Last August, dozens of women launched a protest against the practice of separate men’s and women’s seating on some Israeli public bus routes servicing haredi communities. They boarded the buses and sat down among the men, expecting to provoke some strong reaction.

The women, some of whom were dressed in decidedly non-haredi style, expected to be forced to the area where the women passengers were sitting, but passengers largely just ignored them. On one bus, a haredi passenger did ask the driver to tell the protesters to sit among the other women, but the driver refused and the passenger returned to his seat.

Last April, two Israeli newspapers doctored photographs of the new Israeli cabinet to remove the images of two female ministers, Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver. In one paper, the women’s faces were replaced with two male ministers; in the other they were blotted out.

The erasure of the women’s faces was in accordance with the ultra-Orthodox view that it is immodest to print images of women.

Last week I was honored to speak to the Jewish community of Venice, Italy. Having just returned from Haiti, I addressed the issue of why a good God allows the innocent to suffer. I was amazed when an observant Jew approached me to say that the people of Haiti were not innocent, immersed as they are in voodoo, witchcraft, and idol-worship.

I said, “Surely you don’t mean to say that the morgue filled with the babies that I witnessed, the stench so bad that I was gagging, deserved to die? Or that the discarded bodies I saw being eaten by scavenger dogs deserved their fate?” His response: The people of Haiti as a whole were punished. A similar sentiment had earlier been voiced by the Rev. Pat Robertson on The 700 Club.

As we prepare to mark Purim tomorrow night we cannot help looking at the parallels between the Megillah and current events.

Haman was the chief minister of Persia, subservient only to King Ahasuerus. When Mordechai the Jew refused to bow down to him, Haman launched a plot to kill him and all the other Jews in the land.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, is president of Iran, subservient only to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Under the leadership of the ayatollah, Iran is a major sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad has also called into question historic facts, such as the Holocaust, in order to delegitimize Israel. If Iran attains the ability to create a nuclear weapon — which Israel and the West suspect is its goal — then it will not only directly threaten Israel, but the Iranian regime could also pass along such a weapon to one of its terrorist proxies.

These may not be the worst of times — we’ve had plenty of those — but they are hard enough, economically, for families to be hurting.

Jewish families have the additional burdens of synagogue dues, day-school tuition, and bar and bat mitzvahs (though joyous occasions) to fund.