Andrew Burke wrote:

>Ken said -
>
>
>
>>Would I
>>
>>
>have experienced it differently if I'd read it at Fordham Prep--a Jesuit
>high school--in those years? Perhaps. <
>
>I spent twelve years in a Jesuit school, and never heard a bigotted word against any other group or religion in that time - from the priests, that is. One of my best buddies until he was 12 was Jewish. His father then banned him from knocking about with us. (He owned the local cinema, so there went all our freebies ) (That 'boy' later married a devout Catholic from Asia ...)
>I went forth into the wide world with both eyes innocently open. It was my ears that were shocked and polluted by the bigotry - racism, sexism, homophobia, agism - around me.
>
>
What I think I was getting at was context. I attended a NYC public high
school (class of 1961), and in the class where we read Merchant, my best
guess is 90% of the kids were Jews, as was the teacher. I don't know if
we "got it" because I don't know what there was to get. I don't think
we talked about Shylock as an oppressed character or about those goyim
dumping on him. Plainly, Shylock is to me now what he was then: the
most distinguished member of the anomalous character catagory, a shit
who commands our sympathies. As best I can remember, we didn't make an
issue over Shylock's Jewishness.

Now, in the context of an all-boys school where most of the students
were not Jews and where the teacher in 1961 would have had S.J. after
his name, and muddying the historical waters by knowing a few Jesuits in
the last few years, I would expect intellectual rigor and perhaps an
even deeper reading of the play than I experienced a few miles east in
that public high school. Would I have felt different if I'd been one of
the few non-Catholics in the class? Would Shylock have come across to
me as someone about whom I should feel defensive and hurt because I
would have been the class minority group, regardless of how people
treated me? Right, it's context. I can't say for sure because it
didn't happen--the idea of sending a Jewish kid to a Roman Catholic prep
school was never on the table back when I was in high school.

Here comes the "Some of my best friends" line: I suppose I should say
that I have had three spiritual directors in the last 8 years since I
entered the Church. Two were Jesuit priests, the other is a woman who
is part of an Ignatian center several miles south of my town.

Ken

-----------------------------
Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com

"A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank balance was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove...but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child."