In the Megillah, Jewish safety depends on proximity to power — passing, hiding, and selectively revealing, and all the fraught calculations that come with minority life.
On this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer is joined by Barbara Spectre, founding director of Paideia: The European Institute for Jewish Studies, to explore the story of Purim through a lens of existential uncertainty and cultural endurance. Drawing on Barbara’s decades of work with emerging European Jewish communities, they examine the pressures to fit in, the costs of standing out, and the tightrope between assimilation and sustaining culture that minorities have walked throughout history. The conversation offers a diasporic lens on power, vulnerability, and the possibility of choosing meaning even, and especially, when certainty is impossible.
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