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White supremacy takes center stage in a new reimagining of ‘The Merchant of Venice’
(New York Jewish Week) — When William Shakespeare wrote “The Merchant of Venice” 400 years ago, he had almost certainly never met a Jewish person. In fact, in 1596 or so, when he created the infamous character of Shylock — a greedy moneylender who thirsts for a literal “pound of flesh” from his Christian antagonist, Antonio — Jews had been banned from England for nearly 300 years.
Like most of Shakespeare’s work, “The Merchant of Venice” — which centers on Antonio’s default on a large loan from Shylock — continues to be performed in the present day, despite its reputation as “the most vexed single play in the Shakespearean canon,” as New York Times film critic A.O. Scott wrote in a 2004 review of the film version starring Al Pacino as Shylock. At the time, Scott noted that “the first task of any modern adaptation is to confront the anti-Jewish bigotry that propels its plot and informs its poetry.”
In his new play “The Shylock and the Shakespeareans,” Edward Einhorn confronts that bigotry head on. Now onstage at the New Ohio Theatre in Greenwich Village, the Untitled Theater Company No. 61 production that debuted June 1 and runs through June 17 reimagines “The Merchant of Venice” from the perspective of Jacob, a Jewish diamond merchant who is called “Shylock” as a slur. In this new version, while still set in an “ancient Venice, of sorts,” a group of white supremacists known as “the Shakespeareans” have co-opted the public discourse, and Jacob finds himself embroiled with them when his daughter falls in love with an Asian immigrant.
Using contemporary events and framing, alongside techniques associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, the play attempts to explore the continuum between the historical and the modern in order to create a conversation about antisemitism as it exists in our current time.
“What’s really interesting to me is how a lot of this resurgence of antisemitism has such old libels embedded in it,” Einhorn told the New York Jewish Week. “You can see whoever is the latest celebrity antisemite coming out and saying something [they think is] new when it’s actually 500 or even 1,000 years old. I think a lot of people don’t realize how historically embedded many conspiracy theories are.”
Despite its old age, conversations about “The Merchant of Venice” continue to be potent — perhaps even more so today, amid rising rates of antisemitic crimes and statements in the United States and beyond. Contemporary artists continue to grapple with what the play can and does mean, often making use of modern-day politics to propel these conversations.
A “race-conscious” production of “Merchant” at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center last March, for example, tackled anti-Black racism, while a recent United Kingdom production of “The Merchant of Venice” by Tracy-Ann Oberman sets the tale in 1930s Britain, and Oberman portrays Shylock as a version of her own great-grandmother. Both of these versions make no qualms about declaring the inherent antisemitism of the play — and so, too, does “The Shylock and the Shakespeareans,” which sends the message that such hate is alive and well among us today.
When it comes to “The Merchant of Venice,” Einhorn said that “playing it straight, rather than staging it with a point of view [and context] is not the best choice.” In his spin on the tale, the playwright retains the main storylines of “Merchant”: The plot revolves around an unpaid debt to Jacob by Antonio on behalf of his friend Bassanio, who seeks to woo the wealthy Portia; Antonio is an outspoken antisemite who slanders the very Jewish man who is lending him the cash he needs.
The twist in Einhorn’s play is the analogy to modern U.S. politics — and the rub is that it’s not particularly difficult to make these connections. The Venetian citizens who persecute Shylock in Shakespeare’s play become white supremacists, led by a hateful politician called Shakespeare. They call out “Jews will not replace us,” an intentional reference to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virgina. Portia, originally the central love interest who tests suitors and creates the judicial conditions for Shylock’s unraveling, is also transformed: she becomes an over-privileged brat who plays cruel games with people’s lives, treating her suitors with blatant racism and disregard.
“It’s cute in ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ but here it’s scary,” actor Jeremy Kareken, who portrays Jacob in this new iteration, told the New York Jewish Week. “[Portia] is playing games with people’s lives and their destinies. People end up married, people end up dead — she’s playing games because of her privilege. And the people she chooses to believe as judges [in Jacob’s trial] are deeply suspect. That’s why it’s a kangaroo court — it’s such an obvious miscarriage of justice.”
