American Jewry produced many great literary figures in the 20th century, but only one, notes Meir Soloveichik, remained a devoutly observant Jew for his entire life except for a brief interval in his youth. This was Herman Wouk, who died last month at the age of one-hundred-three. In addition to numerous novels, Wouk also wrote a bold—and best-selling—apologia for Orthodox Judaism, This Is My God. Reflecting on what Wouk himself termed the “mystery” of the Jewish people, Soloveichik writes:

To journalists and literati, [Wouk’s piety] was a paradox. Wouk, Time magazine argued, “seems like an enigmatic character in search of an author. He is a devout Orthodox Jew who has achieved worldly success in worldly-wise Manhattan while adhering to the dietary prohibitions and traditional rituals which many of his fellow Jews find embarrassing.” But it is not a paradox at all. A novelist like Wouk knew a great story when he saw one, and he was surely struck by the fact that those very same American Jews who avidly read his novels seemed to ignore the most interesting plot of all.

Wouk’s own countercultural observance . . . heralded the resurgence of Orthodoxy in America, one that few in the 1950s would have predicted. But Wouk also offers an example of what American Orthodoxy so sorely needs today: those with the ambition and ability to defend, passionately and eloquently, Judaism’s vision to the world. Should they emerge, they may find an audience far surpassing Wouk’s, hungering for truth in an age of rank relativism and cultural decay, waiting for a gifted writer to fulfill once again words uttered by Moses millennia ago: “This is my God and I will beautify Him; the God of my father that I shall glorify.”

For decades, Wouk seemed superhuman, living to be over one-hundred years of age and writing lucidly late into his nineties. In this he appeared to embody the immortality of the people that he so exquisitely described. . . . Now his own remarkable story has come to an end. . . . But it hasn’t, not really.

Individually, every man is mortal; Herman Wouk was a man, and even he would ultimately die. But precisely because of his faith, a faith that seemed paradoxical but which actually made so much sense, Wouk will achieve an immortality unlike any other Jewish cultural figure of his time. He will live, first and foremost, not in his movies, or novels, but in the extraordinary endurance of Orthodoxy in America, and through the eternal people who cling stubbornly, with love, to Herman Wouk’s God.

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.