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Death of Iranian leader just before Purim revives Book of Esther parallels
(JTA) — In Jewish time, history often has a way of rhyming with the calendar. So when Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike on the Shabbat before Purim — the holiday that commemorates the downfall of Haman, a Persian tyrant who sought to annihilate the Jews — it was perhaps inevitable that rabbis, politicians and social media commentators would reach for the Book of Esther.
Some did so reverently, others triumphantly, and a few with a wink. But as Jews prepared to don costumes and drown out Haman’s name with noisemakers, the ancient story of survival in Persia collided with a very modern war in what is now known as Iran.
The Orthodox Union, the Modern Orthodox umbrella group, put out a statement titled “Purim in Our Time: Standing Up to Iranian Tyranny.” “We will read the Bible story of Esther and Mordecai overcoming the genocidal plans of Haman, who sought to destroy the Jewish people. Today, in coordination with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the IDF, President Trump and the U.S. armed forces took defensive action to silence a modern threat from the same ancestral land of Haman,” the statement read.
Such comparisons have proliferated since the killing of Khamenei.
In his first statement after the beginning of the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the connection to Purim explicit.
“Twenty-five hundred years ago, in ancient Persia, a tyrant rose against us with the very same goal, to utterly destroy our people,” Netanyahu said. “Today as well, on Purim, the lot has fallen, and in the end this evil regime will fall too.”
Known as Persia until 1935, Iran has been belligerent toward Israel at least since the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, which brought clerics like Khamenei, with their frequent chant of “Death to Israel,” to power.
The holiday takes its cue from the Book of Esther, which describes how the Jewish queen to the Persian king Ahasuerus engineers the downfall of Haman, an advisor to the king who was plotting the murder of the kingdom’s Jews. Although Jewish tradition treats the book as historical — and Ahasuerus is often associated with the historical ruler Xerxes I — biblical scholars and historians tend to regard the story as what scholar Adele Berlin, author of “The JPS Bible Commentary: Esther,” called a “historical novella.”
Jews across the religious spectrum noted the comparison, often to different ends. Agudath Israel of America, the haredi Orthodox umbrella group, talked about prayer and salvation in its statement about the war.
“The upcoming Jewish holiday of Purim celebrates the downfall of those who rose up against the Jewish People in ancient Persia nearly 2,400 years ago,” it read (the events described in Esther are thought to have taken place in the fifth or fourth century BCE). “We are reminded how the key to the miraculous salvation was the heartfelt prayers of men, women, and children. While prayer is always powerful, our sages have taught that it carries special power during the Purim holiday season. We call upon the Jewish community to unite in prayer and beseech the Almighty to protect all those on the front lines and in harm’s way in Israel and across the Middle East.”
Rabbi Nicole Guzik, senior rabbi at Sinai Temple, a Conservative congregation in Los Angeles, spoke about human agency in her hastily rewritten Saturday sermon.
“Right now we stand at a critical stage where the story shifts, where the final paragraph in the Megillah that we are reading right now, in real time, has yet to be written,” she said, using the Hebrew name for a scroll like the Book of Esther. “The U.S., Israel, our beloved nations are holding the pen, and they are declaring, with courage and conviction, that we will be the authors of our future in the same manner as Esther.”
Some of the comparisons have been offhanded, even flippant. The novelist Dara Horn, speaking Sunday night at a forum on combating antisemitism at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, said, “Tomorrow night is Purim, and I think it’s clear to all of us now that the best way to fight antisemitism is to take out Haman with an F-15.”
Comedian Yohay Sponder, an Israeli who often performs in North America, posted a video of a routine commenting on the death of Khamenei. Like the Purim hamantaschen cookies named after Haman, he predicted a time when Jews will eat a food named after the slain Iranian leader. He suggested khamin, the Shabbat stew also known as cholent.
Others have already adapted hamantaschen for the moment. Some have joked about baking “Khamentaschen,” combining the new nemesis’ name with the treat named for an ancient one. At least one bakery in Israel produced “Ayatollah-taschens” with a chocolate center resembling Khamenei’s trademark turban.
Evangelical Christians and Messianic Jews, for whom the Esther story has had increasing significance in recent years, also seized on the parallels. “It all made an amazing story back then, and we are praying for an equally miraculous outcome in our days that will lead to the salvation of many in Israel, Iran, and throughout the whole Middle East,” the One For Israel Ministry, a U.S.-based Messianic group, posted on Facebook..
