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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 first synagogue inside a U.S. prison reopens — no conviction required
As prisons go, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was unusually luxurious. For one, it had flush toilets — beating out even the White House in making the upgrade, museum exhibit developer Beth Tinker told me on a recent tour.
But if plumbing reflected the penitentiary’s commitment to prisoners’ physical well-being, its biggest innovation was more spiritual. Eastern State housed the first synagogue inside a U.S. prison, complete with a Torah ark and ner tamid, or eternal light. That restored sanctuary — a short walk from gangster Al Capone’s former cell — is now newly open to the public in a museum exhibit, Freedom through Faith: Judaism at Eastern State and Beyond.
“It’s a place really of humanity, when you’re not getting a lot of humanity in this space,” Tinker said.
The synagogue, founded in 1922, hosted holiday celebrations and weekly Shabbat services. Outside volunteers brought in kosher meats. A circus performer visited and provided entertainment. After a prisoner gave birth to a baby boy, they brought in a mohel and held a bris.
Compare that level of institutional support with modern-day prisons, where there are often multifaith chapels, but a separate, dedicated space for a synagogue is rare, according to Rabbi Joseph Kolakowski, the first full-time Jewish chaplain in the history of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.
The exhibit comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that makes it more difficult for prisoners to obtain a remedy when their religious rights are violated. Last month, the Court ruled that a Rastafarian man, Damon Landor, could not sue prison guards for monetary damages after they forcibly shaved off his dreadlocks, which he kept as part of his faith. When he entered the prison, Landor carried with him a copy of a 2017 court decision that required the Louisiana Department of Corrections to honor Rastafarian religious practices — which a guard threw in the trash, according to court records.
But while Landor couldn’t sue the guard, the Supreme Court did agree that Landor’s rights had been violated. His case led the Louisiana Department of Corrections to update its prisoner grooming policy to prevent similar violations.
Eastern State, meanwhile, was accommodating Jewish religious practice decades before those legal protections existed, Tinker said.
“That’s part of what makes this synagogue and this Jewish congregation so amazing, is because they didn’t have to do it, legally,” Tinker said. “It was able to not just sort of secretly start up, but thrive.”
The synagogue’s history
Eastern State didn’t exactly start as a model of restorative justice. Opened in 1829, the state-funded prison pioneered solitary confinement in the U.S., with the idea that solitude would force prisoners to reflect on their sins and find redemption.
That philosophy shaped the prison’s design. A wagon-wheel shaped, panopticon-esque layout allowed for centralized surveillance of prisoners. Skylights in each cell represented the “Eye of God,” suggesting to prisoners that they were always being watched. Cells were attached to small outdoor exercise yards, enclosed by high walls to discourage communication between prisoners. Guards placed hoods over prisoners’ heads whenever they left their cells to prevent them from seeing each other.
But overcrowding made isolation difficult to enforce, so Eastern State abandoned solitary confinement in 1913. That same year, Jewish prisoners gathered to pray for the first time together in the prison’s emergency hospital.
The idea for a more official synagogue came from the top: Alfred Fleisher, the Jewish president of the prison’s board of trustees, advocated for the construction of a sanctuary, partly over concerns that Jewish prisoners would be pressured to convert to Christianity, according to Tinker.
In 1922, prisoners and outside volunteers built the ornate sanctuary. Lights in the shape of menorahs surrounded the ark, and a gold Star of David was affixed to the ceiling next to a skylight.
“It was a chance for the Jewish congregants to have a space that really resonated with their religion, and was a little fancier than the rest of the prison,” Tinker said. “It has sort of the gravitas that you might really find in a synagogue.”
Most of the congregants were serving time for petty crimes, Tinker said, and their stays at Eastern State lasted no more than a few years. For instance, Sydney Bleecher, a prisoner and congregant at Eastern State, was serving time after pleading guilty to stealing 542 suits and overcoats from a store. But for many congregants, the synagogue’s impact lasted beyond the lengths of their prison sentences.
“It is not easy to find words that can say what we feel about you,” Bleecher wrote in a 1948 letter to Joseph Paull, one of the synagogue’s most devoted volunteers. “You have done so much for us that we are far and away indebted to you. Maybe we can repay in part by becoming decent citizens and, like you and your wife, reach out a hand to those who need help.”
