In a recent campaign speech, the Texas senatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke attacked a Texas law that permits private adoption agencies to refuse to place children with homosexual couples. His comments, writes David Closson, highlight the important need for such legal protections:

O’Rourke’s claim was based on a 2017 state law under which faith-based adoption agencies may decline to place children with same-sex couples because of sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage and human sexuality. Significantly, the Texas law does not prevent anyone from adopting, and even mandates that if an agency cannot work with a same-sex couple, it must direct the couple to another agency that will work with them. . . .

O’Rourke’s campaign rhetoric is just the latest in a series of attacks on the religious liberty of faith-based adoption providers. Dana Nessel, the Democratic candidate running for attorney general in Michigan, recently expressed similar hostility toward the beliefs of faith-based adoption providers. When asked about the 2015 Michigan law that protects the religious liberty of faith-based adoption agencies, Nessel admitted that if she’s elected she will disregard it because she “could not justify using the state’s money defending a law whose only purpose is discriminatory animus.” . . .

Meanwhile, the ACLU is suing the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services over the 2015 law, and a Clinton-appointed federal judge ruled on September 14 that the lesbian couples represented by the ACLU could proceed. . . .

But in the face of continued challenges to the ability of faith-based adoption providers to run their ministries without fear of reprisal, federal legislation . . . is needed.

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.