“First of all, religion is an opinion, okay? It’s not an ethnicity, it’s an opinion! … I was forced into having an opinion that was Catholic when I was young. Now my opinion is neither one of them. So don’t tell me what I am. What I am is a Catholic-raised atheist. Okay? That’s what I am. And I put in time with the Catholic Church, and I want credit for it.”
Bill Maher never had much patience for religion. He has called himself an atheist for decades, and in 2008 he made an entire movie, Religulous, that takes jabs at believers of every faith.
Now meet the other Bill Maher.
One week after Hamas murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, Maher faced his liberal HBO audience and told them what they did not want to hear: the Israelis “always had the moral high ground and they still do.” A month later, he took on Barack Obama for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, and summed up the world’s double standard in a single line: “When they fire at Israel, it’s a war. When Israel fires back, it’s a war crime.”.
On The View, surrounded by hostile hosts, he called the International Criminal Court’s move against Prime Minister Netanyahu “ridiculous.” “It’s a war,” he insisted. Hamas “started five wars since they were given that land.”
Maher took these stands while the rest of Hollywood went the other way. Within weeks of the massacre, spineless celebrities lined up to accuse Israel of genocide, repeating terrorist propaganda to tens of millions of followers. Bill Maher refused to join the herd.
Week after week, Maher said what needed to be said to audiences that did not want to hear it. I am grateful to him. Israel has very few friends in American media with his reach and his nerve.
But who, exactly, is Bill Maher?
His identity is a mess, and he seems to like it that way. His father was an Irish Catholic radio announcer. His mother was a nurse from a Hungarian Jewish family. Every Sunday, the family went to Mass. “My mother never went, and I didn’t think to ask why.” He was a teenager before he learned that his mother was Jewish. She was not keeping it from him, she told him. It simply never came up in conversation.
To this day, Maher calls himself “half-Jewish.” When Martin Short asked him on Real Time why people assume they are Jewish, Maher blamed his nose: “I’m funny and I have a big nose.” He never mentioned his mother.
Bill Maher does not believe in God. He does not believe in the Bible. He will not even call himself a Jew. Hollywood is full of Jews who proudly call themselves Jewish and then turn on the Jewish state the moment standing with it might cost them a few followers on Instagram. “Proud Jew” Hannah Einbinder accepted her Emmy in 2025 and closed her speech with “Free Palestine.” Why does a man who refuses to call himself a Jew defend Israel, while so many self-hating Jews in Hollywood attack it?
Maher would say that Israel is a democracy fighting enemies who want to destroy it, and that it deserves his support. That is true. But millions of his fellow liberals, including many of his Hollywood colleagues, see the very same facts and side with Hamas anyway. Moral clarity alone cannot explain why an atheist comedian, raised Catholic, defends the Jewish state with more passion than most rabbis.
Twenty-five centuries ago, in Shushan, the capital of the Persian Empire, a young woman rose to the very top of the empire by hiding who she was.
Fifty years before the story of Esther, King Cyrus invited the Jews to go home and rebuild Jerusalem (Ezra 1:1-3). Only about 42,000 Jews answered the call (Ezra 2:64). The vast majority chose to remain in Persia, comfortable and prosperous, with no intention of ever going home to Israel.
By the time of Esther, Jews lived in Persia for more than a hundred years. Their grandparents were exiles from Jerusalem, but most Jews identified themselves as Persians. They spoke Persian, celebrated at the king’s feasts, and gave their children Persian names.
Esther and Mordecai are a perfect example. Mordecai’s father was named Yair, a Hebrew name. Esther’s father was named Abihail, another Hebrew name (Esther 2:5, 2:15). Yet these Jewish fathers named their children after Babylonian gods. Mordecai comes from Marduk, the chief god of Babylon. Esther most likely comes from Ishtar, a Babylonian goddess. That was no accident. They wanted their children to fit in and get ahead in the Persian Empire.
And success came. Mordecai sat at the king’s gate as a senior official of the empire (Esther 2:21). Incredibly, Esther became queen of Persia. She was also given a Hebrew name, Hadassah (Esther 2:7). But once she entered the palace, Hadassah disappeared from the story, and so did her Jewish identity. “Esther did not reveal her people or her kindred” (Esther 2:10). The Sages connect her name to the Hebrew word hester, “hidden.”
The Jews of Persia no longer saw themselves as a nation. They were Persians of Jewish ancestry, loyal subjects of the king. Their identity as an independent people, with their own land and their own destiny, was a distant memory.
