Rabid antisemite or forward-thinking universalist? Shakespeare's witches throw the "liver of a blaspheming Jew" into their noxious cauldron, while elsewhere characters spit the insult "Jew" at each other. But when Shakespeare wrote his plays, there were no Jews in England, they had been expelled centuries earlier in the only instance of a mass deportation in British history. Elizabethan stages were teeming with plays depicting vicious, greedy Jewish moneylenders. Shakespeare, as a prominent dramatist, entered the conversation with money-grabbing Shylock. But is the Merchant of Venice antisemitic or is it a groundbreaking tool to erase differences between Jews and Christians, and men and women? Ahead of our sold out Stratford-upon-Avon trip, Pam Peled – journalist, English literature lecturer and the writer behind our Letter from Israel column – joins us on Zoom to put the Bard's antisemitic tropes into context. Hosted in partnership with the Lyons Learning Project.

We are currently serialising Peled’s new book, Doing the Daf as Israel Implodes, on the JR blog. Want to read more? The entire book is available on Amazon.

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*Please check your spam folder as sometimes group emails end up there. Contact us if you haven’t received the link by the morning of the event.

Header photo: Shakespeare's first folio, 1623, at the Bodlean Library, Oxford © Ben Sutherland