Rejecting Project Esther

JVP Rabbinical Council Praises new “Rejecting Project Esther” report

The JVP Rabbinic Council is proud to identify as part of the Palestinian Solidarity movement. We welcome and support the Academic Council’s in-depth scholarly response to the malevolent designs of Project Esther, “Rejecting Project Esther: Understanding Christian and White Nationalism as Racism and Antisemitism.”

Our Torah teaches us that safety and security are found in the collective protection of those most vulnerable. The genocide in Gaza; violent attacks and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank; and repression of Palestinians’ rights within the 1948 borders of the State of Israel, policing even their right to read about their own history, are all egregious violations of our deepest moral values. These heinous actions do not, and will never, protect Jews as Project Esther disingenuously claims. Our own government’s proposed move toward full liquidation and occupation of Gaza is but a preview of the violent ends of these plans. Any claim that violence against Palestinians is necessary to protect Jews is itself antisemitic, hijacking us in opposition to our own core commitments to the work of pursuing justice. There is no possible justification for the violence Israel has, and continues to, inflict on Palestine.

We do not and will not accept the claim that the right-wing Christian Heritage Project represents us. As Jews, we advocate for ourselves.

No religion, including Judaism, speaks in a single voice. We reject the false conflation of anti-Zionism, or the Palestinian national struggle, and antisemitism; we condemn those who question the Jewishness of anti-Zionist Jews like ourselves. Jewish anti-Zionism, as our colleagues point out, has been a political stance rooted in Jewish humanistic and rabbinic traditions since well before the establishment of the State of Israel.

The story of Esther, a diasporic Jewish woman who rose to a seat of great power in historic Persia, is our inheritance. It is our right to join the unbroken chain of thousands of years of Jewish interpretations of this story, in line with our rabbinic ancestors.

We resonate with the academic council’s vision of Esther as a wise political and spiritual leader who skillfully navigated gendered and sexualized institutions. Her bravery enabled the survival of the Jewish people against powerful men who sought our destruction. We see echoes of those oppressors, Haman and his ilk, in the Christian Zionist authors of Project Esther. 

As our colleagues suggest, we cast our lot with Queen Esther, a woman who lived among other peoples, not apart from them. Antisemitism is not a separate “international conspiracy” but one bigotry among many within white supremacy, all of which we must fight together across lines of difference.

Like Esther, we are not afraid.