Justice is a central theme of the play, and something that Einhorn seeks to subvert and question. “[In the original], people just accept these things are happening,” Einhorn said, referring to Shylock’s trial, during which the moneylender attempts to get his revenge on Antonio but instead loses everything — even his own identity as a Jew.
The play also calls into question the idea of Jewish identity itself by highlighting the narrative arc of Jacob’s daughter, Jessica, who leaves her Judaism behind to marry her love.
“Even if you are no longer religiously Jewish, how does that identity impact you in life?” Einhorn mused. “No matter how you’ve chosen to identify previously, when major life events happen, do they bring you back to that upbringing?”
To Einhorn and Kareken, who are both Jewish, it’s not about how one practices the religion or even if one chooses to do so. (Kareken, who is also a playwright of Broadway’s “The Lifespan of a Fact,” is adamant that there is “no wrong way to do it, within the bounds of ethics.”) Instead, it’s about how a person connects to where they’ve come from and how their culture informs the path they take in the world.
At this fraught moment — when polarization among Jews is intensifying and antisemitism is ascendent — these questions feel palpable. Einhorn admits that some audience members have found it too hard to face, walking out mid-play, but overall the response has been one of reflection and consideration.
“It’s working best when the comedy and the ridiculous aspects are working as well as the drama,” he said. “And I could feel that working from the audience reaction around me.”
“The Shylock and the Shakespeareans” will be performed at the New Ohio Theatre (154 Christopher St.) through June 17. For tickets and info, click here.
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The post White supremacy takes center stage in a new reimagining of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Spike Lee, Kyrie Irving wear pro-Palestinian outfits to NBA All-Star Game featuring first Israeli player
(JTA) — Deni Avdija scored five points and made four assists and one dunk in his first NBA All-Star Game — the first All-Star appearance ever for an Israeli player.
But while Avdija’s Team World squad fell short against the league’s top American players, his appearance continued to generate excitement for Israelis, who have viewed his success on the court as a matter of national pride.
Avdija’s jersey featured an Israeli flag on the back, in keeping with the uniform for Team World.
“I feel like when I come to play, I come with the entire nation, and it’s fun to show that it’s possible, even for a small country like us,” he said during a postgame press conference, in which most questions were asked and answered in Hebrew.
Lebron James, too, was asked by an Israeli reporter about Avdija’s performance and about Israel during his own postgame availability.
“I hope I inspire people over there not only to be great in sports, but to be better in general in life,” James said. “Hopefully, someday I could make it over there. Like I said, I’ve never been over there, but I’ve heard nothing but great things. I appreciate the question.”
Some cultural events featuring prominent Israelis since the start of the war in Gaza have been subject to anti-Israel demonstrations. There were no disruptions at the All-Star Game, but two prominent fans wore outfits designed to show pro-Palestinian solidarity.
The filmmaker Spike Lee wore a Palestinian flag-inspired outfit, with a keffiyeh-patterned sweater and flag badges on his bag strap.
The basketball player Kyrie Irving, meanwhile, wore a T-shirt that said “PRESS” on the front. The shirt, produced by the company Wear the Peace, says inside that it is “dedicated to our beloved journalists in Gaza showing the world the truth.” Irving had previously worn the shirt to another NBA game.
Irving, who was not playing in the All-Star Game, was traded to the Dallas Mavericks from the Brooklyn Nets in 2023 shortly after promoting an antisemitic film on his Twitter account and at first refusing to apologize for the tweet.
The post Spike Lee, Kyrie Irving wear pro-Palestinian outfits to NBA All-Star Game featuring first Israeli player appeared first on The Forward.
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As the last generation of Holocaust survivors die, is AI the future of Holocaust education?
At a Brooklyn synagogue on a recent Monday afternoon, a video of Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski played on a two-foot-tall box. Seated in a leopard-print chair, her hands folded in her lap, Warshawski blinked and nodded her head expectantly on a continuous loop.
“Did anyone else from your family survive?” a Hebrew school student asked the AI-powered avatar.
The video cut to a separate clip. Warshawski said she and her sister had survived. Her brother, mother and father did not.
