While the acclaimed novelist Ruby Namdar lives in the U.S., and has set some of his fiction there, he has remained loyal to his native Hebrew. The reason why is in part a religious one, as he explains:

The word faith often makes me cringe, especially when it is uttered or written in English. It feels too concrete, too categoric, to describe the subtle, ethereal relationship between the individual (and especially the artistic) mind and the sublime, or the Divine. The Hebrew emunah, with its lexical flutter toward the word aman (artist), finds itself more palatable on my tongue. The assonance between faith and art in my native language offers a reflection of the great presence the two have shared in my life and writing.

My early encounters with the siddur and the mahzor were . . . formative for me. The language—ancient, regal, glowing with beauty and authority—won me over completely. For a young boy who was hypersensitive to the nuances of language, this exposure was life-changing. To this day, in my writing, I find myself drawn to both the modern and ancient layers of the Hebrew—and these layers are heavily hued in religious colors.

As in my childhood, I still savor the friction between the modern vocabulary and syntax and its ancient ancestors, the biblical and rabbinic languages, and bring that friction to my work. I also still enjoy the religious—and I mean religious, not “spiritual,” or “transcendental,” or any other laundered, noncommittal term used by people to bypass the fence of organized religion, its symbolic universe, and its demands from the individual—tension and the creative conflict it creates between the text and the often secularized consciousness of the reader. (You might say those who prefer the more sanitized terms risk confusing the fence and the garden, and they should be so lucky to take the risk.)

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.