Playing Shylock in Toronto

Hath not a Jew eyes?

This is my review of, or better: my response to, Toronto’s Canadian Stage production of Playing Shylock, billed as “Saul Rubinek’s triumphant return to the stage” and thrice extended because of sold out shows.

In part Playing Shylock was sold out due to a 90-minute non-stop virtuoso solo stage performance by Saul Rubinek, a famous Canadian actor, a personal story dramatically told by a 76-year-old man of deeply rooted talent, something of an elder statesman and perhaps Canada’s most famous character actor export to the USA.

Rubinek is a Genie-award winning veteran of stage and screens big and small. He performed in the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Tarantino’s True Romance and over 60 other feature films. In television he had series regular roles in Frasier and Warehouse 13 and guest starred in The Marvellous Mrs. Maizel and Grey’s Anatomy. So in addition to his talents as a playwright, and published non-fiction author (of So Many Miracles, the tale of his parents’ survival in Poland during World War II), he is a great actor.

Rubinek’s own father was an actor in Poland’s Yiddish theatre, and this certainly adds a generational heritage dimension to the drama, as if Rubinek Playing Shylock is some kind of inter-generational acknowledgment of an inter-generational inheritance.

But in part, Playing Shylock was sold out because Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock is famously antisemitic, so the very title of the play promised some kind of engagement with the charged current debate over what even is antisemitism, and the situation of the Jews in Canadian society in 2024. And Playing Shylock does slyly play with selected issues related to Jews and antisemitism, but in a way that does not ruffle any Canadian feathers.

Certainly a play talking about antisemitism and the place of Jews in Canada would be most topical, given what’s been happening here since October 7, 2023. Just recently, the November 21 anti-Israel one-day student strike in Montreal, followed that evening by a street riot; months-long university public space anti-Israel encampments; mob-chanting anti-Israel protestors outside of Mount Sinai, Toronto’s Jewish hospital; bullet shots on doors of Jewish schools; stones through synagogue windows; arson of a Jewish-owned delicatessen; and blood-red paint vandalism against a national bookstore chain’s flagship store in downtown Toronto, because it is owned by a rich Jewess who, like 85% of Canadian Jews, is supportive of the Jewish state. What would be more topical and important than a play honestly dealing with this current form of antisemitism?

In anticipation, I imagined a play where the villain is no longer a rich Jew, a cruel and vengeful money lender, but the villain is a successful Middle Eastern Jewish society, personified by a cruel and vengeful Israeli soldier? At the very least, perhaps a play that turns on the place of the Jew in Venice in 1596 as imagined by Shakespeare, might cast insight onto the place of the Jew in Toronto in 2024, as portrayed by Saul Rubinek. The Toronto Globe & Mail called it “bracing transformative theatre”. The Toronto Star called it “provocative and urgent”. So I rushed to buy tickets before they sold out.

But for theatre so “bracing” and “transformative”, (also “powerful” and “important” ) this play about Jews and antisemitism barely hints at or even alludes to the elephant in the room – no, the Leviathan in the room: Israel’s existential war against fundamentalist Shiite Iran and its proxies, the Sunni “Islamic Resistance Movement” (Hamas) in Gaza, the Shiite “Party of God” (Hezbollah) in Lebanon, the Houthi “Helpers of God” (Ansar Allah) in Yemen. The play makes zero mention of any of that.

And what about all that support for Israel’s enemies on Canada’s streets, university campuses, and arts institution boardrooms? And in the literary world, the Boycott Divestment and Sanction actions against the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the richest literary award in Canada? Surprise! the play makes zero mention of any of that, either.

Instead, Playing Shylock engages with a dramatic injustice surrounding Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice as a consequence of the play being cancelled in Canada because of protest against the antisemitism of Shakespeare’s famous play. And what is the injustice caused by this cancelling? That a famous Canadian actor, an Ashkenazi Jew born in a refugee camp in Allied-occupied Germany, a child of Polish Holocaust survivors, the son of a Yiddish repertory theatre actor, might be denied the opportunity to recite the famous lines of Shylock in Act 3, Scene 1:

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

But I need not have worried. Rubinek in Playing Shylock DOES recite this one speech by Shylock that supposedly humanizes the Merchant of Venice character described by Gratiano as a “currish Jew”, by Antionio as “the devil”, and by Launcelot Gobbo as “the very devil incarnate”.

