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The Purim story starts in fear and ends in vengeance. Can America and Israel break that cycle?
(JTA) — Many people think of Purim as a children’s holiday — unadulterated joy, fun and merriment. But I have come to see it as a profound moral commentary on what it means to hold power, and a cautionary tale about what happens when we fail to do our part to break the cycle of violence when the power is in our hands to do it.
I have been living with my husband Rabbi Aryeh Cohen’s interpretation of Megillat Esther — the biblical book read on the holiday, which begins Monday evening at sundown — for more than 29 years now. It initially caught me off guard during a discussion while we were still dating, back in 1993: “You know, of course, that Purim is all about confronting the impossibility of redemption.” (Of course?!) In short, the king’s viceroy Haman decides capriciously that the Jews must be killed, and the king agrees. It is only after the Jewish heroine Esther marries the king and convinces him that her people do not deserve to be killed does he change the decree, and the Jews are saved. Redemption!
This happy ending is accompanied by another decree, however, in which the Jews are given permission to slaughter those who were going to slaughter them. To authorize this violent self-defense, the king takes the royal ring, a symbol of his authority, from the corpse of Haman and gives it to Esther’s Jewish cousin, Mordecai.
Writes Aryeh: “The question we are left with is this: In the next scene, the scene after the end of the megillah, who will get the ring then? … We suspect that another Haman will get the ring, then another Mordecai, forever.”
Visions of this unredeemed world were on view in recent days as we watched the multi-directional, free-flowing hate catching fire in America, in Israel and in the West Bank. These weeks leading up to Purim have felt all too much like the horrifying parts of the megillah: the reality of Jewish vulnerability in the face of mercurial antisemitism at its beginning; the wielding of Jewish power in a revenge fantasy at its end.
For me, this megillah started two weeks ago when two Jewish men — Persian, like Mordecai — were shot within a block or two of my Los Angeles house simply because they were Jewish men. The shooter had fallen into a conspiracy rabbit hole and believed that Jews had manufactured and released the COVID-19 virus in an attempt to target Asians. Thank God, both men will recover, and I hope that the shooter can recover from his own misguided hate, too. When politicians, media and others play with rhetorical fire and boost conspiracy theories, it lights the torches of vulnerable people, and we all get burned.
Then last week, I watched through waves of nausea as the end of the megillah was reflected in the West Bank, following the killings of Israeli brothers Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, by a Palestinian shooter. There, Jewish acolytes of Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered 29 praying Palestinians 29 years ago on Purim, took a break from marauding in the Palestinian village of Huwara to offer their evening prayers. In the video that was circulating, the settlers were reciting the words of Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, sometime before or after a resident of nearby Zu’tara, Sameh Aqtash, was shot and killed. They were not reciting the Kaddish for him. Few participants in the pogrom have faced consequences. But the Israeli army has attacked Israelis protesting it.
There were other horrors in between, both here and there — and more since. Innocent Palestinians were killed and injured during military raids in the West Bank. A recent college graduate, the dual American-Israeli citizen Elan Ganeles, was shot to death as he headed to a friend’s wedding in Jerusalem.
And here in the United States, a “Day of Hate” called by far-right antisemitic group put Jews on alert throughout a recent Shabbat.
For these past weeks and months, it has felt like Jews are being squeezed between our vulnerability as Jews here in the United States and Israel and the contortion of Jewish power in Israel — quite literally in the case of the militant Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, whose party is known as Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power.
On the eve of Purim we need to think about what it means to change the story — for everyone.
In the United States, that means building strong and deep relationships that keep us all safe. California state assembly member Isaac Bryan offered a model at a town hall following the shootings here, when he said that Black and Jewish solidarity looks like “thriving, safe, and healthy communities from Pico-Robertson to Leimert Park.” Bryan names the most identifiable Jewish and Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles to remind us that all Angelenos’ fates are connected. That if we show up for one another and ensure one another’s physical and economic safety and well-being, the city becomes a better place for all of us.
