People have spent several centuries rolling their eyes at Shakespeare's character Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. No matter how sympathetically an actor portrays him, Shylock--the Jew--is different from the characters around him.
Caroline Wiesenthal Lion, trained as a rabbi and steeped in Shakespeare, takes off in a different direction in her book Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks: Shylock Beyond the Holocaust.
The view of Shylock is more hopeful when informed by Jewish theology, the author tells us. She joins us to talk about the many points of history and ways of thinking that went into her analysis.