Is Katniss Jewish?

Maybe some other column has covered this, but in my four-hours-of-sleep haze from taking my Big Girl and Skater and a friend (we’ll call her Dancer ’cause she’ll want a blog name) to the 12:01 premier of “Hunger Games,” I think Katniss just might be Jewish. Okay, she’s not, there’s no religion in either the books or the movie (but can’t you just imagine someone out there somewhere in Panem lighting candles in a cupboard), but there have been several cases of biblical Jewish women kicking ass, Katniss-style.

Jewish women can be deadly, you know. Take the cases of Yael and Judith:

Yael hosted a fleeing General Sisera, who was losing a war to Barak and his Jewish army, in her tent. He asks for water, she gives him milk. Possibly, this isn’t in the text, it is warm milk to make him sleepy. He  does fall asleep and she whacks him in the temple with a tent stake. With the general dead, victory was ensured.

Judith, a widow in the besieged town of Bethulia, took off her widow’s clothes, put on something more appealing, and applied that appeal to the conquering general, Holofernes. She feeds him salty cheese to get him thirsty, gives him wine to quench the thirst, and before he can seduce her (as if he had a chance) he falls asleep. Evidently, opposing biblical generals are very tired men. Then she and her servant decapitate him with his own sword. When his army finds him headless in his tent the next morning, they flee and the village is saved.

Oh, yeah, we are Team Katniss. Jewish women have volunteered as tributes. And the odds have been ever in our favor. Shabbat Shalom.

PS

The Peeta/Gale debate? The whole thing makes me think (every time) about a song lyric from the Broadway show “Into the Woods,” after the baker’s wife has had a “moment in the woods” with a prince. She sings that  ”You need a baker for bread and a prince for whatever.”