The synagogue was also unusually integrated with the outside community. Fleisher attended every service at the synagogue until his death in 1928. Sabato Morais, the spiritual leader at Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, simultaneously served as a chaplain at Eastern State.
All that support occurred despite the prison’s small Jewish population, which never rose above 80 in a prison that held roughly 1,800 people in the 1930s.
Yet according to Tinker, the synagogue never faced much pushback from people of other faiths.
“When they started it, it’s also World War I, World War II, and all that antisemitism that’s happening,” Tinker said. “It could have easily gone another direction.”
Jewish life behind bars
Most prisons today hold Jewish services in multi-faith chapels rather than separate Jewish sanctuaries — a practical arrangement that allows facilities to accommodate prisoners of many faiths in a shared space.
After Eastern State closed in 1971, its successor, Graterford Prison, also featured a dedicated synagogue. But after Graterford closed in 2018, its replacement, SCI Phoenix, opened with a multifaith chapel instead.
Today, Kolakowski, chaplaincy program director at the State Correctional Institute at Waymart, Pa., conducts services in a multifaith chapel or, when it’s occupied, a classroom shared with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
There, he leads regular services and holiday celebrations, including Passover seders and Hanukkah candle-lightings. During Sukkot, he hosts services in a makeshift sukkah.
“It’s meaningful to every inmate that practices a religious tradition,” Kolakowski said. “I remember one inmate in particular — he expressed how much he appreciated having the opportunity to have the lulav.”
But accommodating religious practice inside a prison often requires balancing spiritual needs with security concerns. When Kolakowski advocated for a Sikh prisoner to be able to wear a turban, for example, prison officials had to consider that the traditional head covering could be used to hide contraband, he said. Kolakowski ultimately got the item approved by suggesting a small turban with less fabric.
Modern-day prisons are legally required to accommodate prisoners’ religious practices unless they can demonstrate a compelling reason not to, such as a risk to staff or other prisoners’ safety. How those accommodations are carried out, however, can vary from prison to prison.
In 2023, for example, Jewish inmate Riley Benjamin sued the D.C. Department of Corrections after officials required him to produce outside proof of his Judaism before providing him with kosher meals. The jail later agreed to change its policy.
“Today, it’s really prison by prison, warden by warden, how they are defining religious freedom,” Tinker said. “One thing those laws really do is they sort of let the prison decide and the staff decide what it means to a certain extent.”
Still, there have been some successors to the Eastern State synagogue — including at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, where Rabbi Irving Koslowe convinced the prison administration to let him convert a basement storage room into an exclusively Jewish place of worship in 1959.
Koslowe died in 2000. But his great grandson, Benjamin Koslowe, visited the prison years later and wrote about the experience for Yeshiva University’s student newspaper.
In an interview with the Forward, Koslowe recalled one of his great-grandfather’s favorite jokes: “They’re the only synagogue that hopes that they don’t have a quorum.”
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I’m a left-leaning Zionist Jew in Maine. I still can’t make sense of the Graham Platner mess
It’s a very strange time to be a left-leaning Zionist Jew in America. It’s an even weirder time to be a left-leaning Zionist Jew in Maine.
Graham Platner, who suspended his ill-fated Senate campaign last week, electrified my friends and neighbors with his grave, light-blue-collar eloquence. He got them excited to vote for someone — not just against President Donald Trump and Sen. Susan Collins. In a state known for delivering temperate and sagacious senators, including George Mitchell, Olympia Snowe and Angus King, Platner brought a fire and passion that more befit our times.
Part of his appeal, and what allowed Mainers to slalom past so many red flags, was the aura of brave truth-teller he cultivated. He seemed unafraid to name our true enemies: billionaires, mega-corporations, Republicans, corporate Democrats, and yes, AIPAC.
The railing against AIPAC as the source of all evil made me uncomfortable, even as it’s become normalized. Add in that infamous Nazi tattoo, and the throngs of people cheering his every word, and any Jewish Mainer had a right to feel they were in a strange new wilderness.
On the one hand: How could I vote for someone who I feared might make this country less safe for my Jewish children? On the other: How could I vote for someone who supports Trump, whose policies also makes this country less safe for my children?
