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Saul Rubinek’s new one-man show asks, Is there ever a right time to play Shylock?
When Saul Rubinek walks on stage in “Playing Shylock,” he’s not only playing Shakespeare’s infamous Jew — he’s playing himself. Or rather, a version of himself: a Jewish actor furious that his production of “The Merchant of Venice” has just been canceled for being too controversial.
That conceit — a play about a play that’s been shut down, starring an actor playing a version of himself — is the brainchild of Canadian playwright Mark Leiren-Young, who wrote an earlier one-man show called “Shylock” three decades ago. During the pandemic, in collaboration with Rubinek, Leiren-Young reimagined the play, which opens Thursday at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center after a critically acclaimed Toronto run.
“My character was ready to come on stage for three minutes,” Rubinek said in a joint interview with the playwright. “Saul Rubinek — the character — just wants to tell the audience that ‘Merchant’ has been canceled and they’ll get a refund. But he can’t leave the stage. He keeps talking. It’s all supposed to feel improvised — but 99.9 % is scripted.”
Over the next 100 minutes, Rubinek, a longtime character actor perhaps best known as Daphne’s mensch-y boyfriend Donny on the 1990s sitcom “Frazier,” delivers a primer on the history of Shakespeare’s most controversial play, a polemic against cancel culture and a meditation on Jewish identity and artistic heresy in the charged years after Oct. 7.
As Shylock — the Jewish moneylender who is scorned and humiliated by the Christian merchant to whom he lends 3,000 ducats under extraordinary terms — Rubinek, 77, wears the velvet kippah, tzitzit and long black coat of a modern-day haredi Jew. He recites some of Shylock’s best-known soliloquies — including “Hath not a Jew eyes,” an appeal to his tormentors’, and the audience’s, conscience — in an Eastern European accent.
Rubinek said he was imagining how his own father, a Holocaust survivor and one-time Yiddish actor who once dreamed of performing “Merchant,” might have played Shylock.
“That gave me the key to Shylock,” said Rubinek, who was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany after World War II, before his family immigrated to Canada. “I’m not really playing Shakespeare’s Jew. I’m playing how I imagine my father would have played him.”
That patrimony only fuels the outrage of the Rubinek character (henceforth called “Saul”) now that an unspecified social media campaign has intimidated the producers into shutting down the production.
The fictional cancellation echoes real-world controversies: In 2014, the Metropolitan Opera cancelled the international simulcast (although not the live performances) of John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer,” about the 1985 hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation Front 2014. The producers’ cited concerns that the production could be used to fuel antisemitism.
Just last year, a Canadian theater cancelled a showing of “The Runner,” a play about an Orthodox man who piously collects body parts after terrorist attacks. The theater explained: “Given the current conflict in the Middle East, this is not the time for a play which may further tensions among our community.”
Jewish activists and the family of Klinghoffer, who was killed in the hijacking, put pressure on the Met; it’s not clear which members of the “community” sought to cancel “The Runner.” Similarly, “Playing Shylock” leaves vague who exactly objected to a new “Merchant,” although there’s a strong suggestion it was over-sensitive Jewish interests. Saul describes a grilling he got at “the Jewish community center,” where a Jewish moderator suggests that a play that centers an antisemitic archetype may be too “toxic” to perform.
Saul reacts with fury. “This? This play? With what’s happening? Right here? In this city?” he thunders. “Where you can’t go into a synagogue without passing armed guards — the real danger to ‘well-being’ is ‘Merchant’?”
Responding to a comically diplomatic press release from the theater saying it would be inappropriate to stage “Merchant” at “this time of rising antisemitism,” Saul scoffs.
“Has there ever been a time when antisemitism was not rising?” he says. “When, when was this magical time? Before or after Moses parted the Red Sea?”
Rubinek insists that “Playing Shylock” isn’t just another shot at woke culture, or a version of the dubious complaint by comedians that they can’t joke freely onstage without risking cancellation, or a dig at right-wing politicians and pundits who police what can and can’t be said about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
“The show isn’t about the left or the right,” Rubinek said. “It’s not Fox News or woke protesters. ‘Merchant’ could have been canceled in 1936, in 1947, in 2016 — it’s always been a lightning rod. The question is, why do we keep trying to silence the art instead of confronting what makes us uncomfortable?”
When the show isn’t defending artistic freedom, it is probing Jewish identity. Saul complains about the number of gentile actors who have played Shylock, from Laurence Oliver to Al Pacino to Patrick Stewart, suggesting that Jewish actors have been overlooked in a misguided effort to downplay the character’s Jewishness. (Although, to be fair, the Jewish actor Henry Goodman was lauded for his turn as Shylock in a 1999 National Theatre production of “Merchant” that came to Broadway, and the Jewish actress Tracy-Ann Oberman starred as Shylock on London’s West End in 2022. Dustin Hoffman played the role in a 1989 London production that transferred to Broadway the following year.)
