Information War
Check out this strange unsolicited email...
Check out this strange, unsolicited email coaching how to write features on anti-semitism. Maybe I got on their list after years of defending Jews, and Israel, publicly. I still have very close friends who are Jewish…but scratch me off the list of the Israel-first-kult.
The message:
“REMINDER: Antisemitism Stories - Consider the cultural perspective of Igor Golyak's "Merchant of Venice" in an upcoming feature
Scott Klein <scott@ksa-pr.com> Unsubscribe 5:00 PM (7 minutes ago)
November 13, 2024
Dear Michael,
Antisemitism.
If you are planning a story, consider adding a contemporary cultural perspective...Igor Golyak’s new The Merchant of Venice, opening November 25, off-Broadway, at Classic Stage Company.
Saturday was the 86th Anniversary of Kristallnacht. Thursday there was a pogrom in Amsterdam as Jewish soccer fans were attacked violently - because they were Jewish. Last month, the anti-defamation league reported the highest number of antisemitic acts ever recorded in the year following October 7. It is in this context that Igor, a Jewish director born in Ukraine, directs The Merchant of Venice.
The first line of the play is, “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.”
Igor keeps saying this to himself because he is not surprised by what happened Thursday in Amsterdam, or on October 7 in Israel, or the shattering of glass, and lives, in Germany on November 9, 1938. He knows this all happened, is happening, and will happen again. He is resigned to it, He expects it, he lives it. So he is surprised that he is so sad. But he is.
In May 2023, half a year before October 7, Igor gathered his cast for a first read of Our Class, which he would later direct in its New York premiere at BAM in January 2024. Our Class is about a 1941 pogrom in Poland. It tells the difficult story of how friends, neighbors, and classmates can share a life, town, and connection with each other, and then so easily turn against each other. When it opened at BAM, it was a big success, and this fall transferred to Classic Stage Company for eight weeks. The production just announced its limited engagement at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in January. While performing Our Class in New York, Igor and the cast began rehearsing Merchant, which opens November 22, also at Classic Stage.
No one is more surprised than Igor that his Jewishness has come roaring to the surface, but the more antisemitism rises in the world, the more people are hating on the Jews, the more Jewish he feels.
His great grandparents were killed at Babi Yar. His grandparents and parents gave up their passports, their country, their families and careers in Ukraine to flee persecution. Igor came to America at age 11 with no English and no idea what America meant, or what it meant to be Jewish. Today, in a contemporary American context, he continues to explore these questions as he makes these plays.
Igor’s version of The Merchant of Venice is a highly entertaining comedy. Set in a late night comedy sketch show environment, it’s fast-paced, outrageous, and silly. It is also devastating, like our world, and being Jewish today. In sooth, it might explain why, while delighted to be creating this Merchant, Igor is feeling the echoes of sadness from many generations past, and a foreboding for his people into the future.
Says Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
Please consider a conversation with Igor Golyak for upcoming stories about antisemitism.
Thanks, Scott
Scott Klein Keith Sherman and Associates
234 W. 44th Street Suite 1004
New York, NY 10036
(212) 764-7900”
Editors Note: It appears the Israeli Maccabee fans were the instigators of the violence according to Sky News and local feeds.
It shocks absolutely no one to hear that the Jewish fans started the ruckus and then when it turned on them they of course started crying about antisemitism and oh poor us aren't we so oppressed. Of course you won't see that covered in U.S. news reports, just the version They want you to read.
Oh, and nothing brings out the loons in your comment section like talking about Jews.
Michael you are all to aware of the financial oligarchy that surrounds the powerful Israeli lobbying groups all over the world. It all leads to Switzerland and Babylon's Banksters.