• A look at Purim as the holiday that “includes all others” and distills the fundamental choice all Jews face: whether to wait for God to act or to take matters into your own hands. [BeliefNet]
• Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a favorite of centrists on the Israeli side, vows that Palestinians will not be provoked to violence by “the terrorism of the settlers, and the terrorism of the settlement project.” [Haaretz]
• In Finland, authorities are trying to bar anyone but doctors from performing circumcisions by prosecuting a Jewish couple whose baby experienced complications after a mohel performed his bris. [Jewish Chronicle]
• A library at Oxford University has a fascinating, and revealing, exhibit of late-medieval manuscripts, with a special focus on Jewish ones. [Times of London]
• Jewish Week columnist Abe Novick bemoans the dissipation of trust and true connectedness in our supposedly globalized world. [Jewish Week]
• Apparently there’s a big Illinois plant that makes gefilte fish. And there’s a trade dispute preventing the gefilte fish from being shipped to Israel. So, yeah, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally pledged to resolve the problem in time for Passover. Me? I prefer my gefilte fish caught in the wild. [JPost]
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.