In Israel, it means recognizing that the Israeli government and those that have empowered it are currently “holding the ring” of power. If they continue to act with unrestrained power to terrorize and dispossess Palestinians, or simply allow settlers to do this with no repercussions, they fail to heed the words of Isaiah: “And when you lift up your hands, I will turn My eyes away from you; Though you pray at length, I will not listen. Your hands are stained with crime” (1:15).
When the Israeli nonprofits Tag Meir and Standing Together organized solidarity trips to Huwara last week, they were taking Isaiah’s admonition deeply to heart, refusing to turn their eyes and hearts away, walking toward the residents of Huwara and raising their voices against the settlers’ hate and violence. Tag Meir was founded to counteract settler “price tag” attacks, and shows up for both Palestinian and Israeli families who have been impacted by violence. Standing Together is a growing group of Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel who organize for change. Both are working to change the end of the megillah in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
In response to identity-based violent rhetoric, we must humanize those whom others would pit against us, while humanizing our own people, as well. There are many organizations that create spaces in which we can build relationships that create a variety of pathways for us to act on one another’s behalf, ensuring safety and dignity for one another. In solidarity, we can write a new ending to our megillah.
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How a Jewish play from 1908 enshrined the idea of America as a cultural ‘melting pot’
It’s long been unfashionable to refer to the United States as a “melting pot.” Identity politics and multiculturalism have undermined the ideal of an assimilation so complete that it obliterates ethnic distinctions. Now the persistence of difference is hailed, at least in some quarters, as enriching rather than estranging, even if the associated metaphors — “salad bowl,” “kaleidoscope,” “mosaic” — lack poetic vigor.
The first reference to the U.S. as a melting pot is said to date to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Framer, in which he wrote: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” Similar notions surfaced in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner. But it was Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot, that injected that industrial metaphor into the national consciousness.
Set in New York City, the play is a love story between a musically gifted Russian Jewish immigrant of Sephardic extraction and a gentile settlement house worker from the pogrom-wracked city that he fled. Its backdrop is the turmoil of an early 20th-century America trying to make sense of massive waves of Eastern European, and particularly Jewish, immigration. The playwright was an English Jew, a disillusioned Zionist who had begun looking to the U.S. as the promised land.
After its debut in Washington, where it was praised by President Theodore Roosevelt, The Melting Pot moved to Broadway in 1909 and has since enjoyed occasional revivals. Crescendoing debates around immigration, antisemitism and who deserves to be an American seem to lend it renewed currency.
So, at least, was the reasoning of Jesse Bernstein, producing artistic director of Philadelphia’s Theatre Ariel, whose focus is Jewish-themed work. Bernstein adapted and directed Zangwill’s play, and has teamed with the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, which produces rarely seen classics, to mount it. Their streamlined, modern-dress version, part of the America250 celebration, opened Wednesday at Philadelphia’s historic Arch Street Meeting House.
Bernstein said in an interview that he pruned as much as half an hour from the original (it now runs about 95 intermission-less minutes) with an ear to modern sensibilities. He also has made some additions that undercut the play’s triumphalism. The Melting Pot nonetheless remains an odd fusion of melodrama and polemic, interesting mostly as an historical curiosity.
Bernstein’s direction does the piece no favors with a stiff, presentational style, in which characters frequently address the audience rather than one another. On the other hand, when they turn away, the meeting house’s unfavorable acoustics make them more difficult, sometimes impossible, to hear. Offstage characters sit in chairs behind the action awaiting their cues. Meghan Jones’s spare set, representing both the Quixano family home and different locations within the settlement house, is draped with oriental rugs and strewn with steamer trunks and valises.
The protagonist, David Quixano, played with endearing sensitivity by Adam Galloway, survived the infamous 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which all his immediate family were murdered and he himself was shot and left for dead. After that trauma, America has become both his dream and his salvation. In New York, he lives with his cynical uncle, Mendel, also a musician; his Yiddish-speaking grandmother; and an Irish American housemaid, Kathleen (Jessy Gruver), who wrestles comically with Jewish customs and dietary laws.