Warshawski, who survived three concentration camps and ran a tailoring shop in Kansas City until 2023, had made it part of her life’s mission to tell her story wherever she could. She spoke with students, filmed the 2016 documentary Big Sonia about her life, and was even a guest speaker at a local prison.
But Warshawski knew she wouldn’t live forever. So in 2021, with the help of the interactive media company StoryFile and her granddaughter’s production company, Inflatable Film, Warshawski recorded answers to hundreds of questions about her life, from “What do you remember about the death march?,” to “Why do you like leopard print so much?” Those answers were loaded into an AI-powered avatar of Warshawski that can converse through a video screen, which debuted as an exhibit at the Museum of Kansas City last year.
The technology also caught the attention of the Blue Card, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to Holocaust survivors in need. The organization adapted it into a portable format and brought the virtual Warshawski to 20 schools and community centers across the New York area over the past year, with plans to expand nationwide. A parallel effort from the USC Shoah Foundation, called “Dimensions in Testimony,” also enables students to have conversations with virtual versions of Holocaust survivors.
The initiative reflects recognition that as survivors age, a model of Holocaust education built on firsthand testimony will be increasingly difficult to sustain. No lesson plan can match the impact of hearing directly from survivors, many of whom dedicate their golden years to speaking tours retelling their traumatic stories. But 90% of the world’s roughly 200,000 living Holocaust survivors are projected to die in the next 15 years. And for aging survivors — who have already lost so much of their lives to violence and deprivation — the weight of transmitting Holocaust memories to the next generation is a burden they cannot shoulder alone.
“It’s absolutely the future of Holocaust education,” said Masha Pearl, the Blue Card’s executive director. “It actually is as close as possible to hearing a live survivor speak.”
Warshawski’s story
Warshawski grew up in Międzyrzec, Poland, and was 17 years old when she and her family were forced into a ghetto. Sonia and her mother were deported to the Majdanek death camp, where she watched Nazis march her mother to her death via gas chamber. Warshawski was then sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was forced to spread her fellow prisoners’ ashes as fertilizer, and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was shot in the chest on liberation day.
She recovered and met her husband, John, at the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp. The couple moved to Kansas City in 1948.
Using AI technology, students can ask the virtual Warshawski about all of those harrowing moments — with the added benefit that the real-life Warshawski only had to recall them once.
Many survivors “suffer from depression and PTSD, and it’s very difficult for them to recount these extremely painful experiences,” Pearl said. “This actually bypasses that in a way.”
The interactive element is also engaging for kids, Pearl said. At the Conservative synagogue Temple Sholom, after watching Big Sonia, nearly all 25 students ages 10 to 13 — half from the parochial school at the church across the street — raised their hands to ask the virtual Warshawski a question. A few students stayed after the programming had formally ended to ask more.
“It’s the same thing I heard from my uncle’s great grandpa,” said fifth-grader Noah Stein, who attends Hebrew school at Temple Sholom. “It’s amazing — I’ve never seen something like that.”
An imperfect technology
Warshawski, now 100 years old and still going strong, celebrated her birthday in November at a party with more than 1,000 people. But she doesn’t have as much energy as she used to and was unavailable to interview for this piece. So I interviewed her avatar instead.
My question — how she felt about her memory being preserved through AI — triggered an unrelated response.
“After we left [Majdanek], there were still people there, and I must tell you, one day when I was…”
“Can we pause this?” said Rechan Meshulam, special projects director at the Blue Card, who operated the technology at Temple Sholom.
Meshulam said the system had not matched my question to the correct response. She then manually selected the closest question, “Are you glad that you recorded this with StoryFile?”
“I feel this is a very important thing for the people in the world, not to forget and [to] read more about it. Read more history,” Warshawski said. “I’m very grateful that I had a chance to do it. I am thanking the Almighty for it, to give me the strength still to go on.”
The initial mismatched response illustrated the technology’s limits: Warshawski can only answer questions that StoryFile asked her during the original interview in 2021. If a question is similar enough, the AI is designed to redirect Warshawski to the appropriate answer. But this didn’t seem to work in practice. Whenever a student asked a question outside the suggested question bank, operators had to ask the student to rephrase — or pause Warshawski and jump in with their own knowledge about her story.