Meanwhile, some suggested that the timing of the attacks appeared to be more than a coincidence. Digital creator Evan Pickus noted in a Facebook post that, according to the Book of Esther, Haman was hanged on the gallows just days before the calendar date that became Purim. “The evil Persian Prime Minister [sic], who issued a promise to kill all the Jews, destroyed on the same day as his ancestor,” wrote Pickus. “I honestly believe our leaders planned it this way, and I love that.”
Although no Israeli or U.S. official has said they planned the attack with Purim in mind, the idea became a talking point over the weekend, especially after CNN posted a report by Israel correspondent Tal Shalev saying the comparisons had been widely shared in Israel.
Shalev also wrote of the significance of the attacks on the Iranian leaders’ compound falling on Shabbat Zachor, the “Sabbath of Remembrance” that precedes Purim on the Hebrew calendar. The day takes its name from a special Torah reading (Deuteronomy 25:17-19) commanding Jews never to forget how Amalek — said to be the ancestral nation of Haman — attacked the vulnerable Israelites after they left Egypt. The Israelites are given a somewhat contradictory command: “Blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!”
A widely circulated image from Beit Shemesh, where an Iranian missile killed nine people in a bomb shelter that also functioned as a synagogue, showed a fragment of shrapnel puncturing a Torah right on the passage that had been read a day earlier.
The injunctions about “Amalek” are often applied, sometimes controversially, as an ongoing commandment for Jews to show no mercy toward those who might eradicate them. That, in turn, has led some Israeli politicians and Jewish observers to cite Amalek in justifying Israel’s war on Hamas and Iran, and others to criticize those same politicians as ruthless and even genocidal.
Shalev’s report inspired at least some commentators to criticize Israel, suggesting the attacks were inspired by religious or nationalist fanaticism.
Purim is itself a strange mixture of the deadly serious and the wildly playful: a story of a thwarted genocide celebrated with carnival antics, including costumes, a raucous reading of the Book of Esther interrupted by noisemakers, and even a tradition of getting drunk. For millennia, it was often a release for a beleaguered minority in strange and often hostile lands. But as Israel emerged as a military power, scrutiny from within and without the Jewish community has often focused on the real-life implications of the story’s purported lessons.
Yet despite the Israeli politicians who take the Bible as a guidebook for revenge or Jewish supremacy, there is a long tradition of commentary that sees books like Esther as intentionally nuanced, even ambiguous guides to ethical behavior, including the prosecution of just wars.
Chapter 9 in the Book of Esther details the reversal of fortune for the Jews on the 13th of the Hebrew month of Adar, when they were said to have killed 75,000 foes in the wake of Haman’s downfall. Many Jewish commentators have expressed discomfort about what can be read as a heartless response to Haman’s thwarted decree.
On Sunday, Rabbi Michelle Dardashti expanded on that theme in a letter sent to members of her Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn. She warned that the Purim story is not just a celebration of the Jews’ victory over a Persian despot, but a warning that “battles that begin in moral clarity do not necessarily remain that way.”
“Purim pushes us to contend with the gray — to recognize how quickly roles can flip; how, on a dime, individuals and nations can shift from victim to aggressor, from righteous to morally compromised, or into categories that resist easy labels altogether,” wrote Dardashti, whose father left Iran as a young man. “Anyone who tells you with certainty that this war with Iran will unquestionably be good for the Jews and good for the world, that it will surely end well or end quickly — I would be wary of heeding that voice.
“And anyone who speaks with absolute certainty about it being entirely disastrous, unquestionably wrong — I would be wary of heeding that voice as well.”
Rabbi Simon Jacobson, a popular lecturer from the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, discussed the parallels between the war and Purim in an installment of his video series, “MyLife: Chassidus Applied.” “The goal, of course, is to eradicate the enemy in every possible way, exactly as it happened in Persia, 2400 years ago in the story of Purim,” he said of the war.
But Jacobson also drew on two common themes not only of the Purim holiday but of much of Jewish tradition: salvation from an enemy, and the ultimate redemption of the Jews and humankind. He characterized the war in metaphysical terms, regretting “any type of bloodshed” but aspiring to “what happens afterwards: a stage, an era, a permanent era of Messianic, … total, solemn, permanent and sustainable peace for all people of this earth.”
For some congregations, the confluence of the war and the Purim holiday posed a challenge in tone — with rabbis asking how their communities might celebrate with bombs falling across the Middle East and Israelis taking cover in bomb shelters.