Through a violin concert, David meets and falls for the lovely Vera (Lexi Thammavong), a former Russian “revolutionist” who now combats poverty through settlement house work. David is composing an American symphony that will convey his rapturous views of his adopted homeland. He finds a ready admirer in the German conductor Herr Pappelmeister (Adam Pelta-Pauls, speaking convincing German).
Standing in David’s way, personally and professionally, are two villains — the wealthy, unscrupulous nativist Quincy Davenport (Eli Lynn), a married man who lusts after Vera, and Vera’s estranged father, Baron Ravendal (Brian McCann), a reactionary Russian military commander who turns up unexpectedly. McCann brings a strangely mannered intensity to a role that is already a caricature.
Zangwill’s characters represent a spectrum of early 20th-century attitudes. Ravendal and Davenport, brutal in different ways, both give free rein to their antisemitism. Frau Quixano (played by a bewigged McCann) and Mendel Quixano (J Hernandez, appropriately world-weary) reflect the resistance of older immigrants to assimilation — and especially to its culmination in interfaith romance.
The Melting Pot is deadly serious at times, larded with apocalyptic symbolism and images of Jewish suffering. But it also has its share of comedy, including the maid Kathleen’s gradual embrace of Jewish traditions and some playful digs directed at critics.
It is up to David, the musical prodigy, to articulate the famous message at the play’s core. Early on, he declares his fealty to a new American ideal:
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! …A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American. The real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you — he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.
David returns repeatedly to this soaring rhetoric, lauding American greatness born of industrial-grade homogenization, and seeking to embody it in his symphony.
The original play ended exuberantly, with both love and David’s melting pot vision of “the glory of America” conquering all. Bernstein’s adaptation, with its insistence on relevance, duly complicates that vision. He wraps the action with supporting characters challenging David’s view of American harmony, and with the future of the betrothed couple clouded in doubt.
The Melting Pot runs at the Arch Street Meeting House, 320 Arch St., Philadelphia, through Nov. 8.
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‘I wanna blow up a synagogue’: Online posts lead to hate crime charge against Utah man
(JTA) — A Utah man accused of possessing explosive devices, searching online for nearby synagogues and making online threats to kill Jews is due in court Friday to face charges including attempting to commit a hate crime.
A federal grand jury indicted Skyler AJ Rose, 22, on Wednesday, the Department of Justice said in a release.
Rose allegedly made threats on social media, including “I wanna blow up a synagogue,” leading the FBI to join the Ogden City Police Department in a search of his home, where they allegedly discovered six pipe bombs, two rifles and ammunition.
A review of a cellphone seized from the home allegedly showed that Rose had searched online for a nearby synagogue, according to the Department of Justice.
The charges Rose faces include possession of an unregistered destructive device, threats to kill and injure people and to destroy a building, and attempting to commit a hate crime.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Will this election end the battle over drafting Haredi men into the Israeli army?
(JTA) — Whether to extend military conscription to haredi men, a longstanding question fueling political tensions in Israel, has boiled over since Hamas launched the current war with Israel with its deadly raids on Oct. 7, 2023.
Hundreds of thousands of Israeli soldiers and reservists battled on Israel’s southern and northern fronts and the manpower needs, especially in combat units, increased dramatically. Reservists served for extended periods and many of those serving in the standing army were forced to remain for an extra four months or longer – at an enormous price to soldiers’ families and to Israel’s economy. For the ultra-Orthodox, the Torah study that young men carry out in place of military service provides an important spiritual defense for the Jewish state. Community leaders are extremely fearful that young men will be unable to practice or outright abandon a haredi lifestyle as a result of army service with secular and modern Orthodox Jews.
In some parts of the country, families continue to bury their dead from the battlefield, while in others Haredi protestors block roads and tussle with police to avoid the draft. The preferred political solution of kicking the can down the road on this deeply divisive issue – which has lingered in legislative limbo for decades – might finally come to an end with the Oct. 27 elections.
Which Israelis are currently drafted to the army, and what are their conditions of service?
