Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 2002

[page 23] Despite the fact that many American Jews have been integrated into American culture, as Gary Tobin notes

This sense of marginality intensifies when anti-Semitism persists in society but its existence is absent from much of our representational culture. The example of replacing Jews with African-Americans in Peter Sellars' production of The Merchant of Venice is not the only example in which African-American discrimination took the place of anti-Semitism. In the 1949 film version of Arthur Laurents' play Home of the Brave, directed by Mark Robson, Peter Coen's character was changed to Moss, an African-American soldier. With this change, as Bosley Crowthers notes in his May 13,1949 review of the film "the movie [now] centers around the drama of the relations of a Negro soldier with four other men on a perilous mission to a Jap-held island".(35) Not only did Crowthers neglect to mention the possible significance of this change, in terms of a marginalization of anti-Semitism, he did not note that it was historically inaccurate. President Truman did not order the desegregation of the Armed Forces until 1948. Mr. Crowthers is not alone. Of the six reviews I found of the Peter Sellars' production, only one reviewer tackled the issue head on. Sheridan Morley writes, "Mr. Sellars starts out from the not entirely breathtaking discovery that there is a Venice in California as well as Italy so, hey, let's do the show right there during the recent race riots, let's have a black Shylock because if he's just Jewish I guess it might not show right away".(36)

[page 24] In the program notes, as reviewer David Richards remarked, Sellars argued that he wanted to extend "the metaphor and the reality of anti-Semitism".(37) I think my troubled feeling came with the awareness that the metaphor was not extended but rather was replaced. The casting decision in the 1947 film Crossfire is another example worth noting. This movie was based on Richard Brooks' novel The Brick Foxhole. According to the film's director Edward Dmytryk, "the book had a number of subplots, one of which concerned the murder of a homosexual by a sadistic bigot".(38) In the film version the murder victim was changed to a heterosexual Jew, and homophobia was replaced with anti-Semitism, effectively erasing homophobia as an issue worthy of film representation at that time. This casting decision, along with the decision in Home of the Brave, and The Merchant of Venice, serves to declare one form of discrimination as worthy of cultural representation over another.

My mind is filled with ideas of how to tackle the challenge Sellars attempted to meet - to expand rather than replace the metaphor and reality of anti-Semitism. Obviously, to maintain a Jewish identity in the play and then expand the metaphor via multiracial casting would be one choice. Perhaps a director could comment on the degree to which anti-Semitism both continues in practice and is marginalized, by including one or two visually marked Jewish characters in the ensemble. These characters, who would have no lines, would constantly be prevented from speaking, exist always on the periphery of the action, and would be dismissed with physical gestures. As theatre practitioners, we must guard against duplicating the exclusionary practices that, albeit perhaps unconsciously, underlie the final production concept that grew out of Mr. Sellar's desire to "extend" the metaphor of anti-Semitism. Practices that exile Jewish characters and the issue of anti-Semitism to the invisible gray zone between Other and Not.

Endnotes

[page 25]

Works Cited

Akerman, Anthony. Somewhere on the Border. South Africa Plays. Ed. Stephen Gray. London: Heinemann-Centaur, 1993. 2-140.

Anti-Defamation League Online. 19 Aug. 2002. <http://www.adl.org>

Azoulay, Katya Gibel. Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

Crowther, Bosley. Rev. of Home of the Brave. New York Times 13 May, 1949, 29:1

Dmytryk, Edward. It's a Hell of a Life But Not a Bad Living. New York: Times Books, 1978

Gilman, Sander L. Jewish Self-Hatred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.

Glazer, Ilsa M. "A Cloak of Many Colors: Jewish Feminism and Feminist Jews in America." Women: A Feminist Perspective. Ed. Jo Freeman. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1995. 632-640.

Goldberg, David Theo. Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Gray, Stephen. Introduction. South Africa Plays. Ed. Stephen Gray. London: Heinemann-Centaur, 1993. vi-xiv.

Halpern, Ben. "What is Anti-Semitism?" Modern Judaism 1 (1981): 252-262.

Laurents, Arthur. Home of the Brave. New York: Random House, 1946.

[page 26] Lebow, Richard Ned. White Britain and Black Ireland: The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976.

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Morley, Sheridan. "Who's Afraid of Maggie Smith?" Rev. of The Merchant of Venice. The Spector 26, Nov. 1994, 62.

Richards, David. "Sellar's Merchant of Venice Beach." Rev. of The Merchant of Venice New York Times. 18 Oct. 1994, C1+.

Roberts, Kenneth. Why Europe Leaves Home. 1922. New York: Arno Press, 1977.

Sacks, Karen Brodkin. "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" Race. Eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994.

Schiff, Ellen. "Shylock's Mishpocheh: Anti-Semiticm on the American Stage." Anti-Semitism in American History. Ed. David Gerber. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. 79-102.

Smith, Tom. "Anti-Semitism Decreases But Persists." Social Science and Modern Society 33.3 (1996): 2-3

Tobin, Gary A. and Sharon L. Sassler. Jewish Perceptions of Anti-Semitism. New York: Plenum Press, 1988.

[page 27]

Works Consulted

Brustein, Robert. "The Merchant of Venice Beach." Rev. of The Merchant of Venice. The New Republic 5 Dec. 1994, 31-34.

Dalfiume, Richard M. Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Non-Jewish Jew. London: Oxford UP, 1968.

Erdman, Harley. Staging the Jew. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1962.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Frankenberg, Ruth. White women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Friedman, Lester D. The Jewish Image in American Film. Secausus, New Jersey, Citadel Press, 1987.

Harap, Louis. Dramatic Encounters. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Hentoff, Nat, Ed. Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism. New York: Richard W. Baron, 1969.

Hyman, Paula. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.

Kemp, Edward. "Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and sexism plague the mystery plays. How does a modern playwright junk the propaganda without losing the plot?" New Statesman 23 Jan. 1998, 38-39.

[page 28] Kroll, Jack. "Chicago--My Kind of Theatre." Rev. of The Merchant of Venice. Newsweek 22 Oct. 1994, 33-35.

LaCapra, Dominick, Ed. The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

Landa, M. J. The Jew in Drama. London: P.S. King & Son Ltd., 1926.

Lazare, Lewis. "The Merchant of Venice." Rev. of The Merchant of Venice. Variety 24 Oct. 1994, 78.

Patai, Raphael and Jennifer Patai. The Myth of the Jewish Race. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989.

Schiff, Ellen. From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.

"Shakespeare and Prejudice." Rev. of The Merchant of Venice. The Economists 26 Nov. 1994, 98.

Raden, David. "American Blacks' and Whites' Preferred Social Distance From Jews." The Journal of Social Psychology 138.2 (1998): 265-267.