At B’nai Jeshurun, an independent synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the clergy offered a schedule of observance and celebration to match the ambivalent mood. On Monday, a traditional fast day in honor of Esther marking “moments of danger and uncertainty,” they urged congregants to turn “their hearts toward prayer and summoning strength before stepping into the unknown.”
At sundown, they wrote in a letter to congregants, when the fast “gives way to celebration, in a world shaken by violence and instability, we anchor ourselves in Purim’s four mitzvot”: hearing the Book of Esther, sharing gifts with friends, giving charity and sharing a meal with friends or family.
“We cannot resolve the uncertainty of this moment,” wrote the B’nai Jeshurun clergy. “But we can choose how we meet it — with prayer, with generosity, and with one another.”
Yoni Rosensweig, a rabbi in Beit Shemesh, wrote in a Facebook post that many of the comparisons between the Purim story and the war on Iran miss crucial distinctions.
“Yes, Haman wanted to destroy us, and so did Khamenei — but Khamenei was the ruler of Iran. Haman was not the ruler — he was nothing more than a schemer. This is not just a technical difference, it’s fundamental,” Rosensweig wrote in an email to JTA. “Esther and Mordechai are trying to survive, that is all, They are trying to maintain the status quo in someone else’s kingdom.”
While the events in Persia inspired a holiday, he argued, “there is nothing long-lasting about the Jewish future in Persia which comes from the story.” By contrast, the current war has the potential to profoundly shape the Jewish future, no less than the Exodus from Egypt celebrated at Passover.
“It is about creating something new (we hope) in the Middle East. It is part of a regional war against powers that want to obliterate us. We aren’t looking to maintain the status quo,” wrote Rosensweig. “We are standing up for our right to live free, as a sovereign nation. Much like the Jews who left Egypt weren’t looking to maintain the status quo but rather to embark on a new path and start a new journey, so too we are doing with this war.”
The post Death of Iranian leader just before Purim revives Book of Esther parallels appeared first on The Forward.
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With anti-Arab campaign ad, Netanyahu stoops to new moral and political lows
Israeli election campaigns have often been ugly. They have featured exaggeration, fearmongering and outright deception. But even by those standards, the first major campaign advertisement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, posted on Netanyahu’s X account on Tuesday, managed to shock much of the country.
The AI-generated video depicts former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, who has become the standard-bearer for the opposition, walking through a sunlit field toward a young Jewish man before passing him by to embrace Mansour Abbas of Ra’am, the United Arab List, instead.
The young man looks strikingly like Eisenkot’s son, Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in late 2023 — although Likud insists he isn’t meant to. Strictly speaking, there is enough difference to sustain the protestations. The young man has longer, wavier hair than Gal Eisenkot did — just enough, perhaps, to preserve plausible deniability. Yet almost everyone I know believed they were watching a father joyfully approaching his slain son, seemingly restored to life, only to ignore him in favor of an Arab political leader at a time when Arab political participation in Israel is particularly contentious.
The only possible explanation: Likud wants their campaign to be as mean as possible. Or perhaps that they believe that anything that creates a buzz — and therefore distracts from the governing coalition’s disastrous and controversial policies, including a wildly unpopular recent legislative blitz — is a good thing.
And buzz there is. The perception that a father’s personal loss had been weaponized for electoral gain struck many as a line that simply should not be crossed. “This is Netanyahu, and this is his machine of incitement”, wrote Einav Zangauker, whose son was held hostage in Gaza by Hamas, on social media. “This isn’t politics,” Zangauker added, but rather “an attack on a bereaved father and an assault on his dignity. It is the lowest of the low.”
“I turn to elected representatives, activists, and all candidates from all parties, and demand that you do not cross red lines. Do not turn rivals into enemies,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said. “I call on the people of Israel, in a clear voice: Remember that elections are not a civil war.”
But even if one puts aside the controversy surrounding the young man altogether, the advertisement remains deeply troubling. It is, at its core, an exercise in incitement against Ra’am — and, by extension, against the very idea that Arab citizens may legitimately participate in governing Israel.
Abbas himself accused Netanyahu of “trying to incite between different parts of society”; about a fifth of Israelis are Arab, and the ad was obviously trying to delegitimize collaboration with the parties who generally represent them.
From Likud’s perspective, that too is logical — so long as they ignore the goal of Israel remaining a democratic country in which component ethnic groups live in harmony. It’s logical because Arab parties have always been part of the opposition to Likud and the chances are high that Eisenkot might need them, even passively, to successfully craft a coalition after the Oct. 27 election.
This isn’t just dangerous. It ignores the essential role that Arab parties have played in building toward a strong Israeli future.