But according to Pearl, the limited scope of questions is a feature, not a bug. Limiting Warshawski to questions she actually answered prevents her words from being taken out of context or misconstrued, Pearl said.
“Sonia cannot tell you what the weather is today, what her thoughts are on politics — anything that’s really current,” Pearl said. “She can only speak to her experience.”
Not everyone draws the same line. Last year, a Utah-based tech startup called SchoolAI drew controversy for its AI-generated version of Anne Frank, which spits out responses that Frank never wrote herself. Henrik Schönemann, a German historian who tested the chatbot, found AI-Frank avoided holding Nazis responsible for her death and spun her story in an overly positive light.
“How anyone thinks this is even remotely appropriate is beyond me,” Schönemann posted to social media, adding that the technology “violates every premise of Holocaust-education” and amounted to “a kind of grave-robbbing.”
SchoolAI, which also offers the ability to chat with historical figures such as Alexander Graham Bell and Frederick Douglass, said it was implementing additional safeguards to help characters more directly address difficult questions.
I asked SchoolAI’s Anne Frank chatbot about how Frank feels about comparisons between ICE agents and the Gestapo. She didn’t take the bait.
“That’s a difficult question. When I lived in hiding, the Gestapo and police searched for people like us because of who we were, not because we had done anything wrong. I was always afraid,” AI-Frank wrote. “I believe it’s important to treat people with humanity and fairness, no matter their situation. What matters most is how we treat one another, especially those who are vulnerable.”
Yet even with careful control over the accuracy of testimony, some educators are uncomfortable with the idea of immortalizing Holocaust survivors in an interactive form.
In a research paper titled “Creating the ‘virtual’ witness: the limits of empathy,” Corey Kai Nelson Schultz argues that digital versions of Holocaust survivors can have the effect of undermining empathy. Viewers may treat the avatars more like virtual assistants than people, he wrote, and could be tempted to gamify the experience or test the technology’s limits.
Schultz told the Forward he prefers more traditional forms of Holocaust education — seeing artifacts like survivors’ shoes or toys, or watching video testimonies — mediums he believes better capture survivors’ humanity.
But the technology’s novelty was part of the appeal for Warshawski’s granddaughter, Leah, who directed Big Sonia — and said the AI component is just one more way to ensure her grandmother’s story lives on.
Warshawski “does authentically, passionately believe that everybody needs more education, and specifically, Holocaust education. And if this is the way to do it in the future, then so be it,” Leah told the Forward. “You know, ideally, everybody would be able to read more books.”
Pearl said the survivors she works with also have a different set of worries.
“We actually didn’t hear any ethical issues or concerns,” Pearl said. “The concerns that we heard were, Who will tell my story after I’m no longer here?”
The post As the last generation of Holocaust survivors die, is AI the future of Holocaust education? appeared first on The Forward.
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Board of Peace Members Have Pledged More Than $5 billion for Gaza, Trump Says
A drone view shows the destruction in a residential neighborhood, after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the area, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City, October 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas/File Photo
US President Donald Trump said Board of Peace member states will announce at an upcoming meeting on Thursday a pledge of more than $5 billion for reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump wrote that member states have also committed thousands of personnel toward a U.N.-authorized stabilization force and local police in the Palestinian enclave.
The US president said Thursday’s gathering, the first official meeting of the group, will take place at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which the State Department recently renamed after the president. Delegations from more than 20 countries, including heads of state, are expected to attend.
The board’s creation was endorsed by a United Nations Security Council resolution as part of the Trump administration’s plan to end the war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas agreed to the plan last year with a ceasefire officially taking effect in October, although both sides have accused each other repeatedly of violating the ceasefire. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 590 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops in the territory since the ceasefire began. Israel has said four of its soldiers have been killed by Palestinian militants in the same period.
While regional Middle East powers including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel – as well as emerging nations such as Indonesia – have joined the board, global powers and traditional Western US allies have been more cautious.