Play a Day: A Maiden of Venice

Aleks Merilo

For Wednesday I read A Maiden of Venice by Aleks Merilo and available at New Play Exchange.

Perhaps more appropriate for the date of Shakespeare's death, which was yesterday. Alas.

There are those who will tell you that The Taming of the Shrew is a play about sexism, that Othello is a play about racism, and that The Merchant of Venice is a play about Antisemitism.

They are wrong. The Taming of the Shrew is a sexist play, Othello is a racist play, and The Merchant of Venice is an Antisemitic play.

There are those who would then tell you you need to look at these plays from an historical perspective, that words like sexism, racism and Antisemitism did not exist at that time. Neither did the words radioactivity, or bacterium, but they still existed even without names, and could harm you.

We still perform these plays, when we perform them, because they are Shakespeare. The words are so good, but so too are the characters. Katharina, Othello, Shylock, they are more interesting and nuanced and even sympathetic than the more stereotypical versions of type created by lesser playwrights of the era. But they are each of them brought low as a result of being who they are, and make no mistake, Shakespeare's audience thought their downfalls were hilarious.

Merilo has written an elegant take on The Merchant of Venice, told from the Jewish characters' point of view, with special emphasis on Jessica, the daughter to the money-lender Shylock. In this version his true name is Shalah, which means tranquil, secure, even prosperous. It is the Christians who use the other name, and insist upon calling him that.

We see and understand in Shakespeare's play the poor treatment Shylock receives, but as he represents and exhibits the worst traits stereotypically ascribed to his "race" the audience is left to understand that the Jewish people are in the situation they currently suffer (confined to their ghetto, limited to practice usury, verbally and physically abused on the street) because of these unpleasant, suspicious behaviors.

Merilo's story begins with Leah's death bearing Jessica, and patiently describes Shalah's trials in raising a child on his own, and enduring the privilege exhibited by the young Antonio, who, though he himself begins as a penniless ne'er-do-well, still believes himself higher than anyone who is Jewish.

This is also a very timely play. The sense of danger, fear, dread, that those who are defined as others must live with, every day. Just last week This American Life reported on one American town that was devastated when ICE agents rounded up hundreds of undocumented workers. So many today who wonder, "When will it happen? When will they come for me?"

Who should I read tomorrow?

Radio Priest (book)

I think I have some kind of stomach virus. I have been up since 4 am with a roiling stomach, which was not alleviated by choosing to take this time to finish reading Donald Warren's biography of Charles Coughlin, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio.

The book refers to Coughlin as a "footnote" in American history, but I am coming to believe he is more of a blind-spot. There are two Jewish members of a certain age in the Playwrights' Unit, and when I brought in a scene making passing reference to this radio priest, one of my peers needed me to explain who he was, while the other was all too aware of his history.

Warren's book details the interesting life of this narcissistic and hateful Catholic priest, though I have to admit I was more interested in the earlier, pre-WWII history, after which it gets bogged down in the question of whether or not Coughlin received direct monetary compensation from the Nazis. This is not unimportant information, but there were an awful lot of names and unanswered questions and a great many specious claims as to make the author sound almost as conspiratorily-minded as his subject.

Published in the mid 1990s, Radio Priest attempts at the outset to trace Coughlin's brand of right-wing, bellicose wailing to the then-present day polititainers like Rush Limbaugh. The book is well-overdue for a reprint with a new forward.

Anything clever I might say comparing Father Coughlin to the likes of Glenn Beck was already done in a much more professional manner in the September 13 issue of The Onion in the article Nation Once Again Comes Under Sway Of Pink-Faced Half-Wit:

Dr. David Snider, a media historian and author of the book "Frothing, Shouting Dim-Bulbs: An American Tradition", said that the current porcine loudmouth is the latest in a long line of pink-faced half-wits that began in the 1930s with the incendiary radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, a pink-faced half-wit Roman Catholic priest.

