Translator, Novelist, Zionist, Detective

The author of dozens of translations of Hebrew and Yiddish literature into English, one novel, eight works of nonfiction, and numerous essay and columns, Hillel Halkin has behind him a distinguished career. Adam Rubenstein recounts a recent visit with Halkin at his home in the Israeli town of Zichron Ya’akov and reflects on that career:

In a review of one of his books, . . . Halkin was called “one of the great snoops of the age.” In English, the word carries a negative connotation: a snoop is one who sticks his nose in others’ affairs, who pries. In Hebrew, the noun can be rendered as balash, a word that suggests a gumshoe, a detective. That somewhat more dignified Hebrew concept applies to Halkin. He has the snoop’s attitude and gimlet eye, a critic sizing up everything and everyone before him, including his readers. . . .

As [Halkin and I] sat for a few hours in [a local] café, several patrons approached our table and introduced themselves to him. . . . The fact that Halkin is still greeted in public and thanked by strangers surely has something to do with his first book. A few years after he and [his wife] Marcia moved to Israel he began work on Letters to an American Jewish FriendA Zionist’s Polemic (1977). The book is written as if it were Halkin’s side of an exchange of letters over several months with a fictitious American friend, a composite of some of Halkin’s real friends. It is a deep yet lively exploration of Jewish continuity. The classical Zionists, Halkin writes, believed that Jews were “hopelessly trapped between the Scylla of assimilation and the Charybdis of anti-Semitism.” The existence of Israel offers another option.

Halkin draws on history, philosophy, sociopolitical commentary, and descriptions of his young family’s life in the young country to make the case that for a Jew, Israel is the most logical place to live. “I have tried to reason with you,” he writes his pen pal in the book’s concluding letter, “to implant in you no more than a feeling of unease for being where you are, or if you prefer, since I don’t mind speaking bluntly, of guilt.” And even if the reader does not leave America to make aliyah—that is, does not move to Israel—“I should hope that these letters will have helped you to think more clearly about the alternatives before us.”

The best dialogic literature forces a confrontation with one’s basic assumptions; it riles the reader. But what makes Halkin’s case so compelling is that he and his wife had themselves recently made the move to Israel—that is, he is a case study in the security of his own argument. Letters combines the thumotic and the erotic—the spirited, preservatory case for aliyah with a yearning for completeness.

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Aliyah, Arts & Culture, Hillel Halkin, Letters to an American Jewish Friend, Zionism

The Purim Libel Returns, This Time from the Pens of Jews

March 14 2025

In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.

Read more at JNS

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Book of Esther, Nazi Germany, Purim