For more than four centuries, Shylock has stood as one of Shakespeare’s most debated and misunderstood creations, a character who has haunted Jewish history and theater in equal measure. The Venetian moneylender is at once a product of Elizabethan antisemitism and a startlingly modern portrait of alienation, rage, and dignity denied. Depending on who plays him — and who’s watching — Shylock can appear as a villain, a victim, or a man desperately seeking justice in a world that refuses to see his humanity.
His infamous demand for a “pound of flesh” has reverberated through generations of prejudice, while his plea — “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” — endures as one of the most profound appeals for empathy in all of literature. Few characters have reflected so directly the tension between how Jews have been seen and how they have seen themselves.
Now, veteran Jewish actor Saul Rubinek, known for his work in “Unforgiven,” “Frasier,” “Warehouse 13,” and “Hunters,” steps into the role with both reverence and rebellion. In his new one-man production, “Playing Shylock,” Rubinek turns the spotlight not only on the character, but on centuries of interpretation, stereotype, and survival. Through this deeply personal performance, he examines how Jews have been portrayed onstage and how those portrayals have shaped — and distorted — their place in the cultural imagination. Speaking with Unpacked, Rubinek reflected on the enduring legacy of Shylock, the ethical weight of playing him as a Jewish actor, and how his own family’s history of exile and resilience informs the way he brings this fraught, timeless figure to life.
Reimagining Shylock for a new era
“Playing Shylock” reimagines one of Shakespeare’s most fraught characters through a modern, self-reflective lens. Working with Jewish playwright Mark Leiren-Young, Rubinek developed a meta-theatrical work in which the protagonist — an actor named Saul Rubinek, the child of Holocaust survivors — refuses to return to the stage after learning that his production of The Merchant of Venice has been canceled during intermission. Through this premise, Rubinek explores the tangled relationships between art, identity, and censorship, using Shylock as a mirror to examine how Jewishness and antisemitism continue to intersect onstage and off.
Saul Rubinek in “Playing Shylock” (Dahlia Katz)
The idea for “Playing Shylock” first took shape during the isolation of the COVID-19 lockdown. Stuck at home, Rubinek reconnected with his old friend Martin Kinch, one of the founders of what would become Canadian Stage. The two had come up together in Toronto’s scrappy theater scene in the early 1970s, when their “theater” was little more than a converted gasworks. After reconnecting over Zoom following a shiva for a playwright friend, Kinch — who isn’t Jewish — introduced Rubinek to Leiren-Young, and the seeds of “Playing Shylock” were planted.
“We started talking about this concept for a play, which really fascinated me,” Rubinek told Unpacked. “We were bored, stuck at home, and didn’t know what else to do, so we started working on it.”
When Leiren-Young lost work during the pandemic, Rubinek reached out to his friend Corey Ross, one of Canada’s few commercial theater producers. “I said, ‘He needs money to write this,’ and Corey asked, ‘Are you going to do it?’ I told him, ‘There isn’t even a play yet!’ But Corey took a total risk and paid Mark to write it.”
Once the script was complete, Rubinek and Leiren-Young held a virtual table read — but no theater was willing to take it on.
“You can ask me why, but theaters never tell you,” he said. “They just say, ‘It doesn’t fit into our season.’ We knew they were scared — and this was before October 7.”
Centuries later, “The Merchant of Venice” continues to remain relevant
Ironically, one of the play’s key plot points is that a theater cancels “The Merchant of Venice” after facing pressure from the Jewish community amid a rise in antisemitic incidents. Life, as it turned out, would soon imitate art.
A few months before the October 7 attacks, Rubinek and Leiren-Young had convinced the artistic director of Canadian Stage to take a chance on Playing Shylock. After the attacks — and the global surge in antisemitism that followed — the fears dramatized in their script became reality. Artists across fields, from film to publishing, began facing boycotts and backlash over their Jewish identity. Some found their work quietly dropped by producers or institutions worried about being “canceled” for platforming Jewish or Israeli creators.
“After October 7, I thought, ‘He’s going to cancel,’ but he didn’t,” Rubinek recalled. “And it turned out to be a huge success in Toronto, with rave reviews.”
Saul Rubinek in “Playing Shylock” (Dahlia Katz)
Though “Playing Shylock” avoids commentary on Gaza or Israel, its relevance feels impossible to miss. The play speaks to the climate Jews inhabit today: one in which antisemitism, both subtle and overt, continues to shape who gets to tell their stories, and how. For Rubinek, “Playing Shylock” is as much a dialogue with the present as it is a reckoning with history.
“The play is about the history of ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ the history of Shylock, the history of who wrote the play, and what art can still do in a time when everything has to be politically correct. Can theater still be relevant?”
The complexity of Shylock
For Rubinek, who was born in a German refugee camp to Holocaust survivor parents hidden by Polish Catholics during World War II, “Playing Shylock” is more than just revisiting Shakespeare; rather, it’s about reclaiming one of literature’s most controversial Jewish figures at a time when staging Jewish stories has become fraught.