The premise of the meta-theatrical Playing Shylock, which actually works well as theatre, is that after the intermission of a production of Merchant of Venice, in which Rubinek himself is playing Shylock, the show gets cancelled by - get this, the Jewish community, due to Merchant of Venice being essentially an antisemitic play. As the great American Jewish writer Dara Horn points out in the essay, Commuting with Shylock: (Reluctantly) Revisiting The Merchant of Venice with My 10-Year-Old Son in her 2021 book People Love Dead Jews, The Merchant of Venice IS essentially an anti-Semitic play. Shylock is a cruel, vengeful and utterly horrible villain with no redeeming virtues, the archetype in the West of the Jewish moneylender, who wants his pound of flesh if his loan to Antonio is not repaid. And in the triumphant Act 4 of Merchant of Venice, Shylock’s loan to Antonio is NOT repaid, Shylock is denied his “pound of flesh”, Shylock is spared death only due to Christian mercy, Shylock’s property is taken from him, and as his own daughter already voluntarily has, Shylock is forced to convert to Christianity. And Merchant of Venice is a comedy! (At least for the Christians.)

So in this “important” piece of contemporary Canadian theatre, the plot twist which propels Rubinek onto the stage is that the people who want to cancel the show are: the Jewish community! You can't make this stuff up. The Jews are the bad guys in 1596 Venice because they're vengeful rapacious money lenders, and the Jews are the bad guys in Canada in 2024 because they are preventing free expression by a Jewish actor.

I was trying to think of a parallel last week while I was visiting Winnipeg, home to many of Ukrainian descent, Canadians whose Ukrainian great-grandparents fled the pre-Soviet Russian Empire for the safety of Canada. It would be as if the most famous Ukrainian Canadian screen and TV actor of all time returns triumphantly to a Winnipeg stage in November 2024. It’s a one-man play by the elder statesman of Ukrainian Canadian actors, let’s call him Stanimir Rubenenko, whose own grandparents were killed in the Holodomor, the genocide carried out against the Ukrainians living in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. So one might reasonably expect that, with all the associated death and destruction in Ukraine, and the threat to Ukraine’s continuation as a sovereign nation, Rubenenko would address the current anguish felt by Canadians of Ukrainian ancestry living in Winnipeg three years after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 by the Russian army.

But one would be wrong. The play, by this star Ukrainian Canadian actor, does not even mention the Russia-Ukraine war. Instead, it is a play about the difficulties Rubenenko is experiencing being allowed to act as a proud Ukrainian in the Manitoba Stage production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Even though, as Rubenenko points out in his monologue, Uncle Vanya was set in the countryside, which COULD easily be Ukrainian! And even though, as Rubenenko points out with great pathos, Chekhov, the famously Russian playwright, was actually born not far from Mariupol, AND Chekhov’s paternal grandmother was Ukrainian.

And then, to complete the parallel, when Stanimir Rubenenko finally DOES gets the part, the Chekhov production is cancelled, due to protest by - Winnipeg’s Ukrainian community! They want Uncle Vanya cancelled because Chekhov’s characters are all Russian nationals, and that does not give proper representation to the many Ukrainians living in the Russian Empire in the late 19th century.

But even THIS is not sufficiently far-fetched. Because I was in Winnipeg frequently in 2024 and I did not see thousands marching through downtown Winnipeg IN SUPPORT of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, chanting “From the Dnieper to the Black Sea, Ukraine will be Russian!”, or a two-month encampment at the University of Manitoba with signs calling for Russian takeover of “so-called Ukraine” and condemning Ukraine’s war crimes; or “pro-Russians” throwing rocks through the windows of Ukrainian Orthodox churches, or “pro-Russians” firing bullets at the doors of Ukrainian language schools, or “pro-Russians” vandalizing Ukrainian-owned bookstores and firebombing Ukrainian delicatessens. And to complete the parallel, after the worst attacks, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issues a generic statement that he is very concerned by the rise both of anti-Ukrainian AND anti-Russian prejudice. “That is not who we are as Canadians.”

