Shakespeare and the Jews »

James Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Going against the grain of the dominant scholarship on the period, which generally ignores the impact of Jewish questions in early modern England, Shapiro presents how Elizabethans imagined Jews to be utterly different from themselves—in religion, race, nationality, and even sexuality.

New York Times Book Review

What Shapiro shows convincingly is how deeply Shakespeare's play dug into the fantasies, anxieties and pleasures of its audience.