Founded in 2019, the Quincy Institute is a Washington-based foreign-policy think tank that brings together scholars, activists, and former officials of both left and right, most of whom have little in common but a belief that the U.S. should be more accommodating of murderous dictators. Among the crimes its fellows and affiliates have attempted to deny or to whitewash are Bashar al-Assad’s gassing of his own subjects, China’s brutal campaign against the Uighurs, and even the Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic’s mass-murder of Muslims. The institute also has its share of committed Israel-haters, such as Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, the professors who believe a malicious “Israel lobby” pulls the strings of U.S. foreign policy; Lawrence Wilkerson, the former adviser to Colin Powell and Bernie Sanders who has exhibited a “dangerous obsession with American policymakers who happened to be Jewish”; and Trita Parsi, a professional apologist for the Islamic Republic of Iran, who frequently blames the Jewish state for the Middle East’s problems.

In an investigation into Quincy, Armin Rosen reveals that Parsi is at the center of things:

The institute’s titular director and president is Andrew Bacevich, [but its] IRS document identifies Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council until 2018, as another one of Quincy’s co-founders and as its executive vice-president. The tax-exemption application lists Parsi’s estimated compensation at $275,000 a year, compared with $50,000 for Bacevich—a fair indication of who is actually running Washington’s weirdest and most intriguing foreign-policy shop.

“The guy is basically an ideologue, and he is pushing a very focused agenda, but the agenda has to do with representing a perspective of a certain wing of the Iranian government,” Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, said . . . of Parsi. “Why anyone would make him the executive vice-president of a supposedly American foreign-policy association doesn’t make any sense. It is to announce that you are compromised from the outset, that you are basically nonserious, and that you don’t understand the implications of what you are doing.”

In . . . 1997, Parsi wrote a kind of open letter to Kenneth Timmerman, a former journalist and founder of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran: “Your organization is nothing else but a façade, a façade to make it seem as if Iranians support the U.S. and Israel’s stance towards the IRI [Islamic Republic of Iran]. By your name, I suspect that you are a Jew.”

And while Stephen Wertheim, the director of Quincy’s Grand Strategy Program, has become a frequent presence on the New York Times opinion page, it’s worth wondering how many well-placed essays it takes to bury something like Sarah Leah Whitson, then Quincy’s director for research and policy, tweeting that the Israeli experience of living under coronavirus lockdowns was “missing a tablespoon of blood.”

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.