The Secret to Israeli Happiness

“Why,” ask Dan Senor and Saul Singer in their book The Genius of Israel, “are Israelis so damn happy?” Although the book comes during a period of intense sorrow and worry for the citizens of the Jewish state, studies of global happiness have, year after year, ranked it as one of the world’s happiest countries. In his review, Meir Soloveichik looks at their answer:

In contrast to the atomistic sense of identity cultivated in much of the Western world, and the epidemic of loneliness now affecting so much of America, Israel has succeeded in creating a culture in which individuality is celebrated but is always placed within the context of family, community, and country.

How does it do this? The answer begins with family. The authors emphasize the way in which Israeli society cherishes children, a fact reflected in a birthrate far beyond replacement, even among the secular members of Israeli society. This, in turn, [shapes] the culture of the workplace, as employers are incredibly understanding of the parental responsibility of their employees. . . . Within this familial culture, Jews in Israel are constantly reminded that they are part of a people, and a history. In rituals like the Passover seder, where the story of Exodus is annually retold, Judaism has created what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has called “a nation of storytellers.”

Israelis continue to create families; weddings that had been meant to take place in halls and hotels have been moved to homes and even army bases, with at times both bride and groom wearing the IDF green under the wedding canopy. In one notable story, a soldier returned from the front for one evening to wed the love of his life, and his neighbor offered him a large backyard in which to hold the ceremony. As the groom’s mother prepared for the wedding, her hairdresser asserted that he would ensure Ishay Ribo, one of the most famous singers in Israel, would perform. Ribo did indeed come, singing the song of the Passover seder: “In every generation they rise up to destroy us, and God saves us from their hands.”

Read more at Washington Free Beacon

More about: Family, Gaza War 2023, Happiness, Israeli society

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