In the Ashkenazi world, Jews had rich traditions of the Purim play, or shpil. Its proper form, writes Miriam Udel, involved “retelling the story of the megillah — often with outrageously funny distortions—in rhyming verse (gramen).” While most of these were works of folk art, they were also written by outstanding literary figures, including the great Yiddish modernist poet Itsik Manger. Udel writes:

One of the most poignant examples, Alef Kats’s Purim shpil, was published alongside another play (Gut morgn, alef, or “Good Morning, Aleph”) that had first appeared in 1946 and been staged in Displaced Persons camps in Germany. His Purim script hews closely to tradition, with each of seven scenes (today we might call them acts) focusing on a different character or event in the biblical story.

But Kats frames his rhymes with a prologue and an epilogue set at a postwar Purim feast, where the family’s connection to the deep Jewish past is underscored by the names of the grandchildren present: Esterke and Motele, diminutives for Esther and Mordecai.

The zeyde, or grandfather, voices the epilogue, which is a kind of pep talk for the youngest generation. “We were all in the lion’s mouth,” he declares, urging the children to see a modern miracle in the survival of a remnant of European Jewry. “After the wound of the six million,” . . . the zeyde calls for his descendants to live proudly as Jews, nourishing themselves with traditions like the Purim shpil.

Udel translates some excerpts of the poem, in which—to give you a flavor—Ahasuerus’ advisers say, “Our heads are full to the brim with our thinking/ Just as the King runneth over with drinking.”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.