European Judaism • Volume 51, No. 2, Autumn 2018: 196–204 © Leo Baeck College doi: 10.3167/ej.2018.510226 Identity and Gender Politics in Contemporary Shakespearean Rewriting Julia Pascal’s The Yiddish Queen Lear Özlem Özmen Abstract Julia Pascal’s The Yiddish Queen Lear, a dramatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, merges racial identity politics with gender politics as the play both traces the history of the Yiddish theatre and ofers a feminist criticism of Shakespeare’s text. The use of Lear as a source text for a play about Jews illustrates that contemporary Jewish engagements with Shakespeare are more varied than reinterpretations of The Merchant of Venice. Identity politics are employed in Pascal’s manifestation of the problematic relationship between Lear and his daughters in the form of a confict between the play’s protagonist Esther, who struggles to preserve the tradition of the Yiddish theatre, and her daughters who prefer the American cabaret. Gender politics are also portrayed with Pascal’s use of a strong woman protagonist, which contributes to the feminist criticism of Lear as well as subverting the stereotypical representation of the domestic Jewish female fgure in other dramatic texts. Keywords: adaptation, gender, identity, politics, Yiddish theatre B ritish Jewish playwright Julia Pascal has written two adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, The Shylock Play (2009, based on The Merchant of Venice) and The Yiddish Queen Lear (1999, based on King Lear), in which she discusses Jewish history in Europe and in the US respec- tively. It is relatively uncommon to associate Shakespeare with Jewish concerns other than with regard to his widely discussed representation of Shylock. However, by engaging with another Shakespearean play, Pascal displays that contemporary Jewish responses to the playwright are not limited to the discussions of Merchant alone. In terms of the use of themes such as ‘(political) disillusion and defeat [that are more