Haman

Many of the figures seated around the Seder table pictured in Szyk’s Haggada were portraits of real people at a Seder he attended in Poland not long before World War II, in the house of Rabbi Eliezer Gershon Friedenson

Painting Propaganda

Artist, illuminator and Zionist propagandist Arthur Szyk was as famous for his anti-Nazi caricatures as for his storybook illustrations,...

Haman’s Pockets

How did a classic Central European pastry become associated with the Jewish festival of Purim? And how did Haman's ears...

Scenes from De Megilla, the Yiddishpiel Theater performance of Manger’s Megilla Ditties, March 2011

Megilla with a Secular Twist

In one modern Purim spiel, petty revolutionaries complain about Mordecai’s piety. Ironically, this subtly subversive Yiddish text was originally shunned...

One of the earliest extant depictions of a Purim spiel: woodcut, Holland, 1657

Topsy Turvy

An annual outlet for the pressure cooker of the medieval Jewish community, the Purim spiel subtly subverts the power structures...

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