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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.”
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Synagogue attacks were part of massive ISIS-inspired plot last week, FBI says
(JTA) — A 21-year-old man from Valencia, Pennsylvania, suggested poisoning food in synagogues as part of a mass attack in support of the Islamic State group last week, according to the FBI.
The suspect, Jonathan Kramer, said in an online forum using the pseudonym “Hamza Al Rashid” that “i wish to inject ricin or cyanide into places such as grocery stores inside water/food with a syringe, or going to food events, preferably synagogues and putting the chemicals in their food and drink…,” according to a sworn FBI affidavit.
The prospective poisoning was part of a broader plot of mass violence that included “repeated attempts to encourage and coordinate violence through encrypted platforms, such as advising others on attack methods, discussing chemical poisons, arson, vehicle attacks, drone delivery explosives and firearm based assaults,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard Evanchec said at a press conference last week.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said in a security update on Friday that no synagogue had been specified by the FBI. , “We are in close contact with our law enforcement partners and federal prosecutors, and if we learn of anything concerning, we will share that immediately,” the organization noted.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg announced last Tuesday that Kramer was “preparing for a mass shooting that could have taken many lives, having already secured a rifle and approximately 190 rounds of ammunition for what he called his ‘mission.”
Efforts to reach Kramer’s public defender Jake Morrison were unsuccessful.
FBI agents arrested Kramer in a hotel parking lot in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, the Justice Department said. They seized a semiautomatic rifle, five rifle magazines, a rifle bipod and scope, a total of 190 rounds of rifle ammunition and about 30 knives following a search of him, his house and his hotel room.
Kramer was charged with receiving a firearm and ammunition believing they would be used to commit terrorism. He appeared in court last Wednesday to waive a preliminary hearing, according to CBS News. A court date has not been set for Kramer’s next proceedings, the network reported.
Kramer had been on the FBI’s radar since 2023, when he was charged by Pennsylvania state authorities “for his role in a plot to commit a mass casualty incident” and sent to a juvenile detention facility, FBI special agent Gregory Battaglia said in a sworn affidavit.
Nearly eight years ago, 11 worshippers were killed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances
(JTA) — The State Department has approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia — a move that would make the kingdom the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to have the world’s most powerful combat aircraft.
“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally,” the department said in a statement.
Israel wants the sale attached to a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. However, there is a small chance that Congress could keep the sale from happening.
When President Donald Trump first confirmed that he was considering the sale last November, Israeli officials told Axios that while they don’t oppose the sale itself, they wanted it “to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel.”
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly brushed off the deal’s significance last fall, a security source at the time warned on CNN that the possibility of Saudi Arabia acquiring “the same capabilities” as Israel was “very concerning.”
The prime minister was more vocal in his opposition to a July announcement from Trump that he was weighing selling the advanced jets to Turkey as well, telling CNN that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “not exactly a model ally of the United States.”
Israel has already purchased 50 F-35 jets, in two procurement rounds that occurred in 2016 and in 2017, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry. However, local media reports indicate that two of the 50 have yet to arrive, meaning that just 48 are on the ground – the same number of planes that the State Department has approved for Saudi Arabia’s potential purchase.
Israel would have many more F-35s than Saudi Arabia for the time being, because its Defense Ministry announced in 2024 that it would be procuring 25 more of the planes, slated to begin arriving in 2028. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry revealed that it would be procuring yet another squadron of the jets, although the quantity remained unclear.
Congressional approval is not assured; wariness of the Saudi regime, stemming in part from the state-sanctioned 2018 murder of a U.S.-based journalist in Turkey, crosses party lines.
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch of the government to notify Congress regarding major defense equipment sales to most countries. Congress can then deem a country ineligible to participate in a sale through a joint resolution. The president can then veto the resolution, which Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority to override.
Additionally, U.S. law requires the president to ensure that Israel maintains “a qualitative military edge over military threats” when considering arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. Israel, per the law, must be able “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat” from both other nations and “non-state actors.”
“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region,” the State Department said on Thursday. It called Saudi Arabia “a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” adding that the sale would help “deter current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense.”