According to Snider, this original pink-faced half-wit exploited the Great Depression to foment his message of virulent anti-Semitism—a tactic of shamelessly preying upon American misery and misfortune that has since been employed by nearly every pink-faced, intellectually corrupt piece of shit asshole to open his fat, disgusting pig mouth since.

Radio Priest opened my eyes to the finer points of anti-Semitism, and the more recent defense of anti-Semitism practiced by those who hold it dear, namely blaming only bad Jews for all the evil which befalls the rest of us - good Christians and good Jews alike.

The good Father taught us that in the olden days, because of true anti-Semitism, Jews could not own land, nor were they tolerated to stay anywhere for any length of time. As a result, Jews put all of their savings into GOLD, which they carried from place to place. And they learned to create more gold by lending gold for interest - an act, children repeat after me, call usury - something Christians were forbidden to practice because it goes against God's law (see: Shakespeare's: The Merchant of Venice.)

Flash-forward to the 20th Century, or at least to 1936 which concerns us most, and Coughlin has made it clear that what threatens our world the most is the Jew-backed, Communist world conspiracy, made possible by "international financiers" - this being the term Coughlin more commonly used early in his career before coming right out and saying "Jews".

The year 1936 was the high point in Coughlin's political career. And remember, we are talking about a parish priest from Detroit. He supposedly answers to the Catholic Church, and Warren's book is loaded with documented missives and direct quotations from interviews detailing the back and forth between bishops, cardinals, federal agents and the like, describing the thoughts of Church superiors and how they might deal with a person who had gained an historically unprecedented amount of influence and power due strictly to the power of mass media - the radio.

The story ends with a whimper, not a bang. Warren would have us outraged that the Catholic Church did very little to reign in a figure who increasingly (especially after his own party's humbling in the 1936 Presidential election) hateful rhetoric led directly or indirectly to hate crimes and which was arguably "lending aid and comfort to our enemies" during the war with Germany. Since his book has been published, accounts of child abuse by priests too numerous to tally left this reader unsurprised at the Church's inaction.

Now, if I may offer my own opinion: What is distressing to me is no longer that individuals such as Coughlin can miseducate so many people. It is the extent to which so many people actually prefer to think in a paranoid and fearful manner. It is the only explanation. Just recently Glenn Beck dedicated three hours to bête noire of the right, George Soros. Granted, Beck was doing a hatchet job on a single individual, not an entire race, but he did attempt to distance himself from accusations of anti-Semitism by - ta-dah! - accusing the Jew Soros of being anti-Semitic.

Remember what the good Father taught us - Jews are not the enemy, Bad Jews are the enemy. An important distinction. Let us continue. From The New Yorker, November 29, 2010:

Beck pictured Soros as a deeply evil figure, a shadowy manipulator whose marionettes include unions, the Democratic Party, the media, and the President; a rapacious financier who seeks to subvert and destroy the American republic in order to satisfy his own greed for money and advance his plot to establish an all-powerful global, state under his control. As it happens, these tropes correspond uncannily to those of classical anti-Semitism.

I happened to read this article the same morning I finished Warren's book. Hmn.

Unlike Beck, who has the support of his Gentile oligarch Rupert Murdoch, Coughlin relied on independent radio stations which became increasingly unhappy with his rhetoric to carry his message across the country and his radio broadcasts were suppressed by the late 1930s, and with is a major source of his revenue. Around the same time, however, his weekly paper Social Justice gained a higher-quality look, which different color inks to make it pop and higher quality photographs. There is evidence that this funding came straight from Berlin. It is without a doubt that several articles in the paper were direct transcriptions of speeches from the office of Joseph Goebbels. Eventually he was pressured to cease publication as a case was being created against him as a disseminator of seditious materials.

Source:
Radio Priest, Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio
The Onion
The New Yorker

Social Justice

Social Justice Vol. 2 No. 6
August 31, 1936

The issue featured above includes continuing coverage of the Union Party Convention held in Cleveland in August, 1936.