The project is also deeply personal. “My father was in the Yiddish theater and always wanted to play Shylock but never got the chance,” he said. “So, in a way, I’m playing my father playing Shylock, in a Hasidic costume. I’m very Jewish — and here I am being told I’m too Jewish to play Shylock. That’s part of why the show gets canceled. That’s the world we’re in.”
Across the political spectrum, Jewish stories have increasingly been seen as risky territory. “The Merchant of Venice” remains especially contentious: Shylock embodies centuries of antisemitic caricature — greedy, vengeful, cruel — yet he is also one of Shakespeare’s most complex, humanized creations.
“Most theaters are afraid to put on ‘The Merchant of Venice,’” Rubinek said. “Anything that platforms a Jewish story makes people nervous. They’re afraid of protests, afraid of being accused of one thing or another, from whichever side.”
That anxiety, he said, often leads directors to distance the character from his Jewishness altogether.
“The director usually has to find a way to make literature’s most infamous Jew as inoffensive to Jews as possible — usually by making sure Shylock isn’t presented as Jewish,” he explained. “Instead, the Jew becomes a metaphor for whatever other group is currently seen as the most oppressed in that community. So we get productions where Shylock is Black, or Indigenous, or Palestinian.”
Rubinek pushes back against the idea that Shylock — or the empathy many take from him — belongs exclusively to Jews. Instead, he sees the character’s enduring power as a reflection of something universal. People continue to come back to the Shylock story because it feels universal to the minority experiencing, believing that the character can and should be portrayed by anyone in “anywhere where the sense of otherness can serve as a metaphor.”
What matters, he suggested, is the honesty of the portrayal: The question of who should play Shylock cuts to the heart of what acting and representation truly mean.
“It’s a loaded question,” Rubinek said. “You’re assuming something is lost [when a Jewish actor doesn’t play Shylock]. One of the things I say in the play is: Can you only play the character you are? We’re told to ‘stay in our lane,’ to be who we are. But if you’re an actor and you can only play yourself, is that still acting? Acting is representation. We take on other lives, other stories. How else can we show our common humanity?”
At the same time, Rubinek recognizes the historical weight the role carries for Jewish performers. For most of theatrical history, Shylock has rarely been played by Jews. Many refuse to, viewing the character as irredeemably antisemitic; in other cases, theaters simply cast non-Jewish actors in the role. From Edmund Kean and Henry Irving to Laurence Olivier and Al Pacino, nearly all the great Shylocks were not Jewish — and yet, Rubinek said, the role carries a different weight when it is.
“There are Jewish actors who’ve played it, of course, but it’s less common,” Rubinek said. “And maybe it’s harder.” Part of that difficulty, he explained, comes from the character’s legacy.
During the Nazi era, “The Merchant of Venice” was among the most frequently staged plays in Germany, with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels insisting Shylock be portrayed as “as evil as hell.” After the Holocaust, the pendulum swung the other way. “Post-Holocaust, Shylock has been played very sympathetically — for good reason,” Rubinek said. “But maybe too sympathetically.”
In “Playing Shylock,” Rubinek dramatizes these contradictions. His character is asked by the theater to do outreach to the local Jewish community before the show opens — to preempt complaints that often arise when The Merchant of Venice is staged. During one visit to a Jewish community center, a young audience member confronts him: “I’m afraid to wear my Star of David on my college campus, and you’re going to be onstage playing a racist caricature?”
That exchange, Rubinek said, gets to the heart of why Shylock remains so charged. “Shylock is the first three-dimensional Jewish character in the history of English literature. When ‘The Merchant of Venice’ was written, there had been no Jews in England for 300 years. People saw Jews onstage as puppets with horns, as devils in religious pageants. They thought maybe Jews did have horns. They associated us with the devil.”
And yet, he added, “Shylock appears in only five scenes — five! — and this character made the reputation of actors for 400 years.” He doesn’t shy away from the darker legacy. “Shylock isn’t just any character. He’s the most famous Jewish character in world literature. He helped spread antisemitic stereotypes and kept them alive. This character is part of the history of antisemitism. So, shouldn’t we talk about that? Shouldn’t we show that? Isn’t claiming it and owning it a way to fight it?”
To Rubinek, the enduring challenge lies in confronting Shylock as both villain and victim. “He’s hated for lending money at interest, one of the few professions Jews were allowed to have, and then mocked for it,” he said. “He offers a loan as a joke, demanding a pound of flesh if it’s not repaid. But when everything collapses — his ships lost, his daughter gone — that joke becomes deadly serious. He wants his revenge.”
Rubinek believes that vengeance, not victimhood, drives the famous “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech.
“It’s not a plea for humanity,” he said. “It begins with, ‘If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge.’ The point of that speech is: if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and I will better your instruction.”
Four centuries later, Rubinek believes those words still cut close to the bone. “That was written 400 years ago, and it’s still relevant — to every conflict, every act of vengeance, every war between peoples.
“That’s what makes it so hard for Jewish actors. Shylock is a bad man, but he’s human — and his reasons for revenge are real. The question isn’t whether Jews can play him, but whether we can face what he represents without sanitizing him.”
