A Coat of Many Colors is an anthology of five plays I have written that feature a wide variety of Jewish characters. They range from the fictional Shylock, to the actual Harry Houdini and the actual last queen of Tahiti. This diverse collection is one way to illustrate that there is no such thing as a Jewish stereotype.
A Coat of Many Colors is an anthology of five plays I have written that feature a wide variety of Jewish characters. They range from the fictional Shylock, to the actual Harry Houdini and the actual last queen of Tahiti. This diverse collection is one way to illustrate that there is no such thing as a Jewish stereotype.
It hangs on. Like a piece of old chewing gum stuck under a desk. For reasons old and new, even after a couple of thousand years. Antisemitic stereotypes refuse to vanish. Why?
Is it a chicken and egg problem? Are Jewish people victims of negative stereotyping or does the hatred of them spark their negative stereotype?
It comes down to this: To the anti-Semite, in the worst possible ways, all Jews are alike.
Probably the most famous Jewish theatrical character, Shylock, tries to undermine this negative image: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” With this line, Shakespeare says what so many in his world and beyond doubted. Jews are part of humanity.
The Jewish characters in the plays found here emphasize that humanity in another way. Their differences from one another are more significant than their similarities:
In Shylock Revisited the title character won’t give up his efforts to make the merchant of Venice, Antonio, pay what he owes. In Good Deeds a screen writer, Salka Viertel, pays the price for helping Nazi era Jewish artists escape from Europe. Harry Houdini, takes on a reluctant con woman in Margery Meets Harry. Educating Henry Adams has the queen of Tahiti convince the U.S. historian, Henry Adams, to help her write a family history that leaves out her Jewish heritage. And finally, in The Optimist, a Jewish college professor discovers that the world goes beyond the logical solutions he thinks will solve all problems.
Just like the Biblical Joseph with his multi-colored coat, many of these Jews pay a price for their position in the world.
Another key question needs asking: Who is Jewish? The attempts to find an answer vary at least as much as the nature of these Jewish stage characters.
Looked at from the non-Jewish perspective, the answer to the question has one of two answers: heritage or religious belief.
Some tried to have it both ways. Going back a couple of centuries, the Jewish born British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, worshiped in the Anglican church. He looked at himself as a Christian. No longer of the Jewish faith.
Yet he could flaunt his Jewish heritage. Disraeli reputedly told a group of British aristocrats that, while their most distant ancestors painted themselves blue and ran half naked through the forest, his wrote the Bible.
Toward the end of his life, Disraeli attended a diplomatic conference of world powers. There he encountered Otto von Bismark the German chancellor. After the conference ended, Bismarck said, “The old Jew. He’s the one.” For him, clearly, Jewish heritage mattered most.
That view has predominated. The Nazis took it to the ultimate extreme, to their Final Solution, to the Holocaust.
Yet, despite the Nazis, an important segment of the world, but only a segment, still put worship before heritage. Many Roman Catholic priests, including Pope Pius XII, tried to save Jewish converts to their religion from the Nazi death camps. They had little or no success. For non-Jews, nearly a century on, their view remains in the minority.
Looked at from inside the Jewish world, what outsiders see as a simple dichotomy becomes much more complicated. As the saying goes, “Where there are two Jews, there are three opinions.” That is why it is possible to find Jews defining who is Jewish in a wide variety of ways.
For starters, anyone with a Jewish parent is Jewish. Then again, only those with a Jewish mother are Jewish. Some say anyone who converts from another religion becomes Jewish. Others believe that only those born to members of orthodox congregations and who worship in their synagogues are Jewish. For still others, without joining a congregation of any description, they accept Jewish culture and consider themselves Jewish.
Something gets lost in these internal disputes. Even using the widest, most encompassing definition, the Jewish people represent a tiny portion of the world’s population. Except for the first, none of the multiple Jewish views on their identity have migrated very far beyond Jewish ranks.
Yet, despite the small numbers, at one time or another Jewish people have attracted negative attention from all over the world. Not too many years ago, the radical nationalist Japanese group, Aum Shinrikyo, put forth antisemitic views.
