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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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Minnesota man charged with ISIS-inspired plot on Jewish-owned Mall of America
(JTA) — The FBI accused an 18-year-old man of buying an AK-47 assault rifle with plans to commit a mass shooting in support of ISIS at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, the largest indoor shopping mall in North America.
Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, of Richfield, Minnesota, was charged on Wednesday with one count of knowingly receiving a firearm and ammunition in order to commit a federal crime of terrorism, according to a federal complaint filed on Wednesday.
Mohamud’s attorney did not respond to JTA’s request for comment.
Mohamud wanted to attack the Mall of America because he believed its owners to be Jewish, the FBI said in a statement. He planned to kill between 30 and 60 people, according to messages he exchanged with a confidential source, according to the complaint.
Mall of America is owned and operated by Triple Five Group, controlled by the Ghermezian family, a Canadian family of Iranian Jewish origin.
Messages sent in September 2026 included a video in which Mohamud pledged allegiance to ISIS, the complaint said. He planned his attack for Oct. 24 because he expected a crowd at the Hmong Arts Celebration scheduled for that day.
The complaint said an undercover FBI agent sold an AK-47 rendered inoperable, four 30-round magazines and 200 rounds of ammunition to Mohamud for $600 on Oct. 6. During the sale, Mohamud confirmed his plans to commit a mass shooting. Mohamud was arrested shortly after the sale.
The complaint said Mohamud wanted to commit an attack similar to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in which 49 victims were killed; the Bondi Beach mass-shooting in Sydney last December, during which 15 victims were killed during a Hanukkah celebration; and a New Orleans truck-ramming attack that killed 14 victims in New Orleans on Jan. 1, 2025.
The investigation into Mohamud began around December 2024, when he messaged the confidential source on multiple social media platforms, according to the complaint, detailing his desire to travel to Somalia to join a group that the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization. If travel was not possible due to financial constraints, he said would move forward with an attack in Minnesota.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Minnesota man charged with ISIS-inspired plot on Jewish-owned Mall of America appeared first on The Forward.
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Is Israel or Iran a bigger threat to the U.S.? Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed won’t say
(JTA) — Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed was asked multiple times by a debate moderator on Thursday which country he considers a bigger threat to the U.S.: Iran or Israel.
Each time, he parried.
“That’s a ridiculous hypothetical because here’s what’s happening right now: Our ostensible ally in Israel has lobbied us to go to war with Iran,” said El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.
“I don’t consider an ally a country that takes us to wars we don’t need to fight, and I don’t want to be fighting wars we don’t need to fight,” he added, describing both as “kind of dangerous.” Another attempt yielded a similar response, with El-Sayed denouncing “one at risk of attacking us, one getting us into wars we have no business fighting.”
El-Sayed, a former county health official, was responding to a question repeatedly posed by WOOD TV8 political reporter Rick Albin, in a debate against his Republican opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers. The two candidates hurled insults at each other during the hourlong discussion, often returning to issues related to Israel and the Middle East.
After making criticism of Israel a top issue in his primary campaign, El-Sayed eked out a victory against U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens in that early August race. Although he has earned the support of many democratic socialists, including Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, El-Sayed has stated that he is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Rogers, on the other hand, has the official endorsement of President Donald Trump. However, the candidate has been distancing himself from the president, including by criticizing the trade war with Canada.
Results of a CBS News poll published earlier this week showed El-Sayed leading Rogers, by 45.6% to 41.4%, with a 3.8% margin of error. A Quantus Insights poll released on Wednesday, meanwhile, gave El-Sayed a slightly narrower lead, with 47.6% to Rogers’s 46.5%, and a 7.8% margin of error.
While El-Sayed has been meeting with Jewish voters and leaders, he has not budged on certain issues of concern to many Jewish voters. For example, he has indicated only a willingness to recognize Israel’s identity as a Jewish nation-state if Israelis and Palestinians jointly agree to it..
Liberal Michigan rabbis last month signed a petition from the Zioness Action Fund, a progressive Zionist group, calling upon the Democratic Party to agree to “nonnegotiable” principles related to Jewish safety and Israel. A separate cohort of Michigan Jewish leaders urged community members to reject El-Sayed entirely.
Rogers and his representatives in August indicated that they would like AIPAC to refrain from spending directly on him in the general election, according to media reports. Asked about this at the Thursday debate, he said he’d welcome “anybody that wants to help my campaign stop a guy who can’t condemn terrorism in our own country.”
El-Sayed condemned the March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, but added that “hurt people hurt people,” which critics interpreted as justifying the attacker’s actions. He later apologized for those remarks.
Rogers has repeatedly slammed his opponent for taking funds from donors affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Unity & Justice Fund super PAC and other groups and individuals.
