Teaching Hatred

My introduction to William Shakespeare came in the Cairo of the late 1970s in a high school English class. The teacher, a liberal female in her late twenties, insisted that students buy a copy of The Merchant of Venice, in an abridged form, as an extracurricular text. Did she want to teach the group of impressionable Arab teens a lesson in the quality of mercy, now that Egypt and Israel had begun peace talks? Or was she so moved by the intricacies of Shakespeare’s plotting that she had to share? Perhaps her educational agenda included a historical overview of moneylending and interest-rate calculation?

Well, none of the above.

“Jews are loathed all over the world,” she drummed into the class, presenting Shylock as evidence in the class-courtroom she ran. More than two decades later (and, for me, away from the...