Court Jews Again: MAGA’s Reading of the Book of Esther

This article examines how the MAGA movement reads the Book of Esther as a theological-political text, and how Esther has become a central metaphor in the ideology of the Republican Party in recent years. Its starting point is the claim that we are living through an “Esther moment,” but instead of engaging with Esther as a Zionist metaphor, expressed, for example, in the discourse on the “Purim War” in February 2026, the article focuses on American Jewry, i.e., the diaspora that sits at the center of the empire. Based on two seminal documents associated with The Heritage Foundation, the policy document “Project Esther” (2024) and Yoram Hazony’s book God and Politics in Esther (2016), the article proposes a reconstruction of MAGA’s interpretation of the Megillah: An allegorical reading that uses the supposedly united front of Esther and Ahasuerus against Haman to establish a “Judeo-Christian” front against the pro-Palestinian movement, which is presented as invasive and alien to US civilization. The article does not focus on the xenophobic aspects of this reading, but rather offers a critique of the idea of ​​a Judeo-Christian alliance, arguing that it obscures the inherent political tensions between Jews and Christians in the United States. By situating the MAGA reading in the context of the Megillah’s reception in the early modern period and in European and American history, the article shows that, alongside presenting Jews as favored allies, MAGA actually feeds off the divisions in the Jewish community, conditions its support for its members on their loyalty to the sovereign, demands political sacrifices from them, and expects them to become subservient court Jews in the court of “King Trump.” At the center of the argument is the figure of the court Jew, a central topos in Jewish historiography, whose most prominent incarnations today are figures such as Yoram Hazony, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Stephen Miller. Thus, the discussion seeks to expose the actions of Jewish politicians in approving the ideology of the ruling power. This study does not seek to abandon the figure of the court Jew, which is seen here as essential to the existence of the diasporic Jew. Instead, by returning to the Megillah, it offers an alternative reading, focusing on the depiction of Esther and Mordecai as figures who act out of alertness to the unshakable tension that underlies the alliance between Jews and the ruling power.