Szyk’s second Book of Esther (published posthumously in Israel in 1974) was illustrated in New England after World War II, once the horrors of Nazism were evident to the world. Szyk made plain the parallels between the recent Holocaust of European Jewry and the story of Jewish persecution in ancient Persia. In this image Haman (who wears a swastika) hangs from the gallows that he had prepared for his Jewish rival Mordechai; Szyk painted himself into the work as an observer with hamantaschen in hand, inscribing the Hebrew words: “The people of Israel will be liberated from their persecutors.”