Censoring with a vengeance: Indecent speech in the Yiddish theater

Max Friedman is a rising third-year law student at the University of Memphis.

Censorship in the name of combating antisemitism has become a fact of contemporary political life. Whether through retaliation against individuals expressing protest slogans on campus, state laws codifying the deeply flawed IHRA Working Definition of antisemitism, or overbroad Title VI enforcement, state actors have exploited fears of antisemitism in ways that suppress pro-Palestinian activism.

To be clear, FIRE takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and fears of antisemitic conduct are far from unfounded given widely publicized reports of rapid increases in antisemitic violence. It also goes without saying that identifying and condemning perceived antisemitism is protected speech under the First Amendment. Yet all too often, activists and governments blur the line between arguably unpleasant but protected speech and unprotected conduct like true threats, discriminatory harassment, and incitement to imminent lawless action.

Implicit in this campaign against allegedly antisemitic speech is the idea that some “hateful” or “dangerous” speech should be suppressed because it might inspire others to discriminate or commit violence against Jews. These paternalistic arguments are not new, and they are deeply flawed. To illustrate, let’s turn the clock back a century.

In 1923, New York police entered Broadway’s Apollo Theater and shut down an English-language production of a popular Yiddish play, Sholem Asch’s Got fun nekome (“God of Vengeance”). Officers arrested the entire cast and production team, including prominent First Amendment lawyer Harry Weinberger of Abrams v. United States fame. The raid led to a sprawling obscenity trial that sharply divided the New York Jewish community.

Got fun nekome was supposedly “obscene” because it portrayed a Jewish family that defied norms of gender and social status. A violent and controlling father operates a brothel in his basement, masks his corruption with hypocritical piety, and desecrates a Torah scroll. His daughter rebels from an arranged marriage and falls in love with one of the brothel’s female prostitutes, whom she caresses and kisses in the rain (the first kiss between two women to appear on a Broadway stage). Needless to say, none of this is “obscene” under modern constitutional standards. But ultimately, the jury found each of the defendants guilty of obscenity, relying on the prosecution’s description of the production’s “immoral” and “salacious” contents.

Some Jewish leaders at the time feared that the play’s portrayal of Jews would inflame antisemitic stereotypes. They argued it portrayed the father’s immorality as uniquely Jewish — contrary to Asch’s intended broader social critique that happened to feature Jewish characters. Rabbi Joseph Silverman, a prominent leader in the New York Jewish community, noted the rampant anti-immigrant sentiment directed against Yiddish-speaking Jews and claimed that the play “libels the Jewish religion.” (Rabbi Silverman, in fact, had filed the criminal complaint that led to the raid.)

The judge overseeing the trial even cited these concerns in his statements following the verdict. As reported in the Yiddish newspaper of record, Forverts (“Forward”), the judge proclaimed, “God of Vengeance has been condemned by Jews, like Silverman and others. According to them, the play does not communicate the right message about Jewish life and doesn’t paint the Jewish woman in a good light.”

Meanwhile, the play’s advocates relied on principles of free expression. Weinberger, defending himself and the rest of the cast, argued that the case implicated bedrock civil liberties (and later succeeded in having the convictions reversed on evidentiary grounds). Prominent figures, including the editor-in-chief of Forverts, testified to the play’s artistic merit. And as Asch himself wrote in an open letter, “Jews do not need to clear themselves before any one. . . . I think that the apologetic writer, who tries to place Jews in a false, even though white light, does them more harm than good in the eyes of the Gentiles.”

Asch’s response draws on a cornerstone free speech principle: what we consider “true” or “dangerous” can change, sometimes very rapidly. John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty that we must embrace speakers’ right to express controversial, unpopular ideas, because those ideas may in fact be true. And even if they are not, the proper remedy is truthful speech, not censorship. Got fun nekome is a case in point. Today, the play’s rejection of racialized essentialism and embrace of same-sex relationships are points of pride for many Yiddish theater aficionados; and its radicalism in its own era inspired Paula Vogel’s award-winning play Indecent. Suppressing Got fun nekome — even assuming it might have prevented some gentiles from believing negative stereotypes about Jews — would have erased what many view as a transformative work of Jewish art.

So let Sholem Asch’s words guide us now. The mere fact that a message could provoke ill will toward Jews does not justify stamping it out in the name of Jewish safety. Indeed, as the Got fun nekome scandal shows, the nebulous notion of “dangerous” speech has encompassed controversial expression by influential Jewish cultural figures like Asch. The government may regulate select categories like true threats, discriminatory harassment, and incitement, but the First Amendment protects most provocative and uncomfortable speech. And often — especially with time — “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”