Ironically, the first character in the story to speak of the Jews as a people is the man who wants them dead. Haman goes to King Ahasuerus and makes his case:
Haman was not attacking a religion. He did not accuse the Jews of praying to the wrong God. He accused them of being a separate nation, scattered across the empire yet still bound to one another and to their own laws. The Jews of Persia spent a century trying to become Persians. They changed their names, hid their identity, and celebrated at the king’s table. None of it fooled Haman. He looked at these assimilated Persians and saw exactly what they tried so hard to forget: a nation.
When Mordecai learned of the decree to annihilate the Jews, he did something no respectable Persian official would ever do. He tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and ashes, and walked through the middle of Shushan crying out loudly and bitterly. He went right up to the king’s gate, where no one dressed in sackcloth was allowed to enter (Esther 4:1-2). In other words, Mordecai was announcing: I am a Jew.
Esther was mortified. Her cousin was making a public spectacle of his Jewishness, steps from the palace where she spent years hiding hers. She sent him fresh clothes and urged him to take off the sackcloth (Esther 4:4). Get dressed. Stop embarrassing us. Mordecai refused, and sent her a message:
Mordecai was not asking Esther what she believed. He was asking her who she was.
Esther did not merely find faith on that day. She found herself. The queen who was once ashamed of being a Jew now summoned them: “Go, gather all the Jews who are in Shushan, and fast for me… and if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). The woman who hid her Jewishness from the king now tied her life to the fate of the Jews. And when she finally stood before Ahasuerus, she said out loud what she spent years concealing: “Let my life be given me at my petition, and my people at my request. For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed” (Esther 7:3-4).
My people.
Haman’s decree did not teach Esther a new belief. It reminded her who she always was: a member of the Jewish people. She spent years burying her identity, and it took a genocidal enemy to dig it back up.
That is the difference between a religion and a nation. A religion is a set of beliefs. Stop believing, and you are no longer part of it. A nation is a family. You are born into it, and no matter what you believe or how far you run, you remain part of it. You cannot resign from your family.
In my book, Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption, I call this the “Esther Moment”: the moment when the world forces Jews to remember what they spent generations trying to forget.
Which brings us back to Bill Maher.
Like Esther, he grew up with his identity hidden. Not out of shame, but because it “never came up.” Like Esther, he built a brilliant career in the capital of the empire, surrounded by Jews, without ever being counted as one of them. And like Esther, he deflects. Half-Jewish. Catholic-raised. A joke about his nose.
Then came October 7, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. The next day, as Israeli families were desperately searching for their missing children, crowds of Muslims gathered in New York to celebrate. College campuses chanted for intifada. And Maher’s own political party began making room for Jew-haters. In 2024, Kamala Harris passed over Josh Shapiro, the popular Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, as her running mate, because a proud Jew would turn off too many voters. Maher noticed.
Bill Maher never decided to stand with the Jews. He never announced that he was reclaiming his Jewish identity. To this day, he calls himself half-Jewish. But when the Jew-hatred came, he stood with his people anyway, by instinct, the way a man jumps to defend his own family before he stops to think about it.
Maher calls it moral clarity, and it is. But Esther could have called her plea to the king a matter of simple justice too. She knew better. She said “my people.”
Bill Maher defends Israel with the fire of a Jew because he is a Jew. Not by belief, which he rejects, but by belonging, which he cannot reject. By Jewish law, the son of a Jewish mother is a Jew. No ceremony, no confession of faith, no membership card required. The Sages taught: “Israel, even though he sins, is still Israel.” Maher is right that religion is an opinion. But being a Jew is not an opinion; it is family.
The Jew-haters know this. To the people chanting for intifada, an atheist comedian with a Jewish mother and a rabbi in a black hat are equally Jewish. So it was in Persia. Haman’s decree made no exceptions for the assimilated. It targeted “all the Jews, young and old, children and women” (Esther 3:13), those who still prayed to the God of Israel, and those who stopped praying long ago.
Bill Maher doesn’t want to be labeled. “Don’t tell me what I am,” he says. Fine. Nobody needs to tell you, Bill. You told us yourself.
You told us every Friday night on HBO, every time you defended Israel in front of an audience that would rather you stayed quiet. You told us every time you took the heat while your Hollywood colleagues took the easy way out.
Esther’s story did not end when she risked her life. It ended when she stood before the king and said two words out loud: “my people.” Bill Maher has already done the hard part. He has stood up for his people when it cost him. All that is left is to say the words.
He is not alone. Thousands of American Jews live exactly where Bill Maher lives: secular, half-in, unsure what to call themselves, and suddenly unable to stay silent. That awakening is no accident. As Mordecai told Esther, perhaps you were born for a time such as this?
