On May 25, the Biden administration issued a 60-page document outlining its plans for protecting U.S. Jews from bigotry. Alex Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky find some of its particulars salutary, but argue that it is overall ineffective, or worse:

[M]ost of the recommendations are simply the government telling itself to mention anti-Semitism in the course of routine training and other activities. . . . Looking beyond the budget increase for the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, many of the strategy’s directives are unserious. Directing the Department of Agriculture to “provide educational opportunities for 4-H, Future Farmers of America, and other rural youth organizations to learn how to identify and counter anti-Semitism and related forms of discrimination,” or the Interior Department to train “National Park Services employees, such as rangers and guides, to identify and counter anti-Semitism and other forms of hate,” do not even attempt to address the core problems.

Indeed, most recommendations are not specific to anti-Semitism but are directed rather against “all forms of hate,” including “anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bias, anti-Sikh bias, and related forms of bias and discrimination.” . . . Islamophobia is mentioned numerous times, but no reference is made to Israel boycotts, much less to Islamist . . . violence against Jews.

Worse still, the strategy mentions, but carefully avoids endorsing, the important and widely accepted guidelines for identifying anti-Semitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)—which is probably what won the strategy praise from such groups as Palestine Legal (aligned with the boycott-Israel movement) and the Hamas-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Therein, write Joffe and Romirowsky, lies the real problem:

Organizations such as states and universities that have put the [IHRA] definition at the center of their efforts to protect Jewish students will now see that move challenged on the basis of the federal strategy’s deliberate vagueness. The Biden administration has, in other words, harmed others’ attempts to fight anti-Semitism as well.

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.