The department maintained that not only would the sale improve Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities, but it would also boost “interoperability” with both U.S. forces and other players from NATO and the region.
As for the potential deal’s logistics, Saudi Arabia has requested 48 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Jets, as well as 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, according to the State Department.
The kingdom is also seeking to acquire other non-major defense equipment, such as cryptographic devices, precision navigation, secure communications, simple key loaders and support for electronic warfare databases, maintenance and personnel training.
Producing and delivering these planes can take many years.
Meanwhile, just a day before Trump’s announcement, The New York Times surfaced intelligence concerns that China could acquire F-35 technology by spying on Saudi Arabia or through its partnerships with the kingdom.
U.S. House Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, warned in a statement on X that “Beijing has spent decades stealing American intellectual property” and that this deal could “help them do it.”
“Our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi added.
The Biden administration reportedly ended a past F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates — secured by the first Trump administration — due to similar concerns about the country’s connections to China, as well as to Russia.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’
(JTA) — The lieutenant governor of Texas says his recent call for the state’s public schools to remove “over 2,000 titles” of “dirty, filthy and vulgar books” was not meant to include books about the Holocaust.
Dan Patrick’s statement, provided exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, comes after a month of confusion following a press conference in which he and a conservative Christian activist threatened schools with potential loss of state funding if they did not comply with his directive to purge their libraries.
“I believe Texas students must learn about the Holocaust, and that includes reading books such as ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and other books about the Holocaust,” Patrick told JTA, singling out two books on the removal list he had promoted – one of which, “Night,” that he previously explicitly called for removal from middle schools.
Patrick added that his initiative was “focused on age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in public school libraries across Texas.” At his earlier press conference, he had directed viewers to an online list compiled by an activist group that features several books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Patrick’s threats have teeth. In Texas, lieutenant governors are more powerful than in many other states, playing central roles in shaping the budget and determining the legislative agenda.
Patrick also appeared to walk back some of the harsher proclamations from his Aug. 19 press conference, at which the Republican had stated, “We’re coming for the books.”
“As the law states, local communities have the right to make their own decisions about their public school libraries,” he told JTA Friday.
The lieutenant governor, who is up for reelection this fall, appeared at the conference with Bonnie Wallace, the head of the activist group Recover America, and told viewers to “go to RecoverAmerica.com.” That group has circulated a list of more than 2,100 “Harmful Books in Libraries.” Its list, which it describes as “books with harmful, sexually explicit, and vulgar content,” includes more than a dozen titles of particular import to Jewish readers.
Recover America’s flagged books include both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a comic-book adaptation of Frank’s diary and Bernard Malamud’s novel of a blood libel “The Fixer” — all books that have been removed from school districts in Texas and other states in the past amid broader conservative-led library culture wars. In some cases those books were restored to the districts following public outcry, but spurred deeper dialogue about the state of Holocaust education and antisemitism awareness in public schools.
Patrick’s latest push would go much further than a handful of districts, affecting the more than 5.5 million students in public schools across the state.
One book of particular contention on Recover America’s list was “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s bestselling memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which has been taught in schools for decades. After a Houston Chronicle story noted the book’s inclusion on the Recover America “harmful” list, Patrick initially doubled down on “Night,” saying that it was not appropriate for middle schools owing to its “violence.”
“If ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, were made into a movie, it would likely be rated R,” Patrick wrote on the social network X on Aug. 26. “‘Night,’ which includes depictions of graphic violence and the machine-gunning of babies, should not be available to sixth graders in middle-school libraries. High school is more age-appropriate.”
His tweet appeared to contradict the state’s own K-12 required reading list, passed this summer, which mandates that “Night” be taught in the eighth grade beginning in 2030.
Now, in response to questions from JTA, the lieutenant governor said he would defer to the Texas State Board of Education on the appropriate grade to teach “Night.”
“The State Board of Education decides the appropriate grade level for books and will determine whether ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, is at the appropriate grade level,” Patrick told JTA in his statement.
He continued to insist that books in schools should be held to “FCC standards,” referring to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that governs broadcasting content and does not regulate publishing.
