The Merchant of Venice: Ghetto

The Dybbukast

In this episode, presented in collaboration with the George Washington University Department of History, we examine the history of the word “ghetto" and look at ways that ideas contained in Shakespeare's play overlap with and deviate from that history.

Dr. Daniel Schwartz, Professor of Jewish History at GW, guides us through this exploration, sharing some of the concepts contained in his book, Ghetto: The History of a Word.

This is the first in a three episode series connected to concepts that intersect with theatre dybbuk's most recent theatrical work, The Merchant of Venice (Annotated), or In Sooth I Know Not Why I Am So Sad. That production combines text from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice with Elizabethan history and news from 2020 to the present. In doing so, it seeks to illuminate how, during times of upheaval, some people may place blame for their anxieties on an “other."