The world of antisemitism is topsy-turvy, yet all too familiar. Let’s begin with that great defender of the Jews, Donald Trump.
Preposterously, Trump characterizes elite universities that have long been havens for Jewish faculty, students, and researchers as pits of antisemitism. He then uses that false charge as a thin pretext to deny liberal universities funds and to try to put them into personal receivership, and to shift federal civil rights policy away from defending Blacks, where America has far too much unfinished business, to obsessively and fraudulently defend Jews.
This is the same Trump who has neo-Nazis among his fervent supporters. When neo-Nazis broke up a peaceful march, causing one death, at Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” Trump declared that there were “good people on both sides.”
Meanwhile, American Jews have gone from long-standing affection for Israel to the point where a majority of Jews in the U.S. believe that Israel is guilty of war crimes and 39 percent are willing to call it genocide. Among young Jews, the percentages are higher.
Yet real antisemitism is on the rise—and the prime minister of Israel and the military policies of Israel in Gaza and the West Bank are the prime source of its revival. The two leading pro-Israel groups, AIPAC and the ADL, are doing their best to resurrect the ancient slander of “dual loyalty,” by demanding that Jews proclaim their support for Israel.
Outside hundreds of synagogues, you can see prominent signs promoted by the Israel lobby, most commonly, “We stand with Israel,” often festooned with American and Israeli flags. That’s sly. Does that slogan mean the children of biblical Israel, the current Israeli government, the wretched policies of that government, or all three? It makes the dual loyalty slander literally true.
Some Jews play into rising antisemitism. The ultra-Orthodox can display an entitled and belligerent indifference to non-Jews. A good friend was recently on an American Airlines flight on a Friday afternoon, from LaGuardia to Cleveland, scheduled to depart at 3:37 p.m. Given the government shutdown and the air traffic controllers mess, the flight was delayed. By a little after 4:30, it was cleared for takeoff.
At that point, a young ultra-Orthodox couple on board realized that the flight would probably land after sundown, on Shabbat. They told a flight attendant that their religion prohibited them from flying after sunset on the Sabbath, and they demanded to be let off the plane. After a hurried conference with the pilots, the plane headed back to the gate, where they disembarked.
Now the plane had to get back in line for takeoff. Rather than being an hour late, it would be two and a half hours late. What followed was pandemonium on board and some viciously antisemitic comments.
Was it too much to ask of this young couple that they plan ahead, in case their plane was late? Had it already taken off, should it have turned around in midair?
When 1,100 rabbis sign a letter equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and specifically attacking the candidacy of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, does that make Jews more secure or more at risk?
In Rockland County, New York, ultra-Orthodox Jews gained control of the local East Ramapo school board. Having created their own private schools, they declared a public school surplus property and then bought it on the cheap for use as a religious school.
America on the whole has been hospitable to Jews, and most Jews reciprocate. But you sometimes get the feeling that at least some ultra-Orthodox don’t mind if they set off a pogrom. (Their refusal to abide by Israel’s universal conscription laws has brought the nation’s secular majority and ultra-Orthodox minority to blows.)
Some antisemitism is self-inflicted. More precisely, it is inflicted by people like those anti-Mamdani rabbis, by those Rockland County school closers, and by Bibi Netanyahu, and it spills over to endanger the broader Jewish community.
Moreover, Trump’s false love-bombing of the Jews also engenders antisemitism. Why should Jews get special treatment?
AGAINST THIS BACKGROUND, I RECENTLY happened to see a one-man performance called Playing Shylock, which is showing through early December at the Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. The performer is Saul Rubinek, the child of Holocaust survivors, who was born in a refugee camp after World War II, and grew up speaking Yiddish.
The premise of the play is that the audience has come to see The Merchant of Venice. It’s intermission, there is a commotion backstage, and Rubinek, dressed as a stereotypical Shylock, comes out, chagrined, to tell the audience that management has caved in to pressure from conservative Jewish groups and canceled the rest of the run.
What follows is a dazzling 100-minute solo performance on whether The Merchant of Venice is antisemitic, the nature of stereotypes and antisemitism, how much of the current anxiety about rising antisemitism is legit and how much is trumped up, and antisemitism through the ages.
Along the way, we learn that Shylock is seldom played by a Jew, and that whenever Merchant is shown, the show’s producers do anticipatory damage control with Jewish organizations. In the play, Rubinek/Shylock recounts his visit to the local Jewish Community Center. There, a 19-year-old tells him that he’s afraid to wear his Star of David on campus. Rubinek muses aloud about whether canceling The Merchant of Venice will make the haters less likely to machine-gun synagogues, and delivers a hundred equally profound and irony-laced comments.
Rubinek quotes from the press release by the theater management of this imaginary production: “Continuing to stage this production of The Merchant of Venice would be inappropriate at this time of rising antisemitism.” And Rubinek asks the audience, “Yeah, but has there ever been a time when antisemitism was not rising? When, when was this magical time? Before or after Moses parted the Red Sea?”
What’s remarkable is that the play was written over several years and opened in 2024 in Toronto—before Trump took office for a second term, before the demonstrations at Columbia University, before claims that protests against genocide in Gaza made Jews on American campuses unsafe, and before Trump tried to shake down universities for being insufficiently solicitous of Jews.
The play never mentions Gaza, or Trump, or Netanyahu, yet it can be read as a profound comment on the present moment—and on Jewish history.
For the fact is that antisemitism is both things: often exaggerated, and also all too real. It can be rekindled by deliberate mischief and hatred, or opportunism, or ignorance.
And what of the charge that Shylock both illustrates antisemitism and promotes it? Shylock was of course a stereotypical Jewish moneylender. But Shakespeare, as Rubinek’s brilliant depiction shows, was far more subtle than that. He both gave the audience the villain that the play needed, and then bent over backwards to depict both Shylock’s humanity and his emulation of Christians in his desire for revenge.
The play ends with Rubinek doing Shylock’s greatest soliloquy, in which Shakespeare demonstrates the moneylender’s humanity (“If you prick us, do we not bleed …”), first in English, then in Yiddish. Ven ir shtecht undz, blutn mir den nisht?
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy.
Follow Bob at his site, robertkuttner.com, and on Twitter.
