Bet you never knew America has always had a queen.
While our beloved democracy was founded as a republic, by the people and for the people, for those people there has always been Esther, the Jewish heroine whose story is read on the holiday of Purim.
The Purim story first made an impact on America even before the nation declared independence. During the decade of colonial resistance against the British, pundits and preachers turned to Purim as a way to contextualize their own struggle. Blaming not King George III for their oppression but rather the British prime minister and his oppressive policies - recall that whole “taxation without representation” thing? - the colonies saw themselves as Esther, and the English officials as Hamans. Just as Esther needed to stand tall and proud in the face of Haman’s plotting, the colonists sought to resist suppressive English laws. George III, in this analogy, was Ahaseurus, manipulated by his scheming advisor, the source of the cruel decrees.
So, as the colonies celebrated the repeal of the Stamp Act, which had been levied by the British without the colonists’ consent, in 1765, the Boston Gazette stated that whoever had suggested George III enact such a law in the first place was “as great an Enemy…as was wicked Haman to the Jews.” George III, like the Persian king, must have “taken up with his Queen and the luxuries of the court, and committed the management of his political affairs to a very bad man,” the New York Journal wrote in 1774.
During the American Revolution just two years later, the Founders found inspiration in Esther’s faith. On May 17, 1776, the Continental Congress, like Esther, declared a public fast day in an effort to evoke divine assistance during turbulent times. John Witherspoon, then president of what would later become Princeton University, delivered a sermon on that fast day, enlisting the biblical Esther into the American cause:
“We have also an instance in Esther in which the most mischievous designs of Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite against Mordecai the Jew, and the nation from which he sprung, turned out at last to his own destruction, the honor of Mordecai, and the salvation and peace of his people.”
Even General George Washington, America’s first president, counted himself as an Esther admirer - or, at least, a hater of Haman. Furious at war profiteers at Valley Forge, he raged "I would to God that some one of the most atrocious of each state was hung in gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared for Haman.”
As America aged, and sought to achieve its founding ideals - first and foremost by abolishing slavery - Esther remained ever-present.
In 1836, the abolitionist Angelina Grimké, in an appeal to fellow Southern Christian white women, wrote, “Is there no Esther among you, who will plead for the poor devoted slave? Read the history of this Persian queen, it is full of instruction.”
At a crucial rally on September 7, 1853, the escaped slave born Isabella Baumfree, now calling herself Sojourner Truth, told the assembled how “in the old times the kings of the earth would hear a woman. There was a king in the Scriptures; and then it was the kings of the earth would kill a woman if she come into their presence; but Queen Esther come forth, for she was oppressed, and felt there was a great wrong, and she said I will die or I will bring my complaint before the king.”
Even the Great Emancipator, President Abraham Lincoln, had his own Purim moment. On September 13, 1862, the pastor and abolitionist Rev. W. W. Patton took a contingent of clergymen to the White House to meet with President Lincoln and insisted that he issue the Emancipation Proclamation - which he did nine days later. And how did they convince the President? Simple. Patton and his fellow preachers reminded Lincoln of Esther:
“At the time of the national peril of the Jews, under Ahasuerus, Mordecai spoke in their name to Queen Esther, who hesitated to take the step necessary to their preservation in these solemn words:
‘Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king’s house, more than all the Jews. For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall their enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed; and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?’” (Esther 4:13-14)
During the 20th century, Esther’s influence in America continued to expand, from beauty contests to the battle against Hitler.
On Purim day of 1933, Katherine Spector was crowned the “Prettiest U.S. Jewess” in front of a crowd of 22,000 in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden. The event explicitly drew inspiration from the biblical Esther’s own coronation after winning a contest to be Ahaseurus’s new queen.
Joachim Prinz, a German-born rabbi who had escaped the Holocaust, and who decades later would speak at 1963’s March on Washington immediately before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, recalled how in the early ‘30’s, during those nightmarish days back in his homeland, Purim “became the story of our lives … Every time we read Haman the people heard Hitler, and the noise was deafening.” Of course, Hitler-Haman was eventually defeated, much to the relief of Jews across the globe.
In our own century, politicians across both sides of the aisle, from former New York mayor Eric Adams to Rep. Elise Stefanik, have cited Esther’s courage in expressing their own convictions. The former cited Esther in explaining why he believed God wanted him to run for Mayor of NYC “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14), while the latter cited the same verse in encouraging her fellow Representatives to vote for Jim Jordan for Speaker of the House.
Esther, then, is one of America’s longest-serving leaders. Rabbis and reporters, revolutionaries and abolitionists, Puritans and preachers and presidents, have understood this ancient Jewish story to speak to their present moment, as each and every one of us can today.
Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern serves as the senior advisor to the provost as well as the deputy director and chief strategy officer of the Zahava and Moshael J. Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. He is the editor or author of nineteen books, including Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story and the upcoming Two Nations Under God: How (Biblical) Israel Inspires America, both of which received a National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Among his other books are The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada, Esther in America and Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.
