In February 1994, a Brooklyn-born religious settler, Baruch Goldstein, murdered twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in Hebron. Significantly, he chose to do it on Purim, the holiday commemorating the biblical story of the Jews of Persia foiling a plot to destroy them and then killing “all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter, and destruction.” That year, Purim fell on the third Friday of Ramadan.