I had trouble squaring the fear so many of my Jewish friends felt at Platner’s candidacy with the exultation of my non-Jewish friends. There is a great Maine saying for when you need more information before you commit to a stance: “Hard telling not knowing.”
I didn’t know enough, so I couldn’t tell how much to worry. So I endeavored to speak to the guy about it.
Maine is a small state, and you can actually do that kind of thing. I went to the Passover Seder that Platner’s campaign put on, and I parlayed that into a conversation. I came out of that experience cautiously optimistic that Graham Platner is not an actual Nazi, or even an antisemite. But I was still relieved to see him step back from the race — even though I took no joy in it.
Troubled Jewish bona fides
There were plenty of reasons to have some faith that Platner wouldn’t be as disastrous for Jews as many of my friends feared. I met the lovely Jewish family in whose Bangor home a young Graham shared many a Shabbos dinner. His campaign staff who I met would have set off even the least sensitive Jewdar. He was clearly comfortable at the Seder he hosted, and it clearly was far from his first.
When we spoke on the phone, he talked about the deep love he has for his Israeli family members, including his step-brother: a serious, hawkish Israeli security analyst with Maine roots. That gave him a human connection to the conflict that few Mainers have. He believed he’d spoken out forcefully against antisemitism.
But his language about Israel was reckless, I told him, and I implored him to be more careful. While he knew and loved individual Jews, most Mainers did not: our community in this state is very small. The impact of his insistence that Israel was committing genocide might not match his intent. Criticism of Israel is valid, but the recent increase in its intensity has been paralleled by an increase in attacks on American Jews.
Platner’s response concerned me. He told me that it was the policies of the Netanyahu government that were most responsible for that spike in violent antisemitism — not the people actually trying to kill us. I asked him to use his platform and his unique perspective to move people away from hatred. He repeated that Israel was committing genocide, and that he would continue to speak out against antisemitism.
We ended the call and I thought about Yehuda Amichai’s wise line: “From the place where we are right/ flowers will never grow/ in the spring.”
An aborted story of redemption
Somehow me saying “I told you so” to my friends left saddened and angered by Platner’s withdrawal from the race following an allegation of sexual assault didn’t make them feel better.
And even I wasn’t sure exactly what the “I told you so” would mean. I’d been clear that he wasn’t reliable, that his political vision didn’t make up for a lack of personal judgment or record. But I myself had tried to see my way past those concerns, too. To be quite honest, although it’s probably anathema to say so given the charges against him, I kind of liked the guy as a person. His clunky, tearful exit video hurt to watch.
The story of redemption that Platner and his campaign told was a welcome antidote to the turbocharged version of manhood pushed by so many on the right. That his downfall came from a revelation of an act that felt like the embodiment of how toxic that vision can be only contributes to the overall feeling of brokenness.
Now several other viable candidates with half of the charisma will try to gather all of the energy he created. And I wonder: in these furious, truncated weeks of campaigning — the Democratic party must select a candidate by July 27 — which of them will take the shortcut to the progressive heart by bashing Israel the most? If one says Israel is bad, must the next say it is worse?
It’s for the best — but also alarming — that we’re about to have new insight into how much of Platner’s coalition was built upon this rhetoric. Already Shena Bellows, a top candidate and former head of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, has hesitatingly taken to using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. Who will be next up to take a swing?
What terrifies me about Platner, and many others on the anti-Israel left, is that they seem to be casually playing with a darkness they do not understand. (The same could be said of Platner’s erstwhile Nazi tattoo, if we’re to believe he truly didn’t understand its meaning when he got it.) They risk building a permission structure for hatred of Jews, whether they intend to or not.
I will be looking for the candidate who refuses to add another brick to that structure, although I don’t know if any of them have the courage to abstain.
Meanwhile, ICE just killed an innocent man in Biddeford, Maine in front of his daughter. This madness, too, has to stop. Which madness do we prioritize? And how much of one madness will we accept in order to stop another?
This is the place of confusion that many of us are in. The only answer I have is that it’s hard telling not knowing.
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Bagels are hanging from the trees in Beijing. Is China bagelmaxxing?