* * *
My blog posts have slowed a bit in the past week as I have been reading the biography of a man who:

- Was backed by shadowy, right-wing finances.

- Communicated to his audience through mass-media and grand, public, staged events.

- Appealed to base instincts and fear.

- Made educating the people about the impending threat of Communist world-domination the centerpiece of his message.

- Detailed wildly complex and paranoid conspiracy theories.

- Fomented race-hatred in millions of his economically-challenged followers.

- Had an obsession regarding the possession of gold.

... Tomorrow we'll talk about Father Coughlin.

Drum fill. Happy Thanksgiving!

Philip Johnson

Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) is the famous bald architect with the big, round glasses.

Born in Cleveland, Johnson's ancestry is Dutch. He is descended from Jacques Cortelyou who mapped out the town plan for New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvestant. Studying philosophy and history at Harvard, he took several long breaks to tour Europe where he developed his passion for architecture and fascism.

With fellow travelers he championed the modern style of architecture, creating the earthshaking show The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 at the Museum of Modern Art. However, he resigned his post at MOMA in the 1930s to dabble in journalism and criticize the "failure" of the fledgling welfare state. He became a foreign correspondent for Father Coughlin's magazine, Social Justice.

He was "enthralled" by Hitler, and became a disciple of Lawrence Dennis, who predicted that Capitalism was doomed, and that fascism was America's only bulwark against Communism. In 1934 he and some friends formed the National party, though it attracted little interest. He went to Louisiana to work for Huey Long, and after that man was assassinated, found his way to Coughlin's headquarters in Royal Oak, Michigan. In addition to the writing gig, the radio priest tapped Johnson for political organizing for his National Union party.

For ten years, Philip Johnson espoused anti-Semitic rhetoric until he followed the Nazi army into the invasion of Poland as a correspondent. He returned to the United States and enlisted in the Army.

In 1983 he designed the big, ugly extension of the Cleveland Play House and the big, dumb Bolton Theatre.

Sources: Wikipedia
Journal of Architectural Education
The Washington Post
Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio

Franklin Delano Rosenfeld

Roosevelt is Jewish. Rosenfeld was the first name and he wasn’t regarded as one of the first founders of Jewry in this country, either. I have a book out there with the pedigree of all the Jews in it written by a Jew which I can show you ...some of them more famous Jews than he.
- Charles Coughlin, 1970

Since the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 this country has been educated to a new phase in government … Or shall we say that which it is? It is assuredly “Freedom and planning” adapted to the United States … Stripped of all its commouflage, it is a guild form of government … The guild form of government is directly the opposite of the constitutional form of government, It is the Jewish plan of a world estate.
- Louis McFadden, U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania, 1934

President Roosevelt intends to repeat the “Pax Judaica” of Woodrow Wilson who led the United States into the World War because he acted on behalf of Morgenthau, Warburg, Jacob Schiff, Louis Brandeis, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., all Jewish bankers of New York and masters of the world. President Wilson was able to put across his cheme because 20 percent of America’s population was Jewish then, but it is easier now, because the number of Jews number 40 percent of the total population today and because Roosevelt himself is a Jew.
- from a Roman newspaper, 1940

From the viewpoint of eugenics, it [FDR’s Jewish background] explains his natural bent toward radicalism … and proves unmistakably, that the Roosevelt administration offers a biological, as well as a political problem. It is therefore as natural to him to be radical as it is for others to be true Americans … HE IS NOT ONE OF US!”
- Gerald Winrod, Defender magazine, 1935

All I know about the origins of the Roosevelt family in this country is that all branches bearing the name are apparently descended from Claes Martenseene Van Roosevelt, who came from Holland sometime before 1648. In the dim distant past they may have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants - what I am more interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God - I hope they were both.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1935

Source: Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio (Donald Warren, 1996)