Various Jewish groups turn inward in an effort shut out the wider world and its views of them. It doesn’t work. The wider world has its ways of overwhelming even the most determined efforts to reject it. Pretending antisemitism doesn’t matter or even exist, won’t make it go away.
Even for activist groups, internal problems can bring efforts to a halt. When conflicting attitudes toward Israel and/or its government reach the forefront, progress does not describe what goes on. Any number of U.S. community and college groups spend more time fighting each other than antisemitism.
That shouldn’t mean everyone gives up. Given its long history, antisemitism is unlikely to fade away on its own. It makes sense to try to get rid of it in a variety of ways.
In doing so, pointing out and condemning antisemitic statements and actions has its place. Many commentators do condemn these outrages. They point to the lives and careers that suffer. They point to injured and dead people. Yet, whatever good the commentary does, their commentary comes after-the-fact.
And, frustratingly, among the anti-Semites, the public condemnation, even arrests and convictions, only burnish their credentials. They claim martyrdom and use it to draw others to their cause. Of late, social media gives them a new, often untraceable, outlet for antisemitic speech and incitement. And the incidents go on.
In order to undermine the spread of this attitude with so many years of belief behind it, non-Jews need to believe that Jewish people have much in common with them. That to condemn Jews as a group is to condemn themselves. To make that case, everyone needs to see Jewish people as individuals, as fellow human beings, not as a faceless group.
The historically based Jewish characters found in the following plays won’t be confused with each other. Of equal importance, all the principal characters (several of the minor ones) are based on actual people. Why? Because if these Jewish characters aren’t real, if they are imaginary, the case for the coat of many colors as a metaphor for the Jewish world falls apart.
Granted it is something of a stretch to view Shylock as an actual historical figure. Yet he seems to live in history as much as he does on stage. Shakespeare has a talent like few of any era. He makes his character memorable and seemingly real. No historian writing about Richard III can ignore Shakespeare’s image of him.
The characters in these plays are meant to continue what Shakespeare started. Through Shylock he showed all of us that we have a shared humanity. Before Shakespeare, the very humanly portrayed Joseph received the gift of a coat of many colors and suffered the consequences. He provides the template for the Jewish people who came after him.
Famously, Shakespeare wrote that all the world is a stage and we are but actors upon it. These plays present that statement in reverse. The stage becomes the world and the actors are the human beings in it.
Note:
Most of the plays that follow went through either the Script Lab at Chicago Dramatists and/or the Plays in Progress program of the Dramatists Guild. All of these shows received public readings at either Chicago Dramatists or Naked Angels, Chicago. NPR, college/university and local radio stations broadcast The Optimist. SAG-AFTRA actors and professional musicians perform all the roles. The show is available as an audio book on Audacity and Amazon Audible Books.
A Coat of Many Colors: Putting Jewish Characters on Stage is premised on the idea of the multicolored coat Israel gave to his son, Joseph. The coat resulted in much jealousy and prejudice for the Jewish youngster. This prejudice that plants and feeds stereotypes of Jewish people is what Roy Schreiber tries to address in this book. By revisiting Shakespeare's plays like Merchant of Venice and other literary works, he tells the story of Jewish people as living, breathing individuals; not as a faceless population that can be reduced to statistics and fun facts.
The authentic narrative voice and dialogue brought the story to life. Whether the story was of a cunning microlender, lovers that take their need to create excitement in their relationship too far, or just that ‘aunt’ who’s so loving she’d give the shirt right off her back, the story was always genuine. In the same way that the characters were based on real people, when reading the story one could see some of the real people they know. It had a strong pull in that way. It is because of this that I gobbled it all up; this is one of those books where one has to remind oneself that there is life that needs to be attended to outside of the book.
If it were not for the numerous errors that, at times, affected my comprehension and enjoyment, this book would have gotten a stellar rating. The errors and their impact on enjoyment aside, this was an engrossing story that kept whispering, ‘Just one more play’ and without realizing it, there was just one to go and all you want to do is leave it for a rainy day so you can savor it but the book still calls you back. Although it did not affect me much, knowing the stories that are retold in these plays can enhance the experience but not knowing them will not take anything away from the story told. If you would enjoy a laugh, some shock, and a drizzle of suspicion, this might be the book for you.