Gershom Gorenberg says there’s a limit to how long a fragile democracy like Israel can maintain an undemocratic regime next door, in occupied territory, before democracy at home is corrupted.
I know that the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch didn’t intend his classic play, God of Vengeance, as an allegory about Israel and the impact of the occupation. The play was first staged 60 years before Israel conquered the West Bank. All the same, what’s happening in the Jewish state keeps tempting me to read Asch’s drama as an allegory.
In “God of Vengeance,” a character named Yankel Chapchovich in an unnamed Eastern European town runs a brothel in his basement while trying to bring up his daughter as a chaste Jewish girl on the floor above. To protect her purity, he installs a Torah scroll in his home. His plan naturally fails: There’s a limit to how much tribute vice can pay to virtue before the line between them vanishes.