Rubinek alludes liberally to the fact of his birth in a refugee camp in Allied-occupied Germany, in 1948, which is indeed a dramatic birthplace, and birthyear, for a Jewish actor. But actually, he is Canadian through and through. He grew up from the age of nine months in post-war Ottawa, during a golden age of opportunity and achievement for Jewish Canadians. And now, as the sun is setting on the Golden Age of Jewish Canada, this famously successful Canadian Jewish actor gets on stage, dressed as an Orthodox Jew, which Rubinek is not, but Shylock is, and engages in this absurd scenario in which it his own Jewish community that is preventing him – a Jewish actor born in a post-Holocaust refugee camp in Germany! – from playing Shylock, English literature’s most antisemitic character.

Oh, the injustice!

While Playing Shylock touches upon issues of antisemitism, it doesn’t call out by name any antisemites except the Nazis, and also “neo-Nazis with machine guns outside of synagogues”. It also doesn’t offend the sensibilities of any ethnic or religious minority other than neo-Nazis and the Jewish community.

It seems odd to say it but in Canada, when talking about the Jewish people, the Holocaust and Nazis are safe, comfortable territory for gentile politicians and Jewish actors alike. Nobody is going to protest - nobody DID protest - outside Canadian Stage’s Berkely Street theatre as long as the only bad guys Saul Rubinek mentions are World War II Nazis, or neo-Nazis shooting at a synagogue.

But as we all know, and consider it expedient not to say, for Rubinek to call out Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organizations as bad guys WOULD trigger protests outside Canadian Stage. Safer not to go there.

So it's not about what was in this theatre performance, but about what was so obviously NOT there. Like the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime that did NOT bark, in Playing Shylock, the elephant in the room is ignored, and safe old comforting battles are fought, as if in 2024 the big problem the Jewish community in Canada faces is neo-Nazis outside of synagogues.

But that’s because Playing Shylock is about the mostly Ashkenazi Jews in Canada, not about the mostly Mizrachi Jews in Israel. Most Israeli Jews are not Ashkenazi, descendants of those who experienced the Holocaust in Christian Europe, but Arab Jews, the children and grandchildren of Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim lands.

Playing Shylock doesn't talk about these Mizrachi Jews, Mizrachi being the Hebrew word for “Eastern”. It also doesn't mention Mizrachi Muslims, religious Middle Easterners of a Mohammedan persuasion. The play does not talk about or even allude to Islamic fundamentalists: not only those in tunnels in Gaza, in bunkers in Lebanon, or in far off Yemen, but Islamic fundamentalists, and their many supporters, in the streets of downtown Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver. And it does not allude to the even larger group of Canadians who share the prescribed aim of the Islamic Republic of Iran: the eradication of Israel as a Jewish state i.e. against a two-state solution.

When the “pro-Palestinian” chant goes up – “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”, it's not exactly clear what in their vision of a “free Palestine” is to be the fate of the 10 million Israeli citizens currently living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and especially the 7.5 million Jewish Israelis who are living between that river and that sea.

Perhaps the answer is to be found in the slogan “Go back to Poland!” which I first saw and heard shouted at Concordia University in Montreal on November 8, 2023. Perhaps that’s the pro-Palestinian vision, or, if you will, the final solution to a “free Palestine’s” Jewish Problem: deportation to Poland. And Poland is indeed where Saul Rubinek’s parents were from. As was my father.

But after the Holocaust of Jews in Europe, Saul’s parents immigrated not to British Mandate Palestine or to the State of Israel, but to the traditional, unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe, otherwise known as Ottawa. Whereas I grew up in Toronto on the land of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat. Since we live in Canada, not Israel, Saul and I are safe. Neither of us Jews whose parents were born there are at risk of being returned to Poland.

But what about the 60% of Israeli Jews whose grandparents were born, not in Poland, but in Yemen (400,000 Jewish Israelis), or in Iran (250,000 Jewish Israelis), or Iraq (450,000 Jewish Israelis)? Why would the 4 million Jews living in Israel whose grandparents were born in Baghdad, Tehran or Saana, Cairo, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers or Casablanca, why would THEY go back to Poland?

I grew up deeply involved in the Toronto Jewish community and I never heard of the Jewish community EVER causing, or even calling for, the cancellation of The Merchant of Venice. Indeed, Canada’s premiere Shakespearean Festival at Stratford mounted months-long productions of Merchant of Venice in 1970, 1976, 1996, 2001, 2007 and 2013. None of them was ever cancelled. Not by the Jewish community or by anybody. I asked AI and the only performance of Merchant of Venice ever cancelled anywhere due to protests about its antisemitism was one Grade 7 production performed by 12-year-olds in a junior high in New York City.

