While Trump’s second term has been an overwhelming barrage of shocking events echoed in a staccato tone of news stories, this past Saturday became a flashpoint when Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was snatched by federal agents under vague accusations of supporting terrorism, a claim that stems from Khalil joining millions of students and community members in demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine. Every effort has been used to undercut the movement to end Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, but underpinning each tactic, from expelling students to sending in police to violently clear protest encampments, is the same central assertion: that these demonstrations are harmful to Jews and directly supporting Hamas. 

Weaponized accusations of antisemitism have been leveled to suppress support for Palestine for years, but since October 7th, it has become a unified rallying cry for those who believe any criticism of Israel is beyond the bounds of humane discourse. The far-right has long seen this as a perfect political opportunity: they can claim to care for Jews, who usually vote left, and simultaneously use accusations of antisemitism to attack their enemies, the organized protest movement of the left. This was codified most specifically in Project Esther, the portion of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 vision for what they could accomplish in a second Trump administration.

Their program is named after the Biblical Esther who, under threat of Jewish annihilation, turned the tables on her oppressor. These Republicans, most of whom are Christian Zionists rather than Jews, would show their pro-Jewish bona fides by lobbying for harsh sanctions on speech they deemed “anti-Israel,” most specifically deporting student protesters (Trump said on Truth Social that Khalil is the “first arrest of many to come”). This seemed like a far-right fantasy, but Trump promised to turn campuses into culture war zones, and the government has now made their advance with the capture of Khalil. The White House even tweeted “Shalom” to Khalil after the arrest, gloating about the suffering they have sparked and giving the action a particularly Jewish appearance. While it is certainly depraved that a primarily Christian far-right think tank would appropriate a Jewish figure for their political agenda, it’s not altogether different than the way others have, including the Israeli far-right.

This time last year, as war commenced and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians had been killed, many on the Israeli Right laid special attention on Purim, the celebratory Jewish holiday built on reading the Book of Esther—the same one that the GOP tries to embody in its alleged fight against the enemies of the Jewish people. 

The Book of Esther tells a bombastic farce where Persian King Ahasuerus orders his luscious queen Vashti to strut in front of his dignitaries during an extravagant party, and when she denies his demands, he fears her Jezebelian behavior will inspire women to disobey their husbands. He picks Esther to replace her and likewise chooses Haman to rule Szechuan, yet after Haman is offended by Esther’s relative Mordechai, Haman decides to dispose of the Jewish people entirely.

Mordhechai and Esther launch a scheme to flip that decree on its head. Mordechai reminds Ahaseurus how loyal he is, Esther reveals Haman’s plan, and Haman’s attempts to rectify the situation goes sideways. Eventually, the decree is shifted: it is not the Jews who will be killed, but instead it is us who are able to kill, first Haman and his brothers and then tens of thousands of Persians. From that moment forward, just as we fast on Yom Kippur, we celebrate with drink and merriment on Purim, the time Jewish life was spared and our enemies received just desserts.

This story was, for most of Jewish history, a boisterous comedy where evildoers are punished and the Jewish people are saved. When we celebrate Purim, which falls this year on March 13-14, we remember the events by cheering as we read from the Megillah (scroll) and wearing garish costumes to honor the absurdity of the entire affair. 

For most American Jews, the final cruelties in the Book of Esther, relegated to Chapter Nine, are not the focus. Instead, Purim is a time for kids to dress up, where we celebrate our perseverance, to take pleasure in one of the more amusing stories from the Bible (it can be laugh out loud funny), and to pat ourselves on the back: we are still here, no matter how many times they’ve tried to butcher us. But for the Israeli far-right, Megillah Esther is not just a tale about our survival, but the persecution that survival demands. Reading the text this year, after nearly a year and a half of Palestinian genocide and with Project Esther underway, simply feels different. 

Because pro-Israel politics are so often conflated with the work of organized Jewish life, there can be complicated feelings about Jewish tradition at a time of unimaginable suffering the land Torah called Eretz Yisrael. In journalist Peter Beinart’s 2025 book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, he asks questions that aim to get at the heart of this. The book is a logical progression of the same questions he has been asking for fifteen years, which have evolved alongside the changes in Israeli politics.

“[I’ve] always been troubled by the way people talk about the Book of Esther…there’s a connection there between not really reckoning with the ninth chapter of the book of Esther and not reckoning with what has happened in Gaza,” Beinart told me on the first day of Adar, the Hebrew month of which Purim is the prize jewel. We don’t just excuse the violence of the Purim story, Beinart points out, we abandon it almost entirely. In two of the most popular survey books on Jewish tradition, those given to students and converts, the genocide of the story’s conclusion is omitted completely, and commentaries on the Book of Esther tend to focus on almost anything other than the violence enacted by Jews: the feminist heroism of Esther, the fickleness of state power, God’s invisible ability to work through human hands, the strategies and tactics we need to establish safety. All of these are valuable lessons from the story, but without the ending, something is missing. 

