Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks

<p>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 <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>. While victimhood and antisemitism have been the understandable focus of the <i>Merchant </i>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 <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Macbeth </i>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.</p>