El-Sayed, on the other hand, accused Rogers on Thursday of accepting corporate PAC money and labeled him the “guy who’s going to rubber stamp everything Donald Trump tells him to rubber stamp.”
The two candidates criticized each other’s policies and interrupted each other so often that Albin, the moderator, needed to step in.
“We’ve got dozens of questions we want to get to,” Albin said. “You can’t litigate all of these with 14 different rebuttals.”
Even prior to a pause for ads, Albin announced that the station is going “to take a break from this pleasant conversation.” When they returned, he declared that “in 30 years of doing debates, I’ve never seen it continue during the commercial, but it did.”
The candidates continued to clash over Iran, with El-Sayed accusing the U.S. government of teaching “the Iranian regime that they had a choke [hold] on the Strait of Hormuz.”
“That’s the kind of policy you’re going to get from a guy who wants to be a sock puppet for the Trump administration,” El-Sayed added.
Rogers, meanwhile, claimed that the U.S. had set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least 20 years, adding that “this would be the time to wrap it up.”
As for Israel, Rogers said he supports “the right to exist for the Jewish state, and the right to defend itself in a very difficult neighborhood.” The only way Israel could lose his support, Rogers stated, would be if the country talked about using nuclear weapons.
Israel is widely assessed to possess an arsenal of approximately 90 nuclear warheads, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The country is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has never acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons.
Albin then turned to El-Sayed, noting the politician’s opposition to direct U.S. military funding for Israel. He asked, however, whether that position could change “if Israel were attacked tomorrow by Iran or another state actor.”
“I want our tax dollars spent here,” El-Sayed responded. “Israel has pushed us to go to war in Iran, and of course, my colleague, who thinks there’s a war for everything, went right along with it.”
When Albin pushed again for a yes or no answer, El-Sayed replied that he doesn’t want the U.S. “buying weapons for other countries.”
Toward the end of the discussion related to the Middle East, Rogers recognized the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. He blasted his opponent for failing “to even acknowledge the pain, the terrorism, the rape, the murders.”
To this accusation, El-Sayed responded, “I’ve condemned that. I didn’t turn it into theater like you did.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Is Israel or Iran a bigger threat to the U.S.? Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed won’t say appeared first on The Forward.
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Ossoff says IDF violated law of armed conflict in Gaza, but genocide is an issue for international courts
(JTA) — Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican challenger Rep. Mike Collins clashed over Israel’s conduct in Gaza, U.S. weapons sales to Israel and the war in Iran during Thursday’s debate in Georgia’s closely watched Senate race.
The race could help determine control of the Senate, with implications for U.S. policy toward Israel.
The incumbent Ossoff, who is Jewish, has long supported Israel’s security, but over the last two years he has criticized its conduct in the Gaza war and voted to block some U.S. arms sales to the country.
A day after the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, Ossoff was asked whether Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, whether he was concerned about growing anti-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party and whether he would support a proposed $2.8 billion U.S. weapons package for Israel.
“The question of genocide is a question of whether a government has the specific intent to destroy a national or ethnic group, and that is a question for the International Criminal Court,” Ossoff responded. “There is no doubt in my mind that Israeli forces prosecuting the war in Gaza violated the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law, and I care deeply about the security of the Israeli people, among whom are members of my family.
“I also care about innocent Palestinian life,” Ossoff continued, “and make no apology for my votes.”
Collins accused Ossoff of having aligned himself with anti-Israel figures including Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
“Imagine being a U.S. senator, and out there recruiting, endorsing, and supporting these people that want to see Israel wiped off the map,” Collins said. “They would rather be for Iran than for Israel — now that’s who Jon Ossoff is supporting.”
Piker had previously called Ossoff a possible contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. He subsequently disavowed Ossoff after the senator condemned antisemitic comments, Jewish Insider reported in August.
During the hourlong debate, Ossoff repeatedly condemned the U.S. war in Iran while highlighting Collins’ support for it. At least three times Ossoff called the war in Iran a “disaster” or “disastrous,” and he blamed the war for rising gas prices in the state of Georgia.
Collins, on the other hand, said he supported the war as necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. “The president had every right to go in there and make sure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon,” Collins said. “The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], they had already sounded the bells, the alarms that Iran was close to getting a nuclear weapon. And the thing is, Iran doesn’t only want to decimate and kill Israel, they want us as well.”
The evening was not without its personal attacks. Collins described Ossoff as “a radical” and a “trust-fund kid who has never had a job in his life,” while Ossoff repeatedly spotlighted the alleged ties between Collins and white nationalists. A recent report alleged that Collins’ former aides were involved with antisemitic and white nationalist rhetoric.
Ossoff leads Collins by about nine percentage points in FiftyPlusOne’s polling average as of Oct. 9.
The candidates are scheduled for a second debate hosted by the Atlanta Press Club on Oct. 13.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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