“For most of our history, when Jews had little capacity to impose our will via the sword, the conclusion of the book of Esther was harmless and even understandable fantasy,” writes Beinart. “Who can blame a tormented people for dreaming up a world turned upside down. But the ending reads differently when Jews wield life and death power over millions of Palestinians who lack even a passport, let alone an army. Today, these blood-soaked verses should unsettle us.”

The way the Book of Esther is often discussed plays into why so many are unwilling to use the term genocide for the IDF’s campaign or to mention the Holocaust alongside other genocides: to be Jewish is to be a victim, never a perpetrator. Many of our stories were written not from just a point of vulnerability, but utter powerlessness, and when we read them in perpetuity without acknowledging the world has changed or that there is a powerful army claiming to speak for Jews, we assume that Chapter Nine can only exist in our imagination, never in the rubble of Gaza City. The world has already been turned upside down, we just haven’t acknowledged it. 

“I have mixed feelings about every Jewish text, as we all should,” says Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, whose work often places Torah in its historical context and wrestles with its complexity. “What transcends time about the story is that we don’t have cut and dry good guys and bad guys.” She points out that the destruction of Gaza is not the first reminder of the darkness that lies in Esther. In 1994, far-right Settler Baruch Goldstein entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, a site held sacred by both Jews and Muslims, and opened fire on Muslim worshippers with his IDF-issued rifle, massacring 29 before being engulfed and killed by the survivors. Goldstein is still revered by some on the Israeli far-right as a hero who engaged in Kiddush ha-Shem (sanctification of the name), acting as a kind of modern Mordechai against people he believed to be enemies of the Jews. As Beinart points out, there is a certain honesty in the appeal the Zionist right makes to Esther, that brutality is in the text; it is the rest of us who often refuse to grapple with its implications. Today, we hear Israeli politicians calling Palestinians ‘Amalek,’ the Biblical race G-d commanded the Israelites to snuff out from under heaven, the same one that Haman is said to represent. “Purim isn’t only about the danger gentiles pose to us. It’s also about the danger we pose to them,” he writes. 

Reading Esther in 2025 should compel us, by force of history, to read the entire story, and to wrestle (the name Israel means “wrestle,” as in the one who wrestles with G-d) with what it means. In their 2024 book on Jewish tradition, For Times Such as These, Rosenberg and Rabbi Ariana Katz write, “Alongside and deeply woven into the story of resistance and rebellion, it is essential to confront and be accountable for acts of violence by Jews that this story spawned and encouraged. Not only do Jews take up armed resistance, they enact revenge killings; the legacy of the violence in this ripples through our text tradition and history.” 

“I experience our lineage as profoundly radical and liberatory and magical,” Elana June Margolis told me as she prepared for the Purim Spiel she is writing to be performed on stage before a packed New York audience. This is her fourteenth year writing a Purim play, which takes a wildly vaudevillian, burlesque, and unapologetically queer retelling of Esther—one of the most inventive ways of making Jewish tradition relevant. This year she is doing it for the long-standing progressive Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), whose Purim Spiel was earth shattering for her years ago, at time when she was wrestling with the hold Zionism had on Jewish life and the ways in which her queerness didn’t seem to fit in many synagogues.

This year’s spiel is named Project Vashti, with Esther crossed out, a nod to the way Project Esther is mobilizing the name of our matriarch to level attacks on activists and Palestinians. 

“There’s so much liberatory potential [in the Purim story], and there’s a lot of really nasty, nasty images in there that deserve to be wrestled with,” Margolis says. Part of why we tell the story, she points out, is that this is the story we tell: it has been with us for millennia. It is part of how Jews have historically processed our experiences, our fears and dreams, and our obligation to ourselves and others. “I don’t know that I could say I know what the Purim story is about…I’m so deep in the story, what isn’t it about?” she says.

Purim Spiels are a long-standing theatrical tradition that picks up on the absurd comedy of Esther, and then pushes its ideas further by escaping into costumes, giving way to debauchery, and lowering the cost of entry: it’s a Jewish event, but anyone is welcome. Purim is known for drinking (and a few other great things as well), and Talmud teaches that we are “encouraged to get so drunk that they can no longer distinguish the hero of the tale…from the villain Haman.” In the end, we no longer have enemies, only friends. 

“On Purim, permission is given to reveal the hidden light at every moment,” writes hasidic rabbi R’ Kalyongmous Kalma Shapira. While the cheers and jeers may come from the violence of the book, the festival has expanded beyond its alleged root. We party because it’s good to party.

And yet, the brutality remains. This is why in 2024, when the genocide in Gaza was only six months old, Margolis’ Purim Spiel directly reckoned with the crimes of Chapter Nine, incorporating references to the present moment. In the Spiel, anti-Zionists from Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) wearing “Ceasefire Now” shirts declare we can’t abide the holiday with what’s happening in Gaza. “We have a responsibility to get present with the truth and turn the tables, both on the narrative in the Megillah and the way it is playing out in real time now, in Palestine,” they shout. 

