INTRODUCTION

This is not the book I thought I was writing. I had imagined that the book I was writing would begin and end with a party, a drinking party, a victory party – with Purim, a festival celebrating Jewish survival in the book of Esther. I have loved Purim for some time, but always from some undeterminable distance, always from some relative distance: not being Jewish. Why I am drawn to Purim, and to the text that Purim celebrates, has something to do with this sense of distance. And this sense of distance, in turn, has something to do with why this is not the book I thought I was writing.