Sarojini Nadar’s Gender, Genocide, Gaza and the Book of Esther was released last year by Routledge. It takes a biblical story that begins with a legally sealed plan to exterminate every Jew in the Persian Empire and reframes it as a story about Jews wantonly killing Persians.
The interpretive lens is declared from the outset: Gaza. The book assumes Israel is committing genocide. That assumption then becomes the key for rereading Esther. The ancient text is retrofitted to match the contemporary accusation.
The first paragraphs of the book make it obvious that Nadar is shoehorning Esther into her hate for Israel:
As we've noted many times, Netanyahu's invocation of Amalek was in terms of remembering what they did, not annihilating them - two separate commandments.
The very premise of the book is false, based on a connection made by the author that has no basis in reality.
The Book of Esther is centered around a royal decree to “destroy, kill, and annihilate” the Jews — men, women, and children — on a single appointed day. The decree is sealed. Persian law does not allow it to be revoked.
That is the existential core of the story.
But in this reading, the moral focus is relocated to the end — to the 75,000 enemies killed when the Jews defend themselves from the would-be genocidaires That episode is elevated as the defining meaning of Esther. The extermination order against the Jews is a minor point barely mentioned.
In this book, Haman’s defining feature is not his genocidal antisemitism. It is his genealogy. He is an “Agagite,” linked to Amalek — a people once marked for destruction in earlier biblical texts. The Book of Esther definitely makes the link, but not in terms of destroying Amalek but in terms of the irrational hatred of the Jewish people that Amalek represents, both in the Torah and in Esther.
Any Jewish schoolchild immediately associates Amalek with unmitigated evil. That is Esther's use of "Agagite." His genocidal desire is based on one fact - that one Jew refuse to bow down to him, just as the Torah emphasizes that Amalek attacked the Israelites for no reason except hate, ambushing the Israelites from the rear where the weakest and slowest were trailing behind, when there was no threat. This is the paradigm of antisemitism.
Instead of noting that obvious analogy between Haman and Amalek, Nadar creates a completely different analogy -one based on the idea that Jews are always the guilty ones.
She even dismisses Haman's decree to murder every Jewish man, woman and child as a "literary exaggeration."
But not Jews trying to survive. That is not exaggeration - that is "genocide." The violence against Haman and his allies is read not primarily as self-defense against extermination, but as Jews enacting a divine mandate to annihilate an ancient enemy. Haman the exterminator becomes Haman the theologically marked victim in her retelling.
The Book of Esther says repeatedly that the Jews struck “those who sought their harm.” It specifies that in Susa, 500 men were killed. It emphasizes three separate times that the Jews did not take plunder — despite being legally allowed to do so.
The narrative does not describe Jews slaughtering Persian civilians indiscriminately. It does not narrate women and children being killed by Jewish forces. It does not present expansion, conquest, or domination. In other words, by no definition can the Jews' self-defensive actions be called genocidal - unless that is how you look at Jews in general. Yet Nadar repeatedly says that the Jews killed 75,000 “gentiles,” positioning self defense as a baseless hatred of anyone who is not Jewish.
Nadar denies any antisemitism. Yet her warped worldview prompts her to she even twist the Biblical account of Amalek itself to try to justify its actions as either self defense or pre-emptive defense of Canaan:
In Esther, Jews are no longer a threatened minority fighting to live. They are the eternal aggressors. In the Torah, the Israelites are not newly freed slaves who are being led to liberation but an aggressive threat to the presumably peaceful Amalekites. In Gaza, Israel is not a state responding to violence or existential threat. It is the inheritor of a biblical annihilation script.
In all cases, Jewish self-defense becomes morally illegitimate by definition. Any exercise of force, even in response to extermination, is reframed as genocidal intent. And antisemitism, uniquely among all types of hate, is transformed into something that must be justified, somehow, because otherwise it doesn't make sense.
Nadar does something similar in her thesis that the Book of Esther connects the sexual subjugation of the king's harem with the Hebrew word herem, which can mean destruction. The words indeed are etymologically related, both denoting separation, but neither is used in Esther, yet Nadar uses this to connect the misogynistic behavior of a Persian king and the supposedly bloodthirsty Jews- she might as well connect Esther to the Arabic/Muslim word haram, forbidden, which also shares the same root word.
This book is moral inversion masquerading as scholarship. And it judges the Jews of Persia and even the Israelites through the same bigoted lens as it judges the Israeli Jews of today.
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