Chai Lights for the Week of March 2
Your weekly Jewish news round-up of things you might have missed
We hope you all had a great Purim and that your hamantaschen was generously filled and your groggers loud.
We assume you’ve all be following the events in the Middle East this week, so rather than giving you more of that, we figured we’d give you some content that is a bit more lighthearted.
Let’s start-off with some Purim insights you probably hadn’t heard about…
Haman Gave Us the Best Compliment in History Why being called “a certain people” is actually something to celebrate.
In a new Purim essay, Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin argues that Haman’s complaint to King Ahasuerus, that the Jews are “a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the nations” whose “laws are different from those of every other people,” was actually the first outside acknowledgment of Jewish peoplehood as a unified social type. It’s a punchy read for the holiday: what Haman intended as an accusation, Jews have quietly worn as a badge.
(Tablet, February 27, 2026) Read it here
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Culture & Identity
“We Are All Jews Here” (and Here’s the Story That Proves It) The tale of an American POW who stared down a Nazi gun and taught us what solidarity actually looks like.
Andrew Fox revisits the extraordinary story of Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, who at Stalag IX-A refused to hand over Jewish prisoners to a Nazi commandant and ordered every American soldier to stand together: “We are all Jews here.” Edmonds faced a pistol pointed at his head and didn’t flinch, later becoming the first U.S. soldier recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. On Purim of all days, the resonance is unmistakable.
(Future of Jewish, February 2026) Read it here
History & Archaeology
The Scroll Has Left the Building (and It’s Magnificent) 2,100 years of waiting, 25 visitors at a time, one climate-controlled room.
The Great Isaiah Scroll, the oldest nearly complete book from the Hebrew Bible ever found, went on display in its full seven-meter length at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem for the first time since 1968. Experts believe the scroll dates to around 125 BCE, and its text has influenced the spiritual lives of millions across Judaism and Christianity. For anyone who teaches or learns Torah, this is about as close to touching the source code as it gets.
(Times of Israel, February 24, 2026) Read it here
Forget the Granny Flat: Iron Age Israelites Had a Better Idea New archaeology reveals that the family patriarch didn’t get shuffled to the corner room.
A new study of a nearly 3,000-year-old building at Tel ‘Eton in the Judean lowlands suggests that the elderly patriarch and matriarch of a prominent Israelite household occupied the largest and most strategically placed room in the multi-generational home. Far from being sidelined in old age, it appears the elders held real authority to the very end. A beautiful data point for anyone wrestling with how Jewish tradition approaches honoring one’s parents.
(Times of Israel, February 19, 2026) Read it here
Culture & Identity
Shawarma, Sephardic Music, and Surprisingly Good Conversations On campus, where Jewish-Muslim tensions run high, a different story is quietly unfolding.
Sephardic American Mizrahi Initiative (SAMi) hosts cultural programming on 16 college campuses, and roughly 10% of the 6,000 students it has engaged are Muslim, drawn by shared food, music, and language rather than formal interfaith dialogue. Students from both backgrounds say these cultural touchpoints are opening unexpected space for connection at a moment of intense campus tension. This is the kind of Jewish campus story we rarely hear, and it deserves airtime.
(The Forward, February 2026) Read it here
Education
The Archive as Antidote: YIVO Doubles Down When Others Pull Back In New York, one Jewish institution is betting that education is the best long game against hate.
YIVO, which houses more than 24 million original documents and objects about Eastern European Jewish life, has seen over 350 visitors come through its learning and media center since it officially opened in June 2025, with groups from Columbia, NYU, and Hunter College among those exploring its trove of Yiddish theater programs, matchbooks from kosher restaurants, and pre-Holocaust photography. YIVO’s CEO Jonathan Brent argues that introducing complexity to the Jewish story will rein in prejudice among non-Jews. At a time when Jewish education often gets reactive, YIVO’s patient, curiosity-first approach is a model worth studying.
(Times of Israel, March 1, 2026) Read it here
History (Bonus Round)
1.9 Million Years Ago, Someone Was Already Here New dating upends what we thought we knew about humanity’s earliest road trip out of Africa.
A new study suggests that ancient humans were present in what is now Israel at least 1.9 million years ago, dramatically pushing back the timeline of human migration out of Africa to hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believed. The site, ‘Ubeidiya in the Jordan Valley, now sits alongside a site in Georgia as among the oldest known human settlements outside Africa. The Land of Israel, it turns out, has been a crossroads for far longer than anyone imagined.
(Times of Israel, February 22, 2026) Read it here