Most Jewish Israeli men and women are subject to compulsory service at age 18. Men currently serve 32 months, and women generally serve 24, although some roles require longer service. Conscripts are generally allowed to defer service for a year or two in order to attend pre-military programs. Exemptions for service may apply for medical, religious, family or other legally recognized reasons. Druze and Circassian men are generally drafted, while Israeli Arabs are generally not. Conscripts who ignore draft orders are subject to sanctions that can ultimately lead to imprisonment.
Upon completion of compulsory service, most soldiers are placed in reserve units, and are called up periodically for training and for active duty in wartime. Reserve duty is generally mandatory until age 40 for non-officers and 45 for officers. Enforcement of a call up order for reserve duty is traditionally less severe than enforcement of compulsory service; sanctions against reservists who avoid call ups are rare.
Following the outbreak of war on Oct. 7, hundreds of thousands of reservists were called up for extended periods. Between the outbreak of war and the end of 2025, some 28% of male reservists and 20% of female reservists served for over 150 days. Current IDF policy allows for up to 55 days of reserve duty per year for combat soldiers, compared to a cap of 54 days over three years (18 days per year on average) prior to the war.
Are Haredim legally exempt from IDF service?
No. Historically, a small number of full-time haredi yeshiva students were allowed to defer service until they aged out of eligibility, amounting to a de-facto exemption. As the share of Haredim in the population grew, so did legal challenges to their exemption, on grounds of inequality. Since June 2023, there are no longer any legal exemptions in place for haredim, and all haredi men face the same legal requirement to enlist as non-haredim.
What is the mainstream haredi approach to IDF service?
Haredim generally oppose IDF service, although recently some small groups of modernizing haredim appear more open to it. Haredi officials and spiritual leaders argue the Torah study that young men carry out in place of military service provides an important spiritual defense for the Jewish state. At the same time, haredi community leaders view the IDF as a bastion of secularism and are fearful that haredi men will not be able to maintain their lifestyle during service.
Historically, how did the draft exemption for Haredi men begin?
In 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion agreed to exempt about 400 yeshiva students so Torah scholarship could be rebuilt after the Holocaust. The arrangement expanded gradually, as the military and political leadership tolerated the arrangement for practical and coalition-building reasons. In 1977, Menachem Begin’s government removed important limits on the haredi exemption. As a result, the number of draft-age Haredi men outside the army grew from roughly 7,000 in the late 1970s to tens of thousands by the 2020s.
When did opposition to the exemption first arise?
Opposition grew sharply in the 1980s and 1990s as the haredi IDF exemption grew significantly. Legal challenges to the exemption were initially rebuffed by the court, but were eventually successful, as the Supreme Court in 1998 first deemed the exemption illegal, and ruled that such an exemption needed to be anchored in legislation that met constitutional standards of equality.
Following the 1998 ruling, how did ensuing coalitions deal with this issue?
The two decades following the 1998 ruling saw various legislative and policy proposals aimed at increasing haredi enlistment. Two laws passed, in 2002 and 2014, but both were eventually struck down by the court on grounds of inequality, as they still enabled widespread haredi exemptions. The second law was struck down in 2017, but the court approved numerous extension requests by the government for the provisions of the law to continue to apply until it could come up with a new law. This left the de-facto exemption in place until the law finally expired in June 2023.
Why did coalitions keep trying to exempt significant numbers of haredim instead of drafting them?
First, haredi parties wield significant political power. In recent decades they have usually occupied 15-20 seats in the 120-member Israeli Knesset, and since 2009 have been part of Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc, save for two years (2013-2015). Governments have been wary of enlisting haredim en masse so as not to lose the support of haredi politicians.
Second, the IDF has not always been keen on drafting haredim. Haredim require special accommodations in terms of Kashrut and mixed-gender military bases. Haredim also go through an autonomous education system and special efforts are required to instill in them the motivation and sense of duty that are prevalent in general Israeli society.
So have any haredim served in the IDF in recent decades?
Yes, some specific programs have opened up for haredim, mainly in technology-oriented units. The numbers of annual haredi draftees has fluctuated, but in the years leading up to the expiration of the draft law the average was slightly over 1,000.
What changed in the IDF’s perspective and the perspective of the general public after Oct. 7?
