APRIL 20 • 2023 | 45

play’s subject was racy for its time — a 
Jewish brothel owner who, hoping to 
make up for his sinful life, wishes to 
marry his daughter to a young rabbinical 
scholar, a bargain he hopes to seal 
with God by having a scribe create an 
elaborate new Torah scroll. 
The brothel setting, as well as the 
characters who were involved in the sex 
trade, might have pushed the limits of 
what Broadway audiences could accept, 
but it was not that far out of bounds. 
After all, the Pulitzer Prize for drama 
in 1922 was awarded to Eugene O’Neill 
for Anna Christie, whose title character 
is a young woman practicing the world’s 
oldest profession. Sex for hire may have 
been a risqué topic for Broadway, but 
there were two other factors that led to 
the canceling of The God of Vengeance.
First, the dramatization of “vice” 
served as justification for the arrests. 
Two women characters, the brothel 
owner’s daughter Rifkele and one of his 
sex workers, Manke, share an intense 
lesbian relationship. Asch’s play even 
calls for them to act out their passion on 
stage. In many respects, the drama pivots 
around their developing love, though 
the original Yiddish version offers far 
more sympathy for the couple than what 
was ultimately staged uptown. Changes 
to the script turned the prostitute into 
more of a panderer than paramour. A 
century on, the scandal of The God of 
Vengeance is not because of its depiction 
of same-sex love, but that it was viewed 
as scandalous.
The other reason for the arrests 
seems more relevant to our supposedly 
enlightened times and is one reason 
Indecent’s use of a play within a play is 
so fascinating. A crucial force against 
The God of Vengeance was the Jewish 
establishment, represented in Vogel’s 
play by Rabbi Joseph Silverman of 
Temple Emanu-el in Manhattan. In 
simplest terms, the rabbi’s objections 
are fueled by that most time-honored 
of communal questions: Is it good for 
the Jews? By 1923, there was already 
considerable anti-immigrant fervor in 
the United States, spawning the quota 
acts that would have such disastrous 

consequences for European Jews trying 
to flee Hitler. And for Rabbi Silverman, 
a play like The God of Vengeance would 
only further fuel the antisemitism that 
had partly inspired those immigration 
quotas. To depict Jewish sex workers 
from Eastern Europe is bad enough, he 
says, but “misguided girls … who turn 
to each other in confusion?” Such a 
presentation was quite simply bad for 
the Jews.
Antisemites had often associated Jews 
with prostitution and the underworld, 
so the rabbi’s desire to suppress a 
play like The God of Vengeance was 
understandable. How might Rabbi 
Silverman have responded, I wondered, 
to a 2023 article in Tablet recounting the 
story of Rosie Hertz, a Jewish woman 
from the Lower East Side who, from the 
1880s until 1913, was New York’s most 
successful madam? The piece also notes 

that in 1913, when Hertz was sentenced 
to a year in prison, there were some 420 
brothels in the part of New York that 
Irving Howe memorably termed “The 
World of Our Fathers.” As Philip Roth 
would learn early in his career, many 
Jewish leaders, like Rabbi Silverman, 
expected writers to be mindful that 
they were not just pursuing their art 
but representing the community. All 
minority American writers since 1900 
have been faced by a double bind: the 
desire to write from the inside, from 
one’s cultural experience, as well as to 
resist being shackled by community 
expectations. 

A CAUTIONARY TALE
Although we may find concerns about 
depicting lesbianism or sex work on 
stage as signs of a more benighted time, 
the treatment of Sholem Asch provides 
a cautionary tale that speaks to our own 
age. After moving to America at the start 
of the First World War, Asch devoted 
himself largely to writing fiction. Asch 
also became involved with Jewish social 
causes, helping found the American 
Joint Distribution Committee, for 
which he traveled to Lithuania to report 
on a series of pogroms that had been 
perpetrated after the war. What Asch 
witnessed caused him to suffer a nervous 
breakdown. Eventually, though having 
become an American citizen, Asch 
moved back to Europe, settling in a large 
home in Nice, France, until the onset of 
the Second World War made him flee 
again to the United States. 
Living in Connecticut then, he began 
a trilogy that provoked a different kind 
of flight. Published between 1939 and 
1949, three books — The Nazarene, The 
Apostle and Mary — depicted the world 
of early Christianity. Coming as it did 
from the midst of the Hitler years, The 
Nazarene essentially broke Asch’s link to 
the Jewish community. The first novel 
sold some 2 million copies, the second 
and third even more; but many readers, 
especially his Yiddish ones, believed he 
had betrayed his people by promoting 
Christianity. Some even believed Sholem 
Asch had converted. The uproar over 

DETAILS
Paula Vogel’s 2017 play Indecent 
will be staged by Jewish Theatre 
Grand Rapids, 2727 Michigan 
NE, April 20, 22, 27 & 29 at 7:30 
p.m.; and April 23 & 30 at 3 p.m. 
More information by calling (616) 
259-6447 or visiting www.jtgr.org/
season.

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