“In the play, I say I’m committing a kind of heresy,” Rubinek said. “By making Shylock visibly Jewish at a time of rising antisemitism, I’m accused of inciting hatred. But I think it’s the opposite — it’s reclaiming a Jewish story that’s been distorted for centuries.”
“You want to know why actors still do this play?” asked Saul Rubinek, shown on stage at at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. “Because Shylock is the first three-dimensional Jewish character in all of literature.” (Dahlia Katz)
For Leiren-Young, the collaboration offered a way to explore a lifelong fascination with censorship and identity. “It’s not just about who’s allowed to stage what,” he said. “It’s about who gets to tell their own story — and whether we still believe in the artist’s right to risk being misunderstood.”
Since the Oct. 7 attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, Rubinek admits, staging a play about Jewish representation feels fraught. Yet the production, he said, seeks to hold both left- and right-wing audiences “in the same room, breathing together.”
“I’ve had people who see things completely differently — politically, emotionally — come up after and say they felt seen,” he said. “Because the play doesn’t lecture. It includes you in the fiction. You become part of the story.”
Ultimately, the play is a rousing defense of “Merchant,” allowing Rubinek to show off his acting chops — both in Shakespeare’s original language and in Yiddish. Rubinek has little patience for those — a roll call that includes the Jewish critic Harold Bloom and the British actress Judy Dench — who call “The Merchant of Venice” irredeemably antisemitic. Instead, he said, the play demands that audiences see a stereotype as a human being.
“You want to know why actors still do this play?” he asked. “Because Shylock is the first three-dimensional Jewish character in all of literature. Five scenes, and he’s haunted actors for 400 years. Why? Because he’s real.”
“Playing Shylock,” now in previews, opens Oct. 23 and runs through Dec. 7 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, home of Theatre for a New Audience (262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn).
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The Israel news we don’t hear – and the forces that silence us
I spent part of Shabbat reading about the stunning performance of the Israeli stock market — which is up dramatically since Oct. 7, outpacing the gains of the S&P by a significant margin.
The 35 Israeli stocks with the largest market capitalizations are up a whopping 90 percent since Oct. 7. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 was up 60 percent during that same time period.
I wondered why I had not read more about this, and was struck by what Eugene Kandel, the chairman of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, told Investors Business Daily.
“Israel was, and still is, under a PR attack from ideological actors, who finance huge campaigns against us,” Kandel said. “But even during these two years, the collaboration with so many organizations, companies, governments and investors did not stop despite threats and protests.”
Why aren’t we hearing about those collaborations?
Then the news of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah shooting broke. Instantly, all the peace of Shabbat dissipated, along with all the thoughts of collaborations — and who is covering what and why, and in which language.
Instead, I thought again of how terrorists worldwide seem to own a well-thumbed Jewish calendar. The date and timing of this massacre — on yet another Jewish holiday — was no accident, and Jews around the world know this.
We are living through a sustained campaign to make Jews afraid to be Jews. Attacks on Jewish holidays are an effort to erase Jewish joy, Jewish observance, and in the case of Hanukkah, Jewish history.
And perhaps we are also under a sustained campaign to minimize Jewish achievement.
Some politicians take notice
Some politicians are making efforts to look at the often-exhausting layers of what is happening and find ways to name them.
I appreciate the effort to find language for all of this. Representative Brian Mast, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a Florida Republican, commented that he discerns a “very specific network that is in place that works together to sow antisemitism that is now, in many cases, working on the left and right across the media, to go out there and put this wedge in this relationship.”
He was referring to the U.S.-Israel connection.
Speaking at a Hudson Institute conference on antisemitism, he called this network a “very, very serious global threat across multinational organizations, media across the globe and adversaries and terrorist organizations.”
When he said “media,” I thought of the minimal coverage of the Israeli stock exchange and the strength of Israeli stocks.
The relief of acknowledgment
I felt a strange sigh of relief as I read Mast’s comments. It was the relief of actual acknowledgment. It was the relief of hearing someone trying to name things, even though I’m not sure if “network” is the best possible word.
Because something must be said.
What I noticed the day after the Bondi Beach massacre was the deep silence. The silence came from so many people that maybe “network” was the right word for it.
I went to a non-denominational holiday party this week, and no one mentioned what had happened in Australia. I wondered what the conversation would have been like if the shooting had happened at a Christmas tree lighting, or a drag story hour that turned into carnage. What would the conversation have been if any other group, but the Jewish community, had been targeted?
