[Magdalen] hissing at Haman

[Jay Weigel]

There was an enormous kerfuffle this year among the Romance Writers of
American when a book based on the book of Esther but set during WWII was
nominated for an award. In the book, a young Jewish woman named Hadassah
Benjamin falls in love with a Nazi commandant and saves a substantial
number of Jews. A huge e-mail and Facebook campaign against the award
ensued, most of the e-mails and posts apparently coming from people who
(predictably) had not read the book and didn't know what it was based on. I
guess it's okay for a respectable Jewish girl to fall in love with (and use
to save her people) a Persian king but not a Nazi commandant.

I'm also betting at least half the complainers were unfamiliar with the
book of Esther.

On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 5:49 PM, Scott Knitter <scottknitter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 4:42 PM, Grace Cangialosi <gracecan at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > King Xerxes???  What happened to Ahasuerus!?
> > After I wrote that, I found this explanation in a footnote:
> >
> > Ahasuerus is a Latin-English transcription of the Hebrew form of the
> Persian name Kshajarsha, in Gr. Xerxes.
> >
> > Good grief...!
>
> All part of what makes the film The Book of Esther so entertaining. :)
>  (There's actually some good acting in it, among the bad acting. But
> it's definitely low-budget. I love what one reviewer said, that it
> boasts a cast of tens. LOL).
>
>
> --
> Scott R. Knitter
> Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA
>