In 1971, at University of Toronto Schools (UTS) in our Grade 9 English class, we studied Merchant of Venice, and part of it involved us boys reading the parts. As the only Jewish boy in a class of 35, did I feel “comfortable” reading? Probably not particularly. Did the teacher purposely give me, or not give me, the role of Shylock? To be honest, I can't remember, so it probably wasn't too big a deal then. But that was in 1970, peak Golden Age of Jewish Canada, when I really did not experience antisemitism.

But there was of course a play in Canada in 2024 that actually was cancelled; the same play, The Runner, canceled twice, by two different Canadian theatres. The play that was cancelled was about Jews, but not Canadian Jews – Israeli Jews. And though it was not written by a Jew, it had the gall to portray Israeli Jews and their moral ethical dilemmas in a positive light. THAT play was cancelled, and it was anti-Israel pro-Palestinians who caused the cancelling. But not a hint of that in Playing Shylock.

In January 2024, organizers of the PuSH performing arts festival in Vancouver canceled the play The Runner just weeks after the same play was cancelled by the Belfry Theatre in Victoria BC. This one-person play explores the reaction to the split-second choice made by an Israeli rescue volunteer to prioritize treating a Palestinian woman accused of violence, instead of an Israeli soldier wounded in that woman’s attack. The PuSH festival statement said “organizers felt anger directed toward them in recent days but its decision to drop the play is strongly connected to the words of festival artist Basel Zaraa, who said he would “not allow” his pro-Palestinian play “Dear Laila” to be shown at the festival if The Runner was allowed to be performed.

According to Zaraa, The Runner only “reinforces dehumanizing narratives about Palestinians.” According to Dara Horn, the Merchant of Venice only reinforces dehumanizing narratives about Jews. But in Canada, The Runner was cancelled, and the Merchant of Venice was never cancelled. Except in make believe. In Playing Shylock. By the Jews.

The non-Jewish playwright Christopher Morris who wrote The Runner and was going to perform it in both Vancouver and Victoria, said in a statement that if removing his show is “the only way Canadians can hear Basel’s crucial voice, then there is value in stepping aside.” Threatened with a withdrawal of the work by Bazel if The Runner remained in the festival, the polite Canadian, so tolerant he is even tolerant of rank intolerance, Morris said that “there is value in stepping aside” in order to allow the PuSH festival “to prioritize one artist's voice over another.” This is the cancellation that Saul Rubinek should have addressed, not the fictitious and frankly ludicrous idea that in the current post-October 7 crisis environment, the antisemitism about which the Jewish community is concerned is in a presentation of Shakespeare's comedy Merchant of Venice.

After the 90-minute play ended, I and many in the audience headed to the bathrooms of Canadian Stage. Beside arrows pointing in opposing directions toward their respective single-sex bathrooms, we all saw with our eyes new printer-paper signs taped over top of the existing original signs. Over the English words “Men” and Women”, denoting humankind’s division into two sexes (same as primates from which we are descended, same as every other mammal which give birth to live young and feed their newborn babies from their own mammary glands) there were now new words. Beside the arrow pointing left was text that read “Stalls & Urinals”. Beside the arrow pointing right was text that read “Stalls”. You can probably figure it out pretty quick. And on the night of my attendance, it seemed that after silently reading these texts, all the men went left, and all the women joined the long line to the right.

In 2024, this is a familiar bit of Orwellian craziness, in which every person who read the text knows the underlying truth but considers it expedient not to mention it. We understand that this minor imposition of the reigning political orthodoxy of our time - like Victorians covering up piano legs - is justified so as not to upset the one person in 200 who is transgender, and for whom the words “Men” and “Women” on bathroom directional signs might make them feel upset. And maybe also so as not to upset progressive theatre patrons who, while themselves are not transgender, fear that the words “Men” and “Women” on bathroom directional signs might make other people upset.

And maybe this is the clue to the intended reading of Playing Shylock. Rubinek speaks of neo-Nazis outside of synagogues, and we are to understand it is really the anti-Israel mob outside of Mount Sinai Hospital. He speaks of Merchant of Venice being cancelled by the Jewish community, but we are to understand that he is really referring to The Runner being cancelled by pro-Palestinians. Like the bathroom signs, the audience members all know what’s going on, but consider it expedient not to say. And since I like Saul Rubinek, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that this far-fetched meta-theatrical explanation is the real one. After all, Rubinek is a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?