But Margolis’s Purim Spiel doesn’t end with Purim’s erasure. It continues by doing what Jewish tradition does best: it reinvents itself. “The tools to transform our tradition are encoded within the tradition, an inheritance designed to heal itself [and] align us with liberation,” says one character later in the Spiel before calling the Megillah, the scroll that contains our story, to be brought before the crowd. Jews exist calendrically, but since Judaism is the process of interpretation and even imprinting, the stories that mark that calendar never remain the same. In the end, “we tell the stories we tell, until the stories start telling us,” says Margolis. This is why the question of what the Book of Esther is really “about” is so opaque, at once revolutionary and reactionary depending on the commentary.

“I’m glad that I didn’t grow up hearing [the violent ending] of the story because I’m glad I didn’t grow up thinking being Jewish means killing other people,” says Ami Weintraub, an author and rabbinical student whose 2024 book To the Ghosts Who Are Still Living grapples with the legacy of Jewish trauma. “I don’t think that’s a choice that is skirting the responsibility. It’s a choice of what we are going to revere in our community…and in this moment, it hits different…and there’s more wisdom for us now.” Rabbis have intentionally shifted our focus over time to emphasize the values they want to impart, to create traditions that highlight pieces of our inheritance that embellish our best selves This is why we celebrate Hanukkah with a hanukiah and the story about the oil that lasted longer than it should, rather than the story of militant fundamentalists executing their enemies and re-establishing the covenant of G-d’s law. But both stories are there, just as there are multiple threads found in Esther. 

“Acknowledging the suffering we have instilled in others makes us full humans,” says Weintraub. “Stepping into full humanity requires acknowledging the suffering you cause.” That acknowledgement has naturally made its way into our holidays already. As I hear the Megillah read, we will acknowledge the suffering, not just with cheers, but with sorrow. Some synagogues use despairing melodies, reminiscent of the bloody wine drops of anguish over the plagues used against Egypt in the Passover story. Others are leading difficult conversations, meeting with activists, taking the tactical lessons that Esther teaches: to stop state violence we need every strategy on the table. Some midrash says Purim is when the Jews finally accepted the Torah, but I think it’s also when we became people like any other, the multitudinous ability to hurt and be hurt.

Esther is written about Jewish vulnerability at a time when we didn’t have state power. And while much of the tradition of reading the megillah has been to place the oppression Jewish communities were facing in a spiritual context, we experience suffering and survival now as we did then; for the story to have meaningful continuity, we cannot be limited by how the story was once told. And if Esther is, ultimately, a story where all things are possible, we have to think about what the story means when the world where it is being read has already been turned upside down, one where we fight for our liberation, then turn it back as oppression on our enemies. 

“The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors,” wrote Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The desire to liberate and the desire to oppress are not always a different desire, or, as rabbi Menahum Nahum of Chernobyl said, the greatest salvation and healing comes from taking the “evil urge” and raising it to a holy purpose. More rage isn’t inherently pure, it has to be molded, channeled if it is ever to raise us beyond the confines of our current moral reality. Without this there is no hope for tikkun olam, the healing of the world. None of us are saved until all of us are. 

Without explicit discourse about the implications of moments such as Chapter Nine’s ending, we rob the text of its capacity to teach, to unpack the human experience, to illustrate the full dimension of what we are capable of. As Oren Kroll-Zeldin, a Jewish Studies professor and author of the 2024 book Unsettled, says, “I think that it is our responsibility to tell that part of the story and to think about it in connection with the past and how we make sense of the past in the present…Teach the bad parts.” 

Esther tells a story about how we become free, and then what we do with that freedom. As with similar parables, sometimes our liberation is bound up with the liberation of others, or, as with the Exodus story or the Book of Joshua, our freedom is derivative of others’ suffering. “Esther illuminated Israel like the light of dawn, while this light itself was like darkness for the nations of the world,” says Midrash Tehillim. Purim’s lightness weighs heavily, the two emotions inevitably bound together, like the grief of losing an old world and the joy of perhaps inheriting, or inventing, a new one. 

The Jewish tradition teaches that the mission of the Jewish people, perhaps of all people, is to piece together the brokenness of the universe, embodied in things as large as the galaxies and as significant as a human life. This future, as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner wrote, begins “when we treat another human being as a human being,” allowing the “captive sparks” of holiness to be released and “the cosmos is healed.” Honesty about the stories we tell, the implications they have for life and history, is not just about treating those who have suffered as human, it’s about finally seeing ourselves as human as well.

“‘They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat’ isn’t the story of our holidays,” writes Beinart. “It’s a choice about what to see, and what not to see, in Judaism, and in ourselves.” 

If closing our eyes to the full story has ensured a profound sameness, where healing has been supplanted by rituals of warfare and revenge, then perhaps it’s time to ensure nahafokh hu. Something else is possible.