Between writing his first novel, Stalingrad, in the aftermath of World War II and his second, Life and Fate, after the death of Stalin, the great Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman became utterly disillusioned with Communism—a transformation that, to Joseph Epstein, is part of what makes the former merely “an important book” and the latter “a masterpiece.” While part of this change in perspective was due to the revelations of Stalin’s crimes, Epstein writes that Grossman’s growing sensitivity to his own Jewish identity played a role as well:

In covering [World War II] as a journalist, Grossman also learned about the slaughter of Jews in Ukraine. Along with his article on the inhuman ghastliness at Treblinka, which was put in evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, Grossman saw Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev where nearly 100,000 Jews were executed and dumped into mass graves in 1941. He knew that many Ukrainians had been complicit in the slaughter of Jews during the Shoah. Add to this his mother’s murder [by the Nazis in the Ukrainian city of] Berdichev.

During these years Grossman worked in collaboration with Ilya Ehrenburg on a volume called The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, a book that was not allowed publication in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Stalin, himself an anti-Semite, had famously declared, “Do not divide the dead,” by which he meant that emphasizing the mass murder of Jews was prohibited. . . .

Life and Fate offers several brilliant pages on anti-Semitism, Soviet and worldwide. “Anti-Semitism,” Grossman writes, “is also an expression of a lack of talent, an inability to win a contest on equal terms—in science, in commerce, in craftsmanship, or in painting. States look to the imaginary intrigues of World Jewry for explanations of their own failure.” He sets out the different levels of anti-Semitism and notes that “historical epochs, unsuccessful and reactionary governments, and individuals hoping to better their lot all turn to anti-Semitism as a last resort, in an attempt to escape an inevitable doom.” In this novel, too, Grossman offers a brilliant portrait of Adolf Eichmann, which one wishes Hannah Arendt had read, as it might have prevented her from writing her wretched book portraying Eichmann as a mere banal bureaucrat.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.