Even before the creation of Israel, significant elements of the international left opposed Zionism, embraced anti-Semitism, and defended the murder of Jews. A new book, Anti-Semitism and the Far Left, chronicles this history from the 1920s to the present. As Tony Michels writes in his review, Israel’s victory in the June 1967 war inaugurated an era of especially virulent rhetoric:

In the summer of 1967, American leftists began speaking about Israel in new, jarring ways. The Jewish state had just won a quick but transformative war with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, resulting in the capture of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. A good many leftists sided with Israel, but a growing number reacted against it with levels of vituperation more characteristic of the ultra-right than the traditional socialist left. From 1967 forward, one could hear angry, often outlandish, public pronouncements with growing frequency.

An article in the Students for a Democratic Society’s newsletter counseled Holocaust survivors and their children to leave Israel for “historically more appropriate place[s]” such as “the vicinities of Stuttgart, Liverpool, and Kiev.” The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s newsletter accused Israel of indiscriminately slaughtering Arabs and connected this to a long history of Jewish rapaciousness. “[F]amous European Jews,” the newsletter stated, had “long controlled the wealth of many European nations.” The Socialist Workers party dismissed objections to this calumny as “chauvinist hysteria.” The Maoist Progressive Labor party labeled Israel a “Nazi state” while the Weather Underground claimed Nazi propaganda owed a debt to “Zionist writings.”

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.