While Britain had barred the gates of Palestine to Jewish immigration, and the U.S. did the same regarding its own shores, an American Gentile journalist named Varian Fry undertook a vast, private operation to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Most of his beneficiaries were German Jewish artists and intellectuals who had fled to France after Hitler’s rise to power, and found themselves again in danger after the French capitulation to the Nazis in 1940. Anya Schiffrin—whose grandfather, the Russian-born Jewish publisher Jacques Schiffrin owed his life to Fry—writes:

During the year he spent in Marseille, from 1940 to 1941, [Fry] and his colleagues created a rescue network that saved at least 2,000 people from the Nazis—including Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Arthur Koestler, [the director] Max Ophüls, [the writer] Anna Seghers, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and scores of other writers, artists, and philosophers. Fry was tenacious and creative, finding a forger and bribing border guards.

Fry and his allies spent their days trying to get people visas and onto boats in a desperate rush against time. Because of his extra-legal methods, Fry was shunned by the U.S. consul in Marseille. But the refugee rescue organization that Fry and his helpers built has been credited with saving from annihilation a crucial piece of European culture
.
While visiting Berlin in 1935, Fry saw a group of storm troopers and civilians attacking any passing Jew on the Kurfürstendamm. Fry went home and wrote a piece for the New York Times warning of what was to come. . . . Later, in 1942, Fry wrote a cover story for the New Republic titled “The Massacre of the Jews.” Fry didn’t just sound the alarm but, along with Reinhold Niebuhr and others, cofounded the Emergency Rescue Committee (which later became the International Rescue Committee).

[O]n August 29, 1941, the Vichy authorities—under prodding from U.S. officials—arrested Fry and ordered him to leave. Even after his deportation, Fry’s network continued to help refugees escape until 1942, when the Germans took effective control of Vichy France.

Fry’s exploits give lie to the long-refuted, but oft repeated claims that little was known in America or Britain about the plight of European Jewry, and that little could be done. It is likewise typical of U.S. officialdom at the time that, even as the U.S. military was engaged in crushing Germany, it looked with hostility upon Fry’s efforts to thwart Hitler’s plans.

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.