Queen Esther’s swoon

A new perspective on a controversial posture in the Purim holiday’s central story.

Preparing to read the central text of the Purim holiday (the megillah, or book of Esther) last night, I stumbled across something that had evaded me the many hundreds of times I had read the book previously. The story, whose central protagonists and villains are Esther, Mordechai, Ahasuerus, and Haman, is intensely dramatic, which lends itself well to …