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Today on Tablet

Hamen-tasting, Vashti the feminist, and more on Purim

by
Marc Tracy
February 26, 2010

Today in Tablet Magazine, in preparation for Purim (which starts Saturday at sundown), Jenny Merkin organized a hamentashen taste test featuring treats from around the country. Natually, the winner is one subway stop away from our offices. Liel Leibovitz posits that Purim has supplanted Passover as the holiday Jews use to assert their Jewishness to the rest of the world. Novelist Elisa Albert remembers how playing spurned Queen Vashti in middle school awakened her inner feminist. In his weekly haftorah column, Leibovitz describes the paranoia that suffused the Jews’ struggle against their eternal villain, Amalek. Ah, yes, The Scroll editor knows this week’s slighly loony haftorah well: it was the one he read at his bar mitzvah.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.