I was strolling through a gleaming new mall complex in Beijing beside a couple walking their robot dog when I stumbled upon the bagel tree. Its branches, though bare of leaves, bore giant bagel sculptures, hanging from its boughs on translucent string. In front was a sign proclaiming, “Beigel Tree by New York Bagelous Museum.”
Beigel Tree by New York Bagelous Museum, it turned out, was a new offshoot of the viral New York Bagelous Museum, a growing bagel chain with five shops across three Chinese cities.
The New York Bagelous Museum would seem, at least in name, to be a nod to New York Jewish culture. These days, China isn’t so hot on either of those things. The Chinese government sees America as a country in decline and often points towards visible poverty in major American cities, like New York, as a sign of this. While China used to be nearly free of Jew-hatred, there has seen a rise of antisemitic posts and rhetoric on Chinese social media platforms. The government tightly controls what is posted on these platforms, but there has seemingly not been censorship of antisemitic posts.
In this environment, the proliferation of New York Bagelous Museums was surprising. I’d been living in China for nearly a year pursuing a Masters in Global Affairs, and I couldn’t help but wonder what this new development in Beijing-New York relations was all about. I went to see for myself.
Inside, the shop was decorated less like a New York bagel shop and more like a New England bed and breakfast. Instead of sturdy linoleum, it has hardwood floors. Customers sat on benches with green velvet pillows, noshing on bagels and sipping coffee. The shop’s exposed brick walls are hung with oil paintings, photos of New York City, and one tapestry depicting a famous 1963 photo of John and Jackie Kennedy’s family at Hyannisport. I found myself thinking, wouldn’t a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg be more appropriate?
Well, yes, but the shop isn’t exactly meant to be a faithful duplicate of a New York bagel shop. The likely inspiration for the store comes not from New York but from Seoul. In 2021, Seoul experienced its own bagel craze when a store called London Bagel Museum opened up, drawing two-hour-plus lines.
The Bagel Museum is, in no way, a museum. Besides the bagel part, the rest of the name is arbitrary. According to a Korea Times article, the store’s name simply “combines the founder’s favorite words.”
Two years later, in 2023, New York Bagelous Museum opened its first location in Shanghai. Like many Chinese companies, it was welcomed into this world with copycat allegations. The two shops are nearly identical, even including the font on the marquee, the interior design and the artwork on the packaging. The main difference is that one features a Union Jack while the other features the Statue of Liberty.
The mission statement on the shop’s page on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media application, says that the founders started the company because they wanted “to create a unique American museum-style bagel shop” and for their customers “to enjoy and feel the atmosphere from the American 50s and 60s.”
Though the menu did feature a lox and cream cheese bagel, the rest of the options were unrecognizable to this New Yorker. The signs were written in both English and Chinese. Some bagels were pre-made sandwiches. One featured sweet red bean paste and a slab of butter. Another was stuffed with cream cheese and topped with sticky syrup and rose petals. The sandwiches were artfully put together, unlike the slapdash constructions you find in New York. Other bagels had fillings rolled into the dough, like the Mexican pepper bagel, stuffed with asiago and salami. My friends and I got these, as well as a blueberry sandwich and chocolate bagel, to try.
Notwithstanding the unorthodox flavors, upon taking a bite, I realized that these were bagels in name only. While they did have some of the chewiness of a bagel, they didn’t have the density or the hard exterior. This is likely because, in making the bagels, New York Bagelous Museum doesn’t boil them, something I learned while watching bakers make them through a window into the kitchen. Besides the shape, there wasn’t much separating the bagels from a bread roll.
At the New York Bagelous Museum, I found few traces of New York, bagels, or museums. But the average Chinese customer probably wouldn’t realize the difference between this shop and the real deal, just like the average American eating Chinese takeout wouldn’t realize the gulf between the Chinese food in America and that in China.
It doesn’t seem like those who visit New York Bagelous museums are all that attracted by New York, much less New York Jewish culture. Instead, judging by the myriad posts from Chinese social media about the shop, it’s merely because the shop is viral. Many reviews mention the bagels, but a lot mention another fact: the shop, with its approximated Americana and absurdly stuffed sandwiches, is a great place in which to take photos.
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