Leap of Faith: Esther

Esther would be horrified reading the recent comments from Kanye West. But surely she wouldn’t be surprised. Esther – she of the harem, the humble origins and the wildly positive way she found to exist in the diaspora – understood the fragility of difference and how it can be distorted. She lived it.

Esther would be grateful, I’m certain, for Jonathan Freedland’s play Jews in Their Own Words if it had been produced and offered in her Shushan palace, rather than in today’s Royal Court theatre.

But right now, she is horrified and not a little terrified by West’s tweets and the hate he’s unleashed. The singer’s social media following was/is tens of millions, so when he says something it matters because a lot of people hear it. The current Jewish population of the world is 15 million, which is half of West’s following on Twitter alone.

What West said has had far-reaching effects, as we might have anticipated. There were signs above a highway in Jacksonville Florida reading “honk if you know he’s right about the Jews” and “end Jewish supremacy over America”. At a football game in Jacksonsville, Florida, a ticker tape showed “Kanye is right…” calling up memories of the Nuremberg laws in public places.

Antisemitism is the oldest hate and yet wherever it is expressed it only heralds more hate for more people. The trope of Jews controlling the world with power and wealth is so tired that it would be risible if it wasn’t so frightening. And it was no doubt familiar for our Queen Esther.

She rather liked the joke used for Purim, Chanukah and beyond – they tried to kill us, they failed, now let’s eat – but she, as we do today, saw something more mercurial at play, more dangerous, more nuanced. Esther managed public help from the King and used the influence she had to save her people. Who wouldn’t do that?

We are so often caught between a rock and a hard place. Do we allow such abuse and leave it ‘out there’ or stand up and demand protection and action, at the risk of being called out for wielding control. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York, was invited onto CBS to discuss antisemitic quotes. Writer Yair Rosenberg’s explanation of Kanye’s recent tweets illustrates how the conspiracy theory is self-affirming – the antisemite will insist that Jews control and silence those who speak out against them. Then, if they are punished for their bigotry, they point to the penalty as proof.

Esther would recognise these as worrying times.