The mass call-up of reservists for extended periods of time brought many Israelis to experience the inequality between them and the haredi public first hand. In addition, the expansion of the war to numerous fronts and new security requirements led to a manpower shortage in the IDF, especially of combat soldiers. Officials have described the shortfall as a national-security issue, and the roughly 100,000 Haredi men aged 18 to 29 are viewed as the only large available pool of potential combat recruits. Researchers have also pointed out that without a new policy the inequality in Israeli society will continue to grow – by 2050 over 40% of the 18-year-old potential male Jewish recruits will be haredi.
What was the outgoing Netanyahu government’s policy after Oct. 7?
The government did not implement significant policy changes to begin drafting haredim in significant numbers, and refrained from instituting sanctions that could have increased the price of draft evasion. The government’s inaction was challenged in court, and the Supreme Court ruled in June 2024 that barring a new law, the continued exemption was illegal. However, the government has continued to push back on attempts by the Attorney General, who leads Israel’s law enforcement apparatus, to abide by the ruling and begin taking measures to increase haredi draft numbers. The government argued in its defense that it was working on a new law which required time.
Did the government pass a new law?
No. The Netanyahu government attempted to pass a new law that would have incrementally increased haredi draft numbers while enabling the majority of haredim to remain exempt. The attempts failed due to push back from legal authorities, the political opposition, the general public, and a number of politicians from within the coalition. Instead, in July 2026, in the final weeks of parliamentary activity prior to the election recess, the Netanyahu-led coalition passed a law to freeze enforcement against haredi draft evaders until after the election. On September 3rd, the Supreme Court struck down this law as well.
So haredi draft numbers have remained at pre-war levels?
No. In order to abide by the 2024 Supreme Court ruling and the Attorney General’s interpretation of that ruling, government officials working within the different ministries removed certain subsidies and privileges from draft evaders, and the police and IDF gradually increased their enforcement efforts. The number of haredi draftees rose as a result. Between July 2025 and the end of June 2026, some 4,298 haredim enlisted, as opposed to 2,811 haredim in the parallel period in 2024-25.
How have haredi rabbis, politicians and the general public responded to growing demands that they enlist?
Leading rabbis affiliated with the three main haredi parties – the non Hasidic Degel Hatorah party, the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael party and the Sephardic Shas party – forcefully opposed IDF service, with some explicitly calling on young haredi men to ignore draft orders should they receive them. Politicians from the three parties also voiced strong opposition to a large increase in haredi draftees, and were willing only to consider minor increases.
A large majority of haredim who received draft orders ignored them, and approximately 90,000 haredi men are legally considered draft evaders, with levels of severity increasing the longer they ignore the orders. Some arrests of draft evaders were met by mass protests and disturbances, including in recent weeks. Some more modernized haredim have increasingly expressed a willingness to serve. These views are represented in two new haredi parties participating in the current election, called Hakahal (roughly translated as “the community”) and Hatzibur Haharedi (“the haredi public”).
Is the haredi draft issue prominent in the election campaigns?
Yes. In a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, a proposition that the next government should draft haredim equally received the most support among a series of propositions. Nearly all of the Zionist opposition parties have made their intention to increase the haredi draft a prominent part of their campaigns. Some opposition party leaders have attempted to frame the election as a choice between the “draft evasion bloc” and the “bloc that serves.” On the other hand, some haredi rabbis and party leaders have expressed their disappointment with Netanyahu’s failure to manufacture a new exemption, and have stated that they no longer view themselves as part of the Netanyahu bloc. However, they have not stated support for any other candidate and are likely to side with Netanyahu again if he is able to form a new government.
What are the most likely scenarios after the next government is formed?
Three outcomes are plausible:
- A compromise: full-time Torah scholars receive a narrow exemption, while others perform military or civilian service under threat of sanctions.
- Continued stalemate: the government delays enforcement, leading to further court battles and coalition crises.
- Broad enforcement: a government less dependent on haredi parties implements substantially wider enlistment.
The first scenario is probably the most politically workable, but the details will determine whether the courts accept it.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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