Shakespeare and the Jews

Grace Tiffany, Western Michigan University:
[Shapiro] forces us to recognize the racist underside of 'Enlightenment' politics and Shakespeare's part in the creation of an insular and xenophobic Englishness.

Richard Halpern, University of Colorado-Boulder:
Shapiro is not concerned merely with Jewish figures in Shakespeare's plays; rather, his book grapples with the much vaster questions of Jewishness and Shakespearean culture.

Eric Sterling, Auburn University:
James Shapiro couples his extensive research with insightful interpretations and ideas, creating an impressive study that will aid scholars of history, literature, and Judaism for decades to come.

Marilyn L. Williamson:
A must-read: it raises fundamental questions about literature in this era of violent bigotry and political correctness.

Andrea Solomon, University of California, Berkeley:
I plan to teach this book alongside The Merchant of Venice the next chance I get.

An outstanding example of how a literary figure can illuminate both our cultural past and our present.

Shapiro not only explodes the myth of the absent Jew but, more significantly, explores how literature conveys such notions.

Our understanding of 'Englishness' is so established by now that it is necessary to read a fine cultural historian like Shapiro to understand how fluid it once was.

A valuable approach to one of Shakespeare's most challenging and elusive masterpieces.

A repository of information about a great many matters long in need of the kind of intelligent analysis that Shapiro gives them.

A groundbreaking study of Elizabethan anti-Semitism that offers a shockingly long pedigree for Shakespeare's Shylock.

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