Ra’am, under Abbas, has been the most integrationist Arab party Israel has ever seen. Abbas broke with decades of Arab political orthodoxy by arguing that Arab citizens should seek influence through practical cooperation with whichever Zionist government Israelis elected. He has repeatedly recognized Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people while demanding full equality for its Arab citizens.
Whatever one thinks of his politics, these choices have represented one of the boldest experiments in Jewish-Arab partnership since the state’s founding.
That experiment briefly succeeded. Ra’am joined Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid’s coalition in 2021 and demonstrated that Arab participation in government could become something ordinary rather than revolutionary.
More awkward still for Likud, Netanyahu himself spent some weeks after the 2021 election attempting to persuade Abbas to support — or even participate in — his own coalition. Those negotiations failed for one principal reason: Far-right firebrand Bezalel Smotrich — now Netanyahu’s finance minister — refused to countenance a government dependent on an Arab party. Without Ra’am, Netanyahu lacked a majority.
It is therefore surreal to portray Eisenkot’s willingness to work with Ra’am as somehow beyond the democratic pale, when not so long ago, Netanyahu himself tried to do precisely the same thing.
Nor should anyone pretend that Arab parties suddenly became relevant because of Eisenkot. Since the emergence of today’s political blocs, Arab parties have almost invariably belonged to the anti-Likud camp. Any center-left coalition aspiring to govern has depended, directly or indirectly, on their parliamentary support. That is not a distortion of Israeli democracy. It is one of its enduring structural realities.
Which brings us to the larger significance of this episode.
Many Israelis have long predicted that this Likud campaign would barely concern policy at all. They expected, instead, an effort to delegitimize any prospective change government by portraying it as illegitimate because it relied on Arab parties. They expected renewed attempts to cast Arab political participation as inherently suspect. They expected emotional manipulation to substitute for argument and personal attacks to eclipse serious debate. Some feared renewed efforts to discourage Arab turnout and disqualify Arab parties from the ballot.
That appears to be exactly what they’re getting.
The remarkable thing is not merely that Likud produced this advertisement, but that doing so was effectively its first act of the campaign, which kicked off after the Knesset recently went into recess.
Before voters had heard competing visions for Israel’s economy, security or diplomacy, the country’s governing party chose to launch its campaign by inflaming fears about Arab political participation while employing imagery that countless Israelis immediately interpreted as mocking one father’s unbearable personal loss.
By the next day, competing ads using a similar aesthetic were put out by opponents of Netanyahu. One depicted Netanyahu on a similar field running past a soldier to hug a Haredi politician holding a sign that says — as many Haredi anti-draft protesters chant — “we’d rather die than serve.”
One reason AI is so attractive to political strategists is because it blurs responsibility. Images can be carefully engineered to evoke a conclusion while remaining just different enough to deny that such a conclusion was ever the intention. The technology offers something every spin doctor craves: emotional impact coupled with plausible deniability.
“I do not think we can allow this to continue,” lamented David Lau, a former chief rabbi of Israel, who has served in the military. “We must stop all these disputes, all this talk, and all these behaviors. This path does not lead to building anything. It does not lead to peace. It is a bad path, and I am even more concerned about the next generation.”
It is entirely possible that this advertisement will prove to have established the moral tone of the campaign. Israel deserves better.
The post With anti-Arab campaign ad, Netanyahu stoops to new moral and political lows appeared first on The Forward.
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Reed College agrees to sweeping reforms as part of Title VI antisemitism settlement
(JTA) — Reed College has agreed to a host of far-reaching institutional changes, including asserting that targeting Jewish Zionists will be considered discriminatory, in order to settle multiple federal antisemitism investigations, parties to the complaint announced Wednesday.
The settlement was announced by the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which jointly filed the complaint, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination at any institution receiving federal funds. It comes as campuses across the country, facing threats of losing federal funding under the Trump administration, have demonstrated willingness to negotiate new antisemitism protections.
As part of the agreement, the private Portland, Oregon, liberal arts school says it will insert language into its discrimination policy asserting that “for many Jewish people, Zionism is integral to their religious, ancestral and/or ethnic Jewish identity,” and that “targeting Jews on the basis of their Zionist identity” will be considered discriminatory.
The school will also contract a third-party consultant to monitor and report on its effectiveness in adhering to antisemitism protections, role that is unusual in similar Title VI agreements. The agreement says Reed will “consider” the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s working definition of antisemitism, which includes some criticisms of Israel, and implement antisemitism training for faculty and staff.
