
Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks
Shylock Beyond the Holocaust
- 240 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks
Shylock Beyond the Holocaust
About this book
Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks: Shylock Beyond the Holocaust uses Jewish theology to mount a courageous new reading of a four-hundred-year-old play, The Merchant of Venice. While victimhood and antisemitism have been the understandable focus of the Merchant critical history for decades, Lion urges scholars, performers, and readers to see beyond the racism in Shakespeare's plays by recovering Shakespearean themes of potentiality and human flourishing as they emerge within the Jewish tradition itself. Lion joins the race conversation in Shakespeare studies today by drawing on the intellectual history and oppression of the Jewish people, borrowing from thinkers Franz Rosenzweig and Abraham Joshua Heschel as well as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and rabbis from the Talmud to today. This volume interweaves post-confessional, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, and mystical ideas with Shakespeare's poetry and opens conversations of prophecy, love, spirituality, care, and community. It concludes with brief critical sketches of Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and Macbeth to demonstrate that Shakespeare when interpreted through Jewish theological frameworks can point to post-credal solutions and transformed societal paradigms of repair that encourage action and the shaping of a finer world.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- A Note on Shakespeare References
- A Note on the Transliteration of Hebrew Words
- Acknowledgments
- Opening Thoughts
- Foreword
- Introduction: Antisemitism and Epiphany
- 1 Shylock: The Imprint of the Path
- 2 Lorenzo: Braving the ‘Perhaps’
- 3 Antonio: The Imprint of the Path
- 4 Portia: Love or Pretense
- 5 Jessica: The Courage of the ‘Gift’
- Conclusion: The Trial and the Rings
- Further Thoughts: Jewish Theological Frameworks Beyond Shylock
- Index