The story of Purim opens with a 180-day party capped off by a seven-day mega-party. It ends with the instruction that the holiday should be celebrated by Jews “as days of feasting and merrymaking,” which should be taken as “an obligation.” And so, on Wednesday night I set off into the night with the goal…
The Forward recently ran an article by Elon Gilad that argues that dressing up for Purim is a relatively new tradition, dating back to a particular banquet in Vienna in 1900. The article is interesting, but it has one of the worst headlines I’ve seen in recent memory: Wearing Costumes On Purim Is Not A…
Jewish White House staffers made time Wednesday evening to gather in the building to celebrate the holiday of Purim by reading the Megillah, the Book of Esther. The reading, led by Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, included the traditional noise-making groggers that participants sounded off every time the reader said the name of the evil…
Purim is the Jewish holiday on which we are commanded to drink. And I’m not just talking about a Kiddush cup full of Manischewitz. No, on Purim we are supposed to get shickered, that it is to say, drunk. How drunk? What’s the point? Where does this all come from anyway? This seems a bit…
Donald Trump is a modern American man, one of the most powerful people in the world, thrice married and not known for his meekness. The heroine of the Purim story, Esther, was an orphaned Jewess from ancient Persia plucked out of obscurity to be queen, remembered for her courage to speak truth to power. Hardly…
The moment that the Purim ads start appearing in the religious magazines, I begin to hyperventilate: How to design the perfect cellophane-wrapped gift packages of treats, the traditional mishloach manot we deliver to one another on the morning of the holiday? How many — who makes the cut for that all-important list? And what about…
When I opened the carefully packaged bottle of Tubi 60 with my colleagues, we were all a bit skeptical, to say the least. It was cloudy, yellow — and it smelled like trees. Upon first sip, an (of-age) intern compared the taste to “being dragged through a wind turbine…in a good way.” “It’s a powerful…
Purim is here, and nobody’s getting left behind. The residents of Ichilov Hospital’s children’s ward (in Tel Aviv) were surprised when volunteers dressed as Superman, Batman and Spiderman began scaling the walls of the building using cables attached to the roof, in an effort to reach its inhabitants, on a mission to deliver them mishloach…
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