For the Anti-Zionist, Jewish Peoplehood Is Itself an Offense

Dec. 20 2019

Since biblical times, Jews have conceived of themselves as a people or nation as much as a religion—a fact about Judaism, writes William Kolbrener, that supporters of the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS) stubbornly refuse to accept. He argues that this deliberate misinterpretation of Judaism as a religion only in the Christian sense of the term is inextricably linked to a form of anti-Semitism:

For [these anti-Zionists], religion revolves around faith, as it does for Christians, but not the distinctly Jewish conception of nationhood—so that they see the state of Israel not as a genuine expression of Judaism but as a cynical colonialist grab for power.

The refusal of Jewish exceptionalism has a long history. BDS-supporting progressives, wearing the multicultured garment of intersectionality, are not unlike [many] Christians before the founding of state of Israel: both seek to deny Jewish difference. The idea that “there is neither Jew nor Greek,” asserted by the apostle Paul, informs contemporary progressive versions of community. Such progressives may bristle at hearing [their beliefs] described as akin to Christian universalism, but in their urge to deny Jewish difference they show many affinities to older forms of anti-Semitism. Just as they did in relationship to Christianity, today Jews give the lie to universalist claims. Then, as now, the Jew is made the excluded outsider, the one difference excluded from the universalism of difference.

Today, the most obvious expression of Jewish exceptionalism is the state of Israel, and thus the target of antiSemitic attack. For those progressives who reject Judaism as defined through peoplehood and practices, mere Judaism as faith does not justify Jewish nationhood; in fact it’s an affront to their sensibility, a betrayal of what real faith should be. But Judaism . . . imagines itself—in its ideal form—as a way of life and aspires to found that encompassing life in relationship to Jewish community in the Land of Israel.

Read more at Fathom

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, BDS, Judaism, Paul of Tarsus

The Purim Libel Returns, This Time from the Pens of Jews

March 14 2025

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.

Read more at JNS

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Book of Esther, Nazi Germany, Purim