The head of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a governor-appointed panel which advised the state on the inclusion of “Night” and other Holocaust texts on its required reading list, did not return a JTA request for comment.
In a statement, the Texas Educational Authority, which drafted the required-reading list, told JTA, “When Texas students learn about the Holocaust, they will be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust. That is why the SBOE placed the book in 8th Grade to ensure age appropriateness for students.”
At the Emmys this week, when “The Librarians,” a documentary about librarians facing book removal threats, won an award, retired Texas librarian Carolyn Foote joined the producers on the stage and held up a copy of “Night” in protest.
“I felt like it was very symbolic to bring ‘Night,’” Foote, a subject of the film and a co-founder of the librarian activist group FReadom Fighters, told JTA. “Having read it, I just know the importance of not forgetting our past. And that’s part of Elie Wiesel’s whole legacy, is remembrance, and so it just felt very important for me to carry that book, coming from Texas.” Another librarian onstage for the win held up “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.”
Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, told JTA that “Texas deserves credit for recognizing that Holocaust education belongs in the eighth-grade curriculum.” Yet, the younger Wiesel suggested, Patrick’s concerns about the book’s violence were misplaced.
“‘Night’ contains violence because the Holocaust was violent; its purpose is not to shock young people, but to help them understand where hatred and indifference can lead,” he wrote in an email. “With context and guidance, students should not be shielded from this history. They should be equipped to confront it.”
Despite having directed viewers to Recover America’s book list during his press conference, Patrick’s new statement to JTA said, “I do not have a book list.” He pointed instead to a law passed in the state legislature in 2025 regulating school books that he said districts were required to follow.
Yet some districts in the state have removed every book on Recover America’s list from their own libraries out of fear of losing funding, Foote told JTA. While the list nominally contains a ratings system, many of the books do not have a rating.
Besides “Night,” “Maus,” “Anne Frank’s Diary” and “The Fixer,” other books about Judaism and the Holocaust on Recover America’s list of “Harmful Books” include:
- “Annexed,” a young-adult novel about Peter van Pels, who hid in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank
- “The Berlin Boxing Club,” a young-adult historical novel based on German boxer Max Schmeling, who helped young Jews during Hitler’s rise to power
- “Black, White and Jewish,” a memoir by Rebecca Walker, the mixed-race Jewish daughter of author Alice Walker
- “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” a nonfiction book analyzing the “caste systems” of Nazi Germany. “Caste” had been included on an earlier, Wallace-spearheaded list of books for removal from a Texas public library in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in 2025, allowing the removals to proceed.
- “Kasher in the Rye,” a memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher
- “Pride: the story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a children’s picture-book biography of the pioneering Jewish LGBTQ legislator
- “Sophie’s Choice,” the bestselling Holocaust novel for adults
- “The Violin Maker’s Daughter,” a historical novel about a Jewish family of musicians during the Holocaust
- “White Bird,” a young-reader graphic novel about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France
In response to JTA sharing a list of the above books, Patrick’s statement mentioned only “Night” and Anne Frank by name. The Recover America list is largely made up of romance and fantasy novels, many with an LGBTQ element, while also including classics such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat’s Cradle” and some picture books for children.
Recover America did not immediately return a JTA request for comment Friday on Patrick’s new statement. Wallace, the group’s leader who has also appeared on Patrick’s podcast, previously told the Houston Chronicle that she had “thought long and hard” about including “Night” on her list.
She ultimately did so, she said, because “an eighth-grade student is 13 years old. Do they need to read about soldiers massacring, throwing up babies, and killing them with machine guns?”
She added, “It’s not to say this doesn’t happen in life. And the Holocaust was maybe the worst tragedy in the history of the world.”
For Cameron Samuels, a Jewish alum of Texas public schools and founder of the activist group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, such efforts do not help Jewish students.
“Non-Jewish people are deciding for us what’s best, and making this public policy,” Samuels said. “We can’t readily access these books and stories. And that makes students feel alone. It also means that our classroom peers are not learning authentic Jewish narratives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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