It’s unlikely that there would be total silence. Total non-acknowledgment. No words in a room of people who work with words.
The threat we face is not just the threat Representative Mast detailed, or the PR threat Kandel described. It’s also the silence, a silence so loud that it is visible as candlelight in the darkness.
How to respond to silence
I don’t know how to answer silence, but maybe some wiser people out there do.
Late last night, I saw a reel of a very long line of cars with menorahs on their roofs driving along the New York State Thruway, not far from the Palisades Mall, just a short drive from where I grew up.
The line of cars went on and on. The silent message was Do not be afraid. And I saw it as a response to Bondi Beach.
I hope there are more Hanukkah menorahs lit tonight, not less. And I also hope that we can consider bringing layers of truth into the light. Sometimes, layers represent both a dose of reality and an antidote against despair.
Yes, a father and son attacked the Jewish community on a holiday. But it is deeply important and also true that an unarmed Muslim father and fruit seller named Ahmed al Ahmed jumped on one of the gunmen and undoubtedly saved many lives.
The video of that heroic act should be watched by all.
It is a reminder that perhaps there is another “network” out there, a network of those who object to hatred. And it is a reminder that generalizations can only take us so far; as my mentor James Alan McPherson taught me, a story is about an individual at an individual moment in time.
Ahmed al Ahmed showed us all the power of an individual. And the power of a single layer in any truth, and in any story.
As for all those under-discussed Israeli companies holding on in wartime, through boycotts, pushing up the index by 90 percent since the worst day in Israeli history, continuing to collaborate with partners around the globe despite a PR onslaught to isolate them — even in this darkness, and in this silence, we see you.
The post The Israel news we don’t hear – and the forces that silence us appeared first on The Forward.
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Zohran Mamdani visits the Rebbe’s Ohel, increasingly a pilgrimage site for politicians
(New York Jewish Week) — Zohran Mamdani visited the gravesite of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s late leader on Monday, one day after the shooting that killed 15 people at an Australian Hanukkah event hosted by Chabad.
Yaacov Behrman, a Crown Heights activist who works as a PR liaison for Chabad, said Mamdani reached out about visiting the gravesite, known as the Ohel.
“Following the terrorist attack in Sydney, Australia, the mayor-elect asked to visit the Ohel to pay his respects and came last night,” said Behrman, who was present during Mamdani’s visit.
The New York City mayor-elect did not publicly share anything about his visit to the Ohel on Monday, but a photo obtained and posted by Forward journalist Jacob Kornbluh showed Mamdani wearing a black velvet kippah standing at the gravesite.
Mamdani had shared a lengthy statement on Sunday morning calling the Bondi Beach attack a “vile act of antisemitic terror.”
“I mourn those who were murdered and will be keeping their families, the Jewish community, and the Chabad movement in my prayers,” Mamdani wrote.
Mamdani specifically mentioned Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was killed in the attack, and his “deep ties to Crown Heights,” the Brooklyn neighborhood that is home to the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
“What happened at Bondi is what many Jewish people fear will happen in their communities too,” Mamdani wrote.
Monday marked Mamdani’s first known visit to the Ohel, which is in the Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, and is a site with particular significance for adherents and admirers of the Chabad movement. It is the resting place of the movement’s two most recent leaders: Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and his father-in-law, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson.
In recent years, it has become an oft-visited site by Jewish and non-Jewish politicians and public figures.
The Ohel draws 1 million visitors per year, according to Chabad’s website, who are “religious and not, laypeople and leaders, Jews and non-Jews, each one coming to pray, seek inspiration and find solace.”
Mamdani’s predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, has visited the Ohel at least seven times, and has said that he finds himself there during “the most difficult days” of his life. President Donald Trump visited the Ohel to mark the first anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Other visitors to the site in the last five years include Ivanka Trump; New York Gov. Kathy Hochul; then-Long Island congressman Lee Zeldin, who is Jewish and now heads Trump’s EPA; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during his presidential candidacy; Rep. Mike Lawler; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand; and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Argentinian president Javier Millei and Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have both visited from abroad.
“There’s nothing opulent about it,” Rabbi Motti Seligson, a Chabad spokesperson, told the Free Press during a tour of the Ohel in early 2025.
Visitors have found deep meaning in their time in the open-roofed mausoleum. Booker, who prays at the Ohel on the eve of his elections, told the Free Press that he finds “something universally spiritual about that sacred space” even though he is not Jewish.
“I find my visits are both grounding and expanding,” Booker said.
Mamdani’s visit to the Ohel comes as Chabad officials and Jewish leaders are doubling down on their efforts to celebrate Hanukkah with public menorah lightings around New York City. Those events have surged in attendance in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack.
