Shylock No More

The Venice Biennale, kicking off April 20 and running until November 24, decided, despite the best efforts of critics of the world’s only Jewish state, not to kick out Israel. Thousands of artists and curators had signed an open letter urging organizers of the art world’s most renowned event that due to “ongoing atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza,” the festival should not “platform… a genocidal apartheid state.” It likely will not shock readers to know that in the eleven-paragraph-long letter, the word “Hamas” appears exactly zero times. Additionally, the month of October 2023 seems to have mysteriously lacked a beginning, since the missive only mentions the number of bombs Israel has fired “by the end of October.” Seemingly, all the creative types lacked the imaginative faculties to recall what occurred earlier that month that might have elicited a response from Israel.

The Israeli artist Ruth Patir, whose exhibition, curated by Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalit, was the source of the ire of over 8,000 signatures, tried to placate her critics by issuing a statement to ARTnews following the October 7 attack by Hamas and Israel’s military response. Patir and her curators wrote: “We have been left stunned and terrified by the horrendous attacks of October 7 by Hamas that brutally shattered the lives of so many of our relatives, friends and acquaintances.” They then expressed concern for innocent lives in Gaza, continuing, “Our immense sense of grief is compounded by profound worry about the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and extends to the tragic loss of lives there, and what’s still to come.”

“Israel not only has the right to express its art, but it has the duty to bear witness to its people precisely at a time like this when it has been ruthlessly struck by merciless terrorists.“ – Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s Minister of Culture

The strongly-worded response to the controversy from Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, on the other hand, was unequivocal. “Israel not only has the right to express its art, but it has the duty to bear witness to its people precisely at a time like this when it has been ruthlessly struck by merciless terrorists. Venice Art Biennale will always be a space of freedom, encounter and dialogue and not a space of censorship and intolerance,” Sangiuliano said. Venice, thankfully, no longer is Shylocking its Jews, forcing the Jewish people to apologize for their self-defense.

President Biden’s “hot mic” moment after his State of the Union address in which he said Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs a “come to Jesus moment” was another example of attempts to handcuff Israel’s efforts to destroy a hateful and genocidal enemy by painting the victim as unjustifiably vengeful. Whether the spiritual overtones were purposeful or not, it evoked the same religious condescension the Bard had Antonio’s snark to Bassanio in Merchant of Venice, “You may as well do anything most hard/As seek to soften that than which what’s harder?—His Jewish heart.” One would not have blamed Bibi for responding:

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?”

As Harry Freedman notes in his recent study Shylock’s Venice: The Remarkable History of Venice’s Jews and the Ghetto, the moneylender’s daughter’s conversion to Christianity in Act 4 no doubt endeared the character to audiences at the Globe, and in countless performances since. The President evoking a figure who for centuries was used to justify the slaughter of Jews who refused to believe in him marks the latest but likely not the last attempt to frame the defensive war of the world’s only Jewish state as a “teachable moment,” with politicians and performers playing the instructors and the Jewish people the pupil. As Marco Roth recently observed in Tablet, “Shylockism often comes across as a wish to save Jews from themselves, most especially from Jewish anger, however righteous, by making them into something else, either through assimilation / conversion (as with Shylock’s daughter, Jessica) or through an extra-legal but pseudo-legal framework—adherence to a higher law—that will ensure a happy end for everyone, once the Jews have renounced their claims.” 

Thankfully for Israelis, and for the art world, instead of turning the other cheek or being forced off the stage, Israel’s war against Hamas continues. And it will do so until the hearts of the families so desperate to reunite with their loved ones are softened by the warm embrace of the freed hostages.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”