About the Author

A well-known English language actor for the Israel Educational Television Network, he appeared in some 21 English Language teaching programs and series. As an educator, Stephen taught English and English Literature at The American International School and for the Ministry of Education at high school and college levels. He retired, last year, at the age of 80. Married to a member of the Queen Mother's family for the past 50 years, he has a son, two daughters and six grandchildren.

Why I wrote the book

My first contact with The Merchant of Venice was when I played Lancelot Gobbo for the off-Broadway, Provincetown Playhouse Repertory Company in Greenwich Village, N.Y. in 1958 and neither at that time nor since have I ever considered the play or Shakespeare to be antisemitic. My later academic studies had, of course, made me aware of the prevailing critical attitudes and presumptions about the play, but having come to the recognition that the prime tenets of the modes of analysis employed by the director and actor are often in direct contradiction to the precepts of critical literary analysis, my studies of the criticism did nothing to change my mind.

However, in 2006, I discovered that a group of students at a Jewish Orthodox Parochial School for Women in England had refused, that same year, to take their A-levels on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Their reason? Because they had been told by their religious leaders (who admitted to never having read The Merchant of Venice) that the portrait of Shylock was antisemitic. I became so incensed at this typically blind, prejudiced perpetuation of the accusation that I decided that I would do my best to disprove what I considered to be a gross calumny. This book is the result.