The visit is Mamdani’s most recent appearance in a primarily Orthodox Jewish space as he seeks to overcome skepticism among many Jewish voters who were turned off by Mamdani’s opposition to Israel. Voters in Crown Heights, where the Chabad-Lubavitch community is headquartered, turned out heavily for Andrew Cuomo in November’s general election.
The mayor-elect attended a celebration by the Satmar Hasidic sect last week, which is anti-Zionist for religious reasons. He was endorsed by a Satmar rabbi, Moishe Indig, and was welcomed to a sukkah by Indig in the fall.
During the Democratic primary, he made an appearance at a breakfast organized by the Council of Jewish Organizations of Flatbush, where there was a large Orthodox Jewish population.
The photo of Mamdani at the Ohel circulated in Jewish WhatsApp groups, and has been shared by some local Chabad chapters’ social media pages.
“His decision to go was surprising,” Chabad Virginia Beach wrote in an Instagram post. “But we all know that when light and darkness meet, light has the power to transform. And this place is a place of light.”
The post Zohran Mamdani visits the Rebbe’s Ohel, increasingly a pilgrimage site for politicians appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Opposes Grossi’s UN Secretary-General Candidacy, Accuses Him of Failing to Uphold International Law
UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi holds a press conference on the opening day of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) quarterly Board of Governors meeting in Vienna, Austria, Sept. 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl
Iran has publicly opposed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Grossi’s potential appointment as UN Secretary-General next year, accusing him of failing to uphold international law by not condemning US and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites during the 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June.
During a UN Security Council meeting on Monday, Iran’s Ambassador to the UN, Amir Saeid Iravani, sharply criticized Grossi, calling him unfit” to serve as UN Secretary-General next year, Iranian media reported.
“A candidate who has deliberately failed to uphold the UN Charter — or to condemn unlawful military attacks against safeguarded, peaceful nuclear facilities … undermines confidence in his ability to serve as a faithful guardian of the charter and to discharge his duties independently, impartially, and without political bias or fear of powerful states,” the Iranian diplomat said.
With UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ term ending in December next year, member states have already begun nominating candidates to take over the role ahead of the expected 2026 election.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, Israel’s relationship with Guterres has spiraled downward, reaching a low point last year when then-Foreign Minister Israel Katz labeled the UN “antisemitic and anti-Israeli” and declared Guterres persona non grata after the top UN official failed to condemn Tehran for its ballistic missile attack against the Jewish state.
Last week, Argentina officially nominated Grossi to succeed Guterres as the next UN Secretary-General.
To be elected, a nominee must first secure the support of at least nine members of the UN Security Council and avoid a veto from any of its five permanent members — the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France.
Afterward, the UN General Assembly votes, with a simple majority needed to confirm the organization’s next leader.
As head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog since 2019, Grossi has consistently urged Iran to provide transparency on its nuclear program and cooperate with the agency, efforts the Islamist regime has repeatedly rejected and obstructed.
Despite Iran’s claims that its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes rather than weapons development, Western powers have said there is no “credible civilian justification” for the country’s nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”
With prospects for renewed negotiations or nuclear cooperation dwindling, Iran has been intensifying efforts to rebuild its air and defense capabilities decimated during the 12-day war with Israel.
On Monday, Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), declared that the IAEA has no authority to inspect sites targeted during the June war, following Grossi’s renewed calls for Tehran to allow inspections of its nuclear sites and expand cooperation with the agency.
Iran has also announced plans to expand its nuclear cooperation with Russia and advance the construction of new nuclear power plants, as both countries continue to deepen their bilateral relations.
According to AEOI spokesperson Behrouz Kamalvandi, one nuclear power plant is currently operational, while other two are under construction, with new contracts signed during a recent high-level meeting in Moscow.
Kamalvandi also said Iran plans to build four nuclear power plants in the country’s southern region as part of its long-term partnership with Russia.
During a joint press conference in Moscow on Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reiterated Iran’s commitment to defending the country’s “legal nuclear rights” under the now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal, noting that Tehran’s nuclear policies have remained within the international legal framework.
Iran’s growing ties with Russia, particularly in nuclear cooperation, have deepened in recent years as both countries face mounting Western sanctions and seek to expand their influence in opposition to Western powers.
Russia has not only helped Iran build its nuclear program but also consistently defended the country’s “nuclear rights” on the global stage, while opposing the imposition of renewed economic sanctions.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has described the reinstatement of UN sanctions against Iran as a “disgrace to diplomacy.”
In an interview with the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (IRINN), Lavrov accused European powers of attempting to blame Tehran for the collapse of the 2015 nuclear deal, despite what he described as Iran’s compliance with the agreement.
Prior to the 12-day war, the IAEA flagged a series of Iranian violations of the deal.