“We take concerns about antisemitism, and all forms of unlawful discrimination, seriously, and we will continue to support the well-being, safety, and success of every member of our community,” a Reed College spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement acknowledging the agreement. Reed declined to comment further.
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Brandeis Center officials praised the agreement in a release as a potential model for other colleges.
“We believe it should serve as a model for other schools,” Denise Katz-Prober, director of legal initiatives at the Brandeis Center, told JTA about the agreement. The required language in Reed’s discrimination guidelines, she said, is “very clear about what constitutes anti-Zionist conduct in violation of civil rights and in violation of the policy.”
“This outcome demonstrates how the Title VI process can work to effectively protect Jewish students,” Greenblatt said in his own statement.
Around 100 students at Reed College are Jewish, or about 7% of the total student body, according to estimates from Hillel International. A request for comment to the director of PDX Hillel, which serves Jewish students at Reed and others in the region, was not immediately returned.
The resolution stems from two anonymous Title VI antisemitism complaints from Jewish former Reed students, both filed in 2024 under the Biden administration. One of those cases related to a student whose dorm-room mezuzah was vandalized, and who herself was later pelted with rocks, during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in spring 2024. The student later left the school out of concern for her safety.
Both of the described acts would have already been considered violations of school policy for reasons unrelated to the student’s Jewish or Zionist identity. Brandeis’s Katz-Prober argued both should have also been considered in the context of her targeting by anti-Zionist activists.
“It might be difficult for someone to, at first glance, understand whether it was simply an assault or an assault motivated by bias,” she said. The case, she said, demonstrated how in some cases, “‘Zionist’ is merely a codeword for Jew.”
Katz-Prober also touted the agreement’s mandate that the school bring on a third-party compliance consultant, separate from its Title VI coordinator. While she insisted that such a role would be “independent” and free of bias, she noted that both the ADL and the Brandeis Center would have a role in their selection.
“Both sides get a say,” she said.
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Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs cruises to GOP nomination for governor amid allegations of antisemitism
(JTA) — Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, who has drawn criticism for ties to white nationalist figures, will officially be the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, after winning the primary on Tuesday night.
Biggs, who is backed by President Donald Trump, has drawn criticism for encouraging Stew Peters, an internet personality, and appearing on his show. Peters has labeled Judaism a “death cult” and has called for a “final solution” that involves the deportation of American Jews, and multiple watchdogs identify him as promoting antisemitism.
“Keep preaching,” Biggs told Peters at the end of his June 2023 appearance on the show, during which they discussed government corruption and Biggs agreed with Peters that the FBI should be abolished.
Biggs, 67, who won handily with 73.4% of votes according to multiple media outlets, will challenge Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in what is expected to be a competitive race in November. Biggs has represented Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, which is outside of Phoenix, since 2017.
His opponent in the GOP primary, Rep. David Schweikert, had put out a campaign mailer in March tying Biggs to white supremacy and antisemitism. The mailer featured mentions of Biggs’ interview with Peters as well as Biggs’ endorsement of Texas GOP candidate Brandon Herrera, who owned a copy of “Mein Kampf.”
Biggs’ campaign did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment, but in a local TV interview last month he called the accusations politically motivated and said, “This notion that I am antisemitic is absolutely one of the most ludicrous, insane arguments ever.”
In 2024, Biggs opposed the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which passed in the House of Representatives. Biggs wrote that he opposes antisemitism and that the “pro-Hamas, pro-genocide, anti-Israel events happening across the nation are sickening.” He rejected the legislation, he said, because it was “so poorly drafted that it violates the Constitution and could have serious ramifications for the Christian community.” Right wing Republicans objected especially to the bill citing a definition of antisemitism that included as an example the claim that the Jews killed Jesus.
That same year, Biggs attended a rally co-sponsored by the Proud Boys, an extremist militia style group. In 2019, he spoke at a “Patriotism over Socialism” rally in Arizona, which watchdogs warned would draw extremist groups.
Media Matters, a group that mostly monitors right-wing groups, in 2023 wrote that “the links between Biggs and far-right extremists have been well-documented,” citing among other things his ties to another far-right group, the Oath Keepers.
The Republican Jewish Coalition did not respond to a question over whether it would support Biggs’ run for governor.
At a campaign event on Tuesday, Hobbs skewered Biggs for his denial of Trump’s 2020 election loss, and for not acknowledging Hobbs’ narrow 2022 gubernatorial victory over Republican Kari Lake.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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