by Justin Goldstein · Sunday, September 28th, 2008
I was just looking around on Google News and stumbled upon this:
Cleaning up of Jewish cemetery in Basra
By Abed Battat
Azzaman, September 28, 2008
Municipal authorities in the southern city of Basra have mounted a campaign to clean up the Jewish cemetery there.
The cemetery is seen as one of Basra’s ‘cultural landmarks’ and the authorities want to keep it clean and tidy, said Ahmad al-Yasseri who heads the cleaning-up campaign.
There are no Jews left in the city which used to house a sizeable Jewish community of tens of thousands before the creation of Israel in 1948.
They were the finest goldsmiths and the most adventurous traders of Basra, known as the Venice of the Middle East.
The lived in one of the city’s smartest quarters with spacious villas adorned with palm trees and oranges
Yasseri said in the tumultuous post-Saddam period, 62 houses were built on the cemetery grounds illegally.
“This cemetery is one of the cultural landmarks of Basra and we are determined to remove the illegal dwellings,” he said.
Not a Jew left in the city (or even the country–minus the soldiers and contractors…), and they choose to retain a Jewish cemetery as cultural landmark. That’s just awesome. I can’t wait for the day when I can visit it!
The community in Basra goes back at least to the 8th-10th century, and possibly earlier. It’s certainly mentioned in the Gemara (It’s mentioned in Avodah Zarah and Gittin, in Avodah Zarah Reish Lakish goes there and sees Jews eating untithed fruits and drinking idolatrous water) and it seems that the city had a vibrant Jewish community, at the latest, during the Geonic period. Cleaning and restoring the cemetery as a cultural landmark is a significant show of coexistence and respect. It leads me to wonder, if a non-Zionist community took shape there, could they reside safely as Jews in Iraq? Could a metivta be in session once more in Bavel? Let us pray we could see the day.
by Aryeh Cohen · Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Maimonides, in what is perhaps one of the more disturbing implications of his Guide to the Perplexed, concludes that stupid people (as infidels) should be put to death (I:36,37). His fear is that stupid people have the wrong understanding of God—thinking that God can change by answering prayers, or that God might do something in contravention of the laws of nature, etc—and that this understanding of God is idolatrous. So, Maimonides’ thinking goes, we should kill them for committing idolatry.
I never really understood the thinking behind this passage until the current election. Idolatry is essentially a form of thinking in which one privileges a fictional account of reality, given a life of its own, over reality. When it is applied to politics writ large it becomes fascism. The state, a political entity which in actuality is the aggregate of the residents and citizens of a geographical region who have invested certain power in a few people to deploy the treasure and armed might of the state in their names, is transformed into an entity independent of its citizens, a being almost, which exists outside of history (the thousand year Reich, for example). When applied to commerce, it ends up in a reified “market” understood as a natural force rather than the aggregate of thousands of choices which may be tracked sociologically but do not exist independently of those who make the choices.
In the current campaign, where the reality is that we are spending life and treasure at an absurd level in a wrong-headed war, and the economy is collapsing–and threatens to bring the empire down with it–because the “market” doesn’t, apparently, regulate itself, it boggles the mind that the McCain/Palin (or McSame/Pain as one bumper sticker has it) campaign chooses to deride community organizing and falls back on macho rhetoric (“I didn’t blink,” “I won’t blink,” “I never blink”) and declares the economy essentially sound and is not driven out of town on a rail.
While Sarah Palin might work as an icon of change–young, not of Washington, not beclouded by thoughts of foreign policy–the icon, as all icons, has no independent substance. She is, as one supporter of Palin said, “anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, anti-Big Oil, a lifetime member of the N.R.A., she hunts, she fishes — she is the perfect woman!” What is needed is some good old iconoclasm.
WAKE UP EVERYBODY!! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!
by Justin Goldstein · Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
[Pictured is Swift Boat Veterans for Truth backer, Ambassador to Belgium and RJC Chairman Sam Fox]
According to the Huffington Post, Suzanne Kurtz, communications director for the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), is making up news–and not the funny kind that Jon Stewart and the Onion are so good at putting together. And it’s also not funny who is paying for it.
A press release was issued Monday calling on Barack Obama “to drop Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) from his upcoming trip to Israel.”
Mr. Hagel is not, however, joining Mr. Obama to Israel; Afghanistan and Iraq, yes; Israel, not-so-much. It seems that the folks at the RJC are trying to manipulate the news to make it appear that Senator Hagel is a close adviser on Israel to Senator Obama. The press release lists a resume of ‘anti-Israel highlights’ from Hagel’s recent career.
- In August 2006, Hagel was one of only 12 senators who refused to write the EU asking them to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
- In December 2005, Hagel was one of only 27 who refused to sign a letter to President Bush to pressure the Palestinian Authority to ban terrorist groups from participating in Palestinian legislative elections.
- In June 2004, Hagel refused to sign a letter urging President Bush to highlight Iran’s nuclear program at the G-8 summit.
- In November 2001, Hagel was one of only 11 senators who refused to sign a letter urging President Bush not to meet with the late Yassir Arafat until his forces ended the violence against Israel.
- In October 2000, Hagel was one of only four senators who refused to sign a Senate letter in support of Israel.
after the jump is a transcript of the phone call from Monday afternoon between The Huffington Post and the RJC, sad and entertaining–like fake news ought to be.
More »
by Danya · Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
One of the perks of lurking around the Jewish publishing world is that sometimes you get to read stuff before it’s out. One of the best things that I’ve read recently is Ariel Sabar’s forthcoming My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq. Sabar’s father, Yona, grew up speaking Aramaic in a small town in the mountains of Northern Iraq, and left for Israel as part of the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews in the early 1950’s. Yona Sabar eventually became a prominent linguist of Neo-Aramaic; he’s a professor at UCLA now.
The book is primarily Yona’s story, and offers a valuable look at life as it was in Sabar senior’s small town of Zakho for his and his parents’ generation, and of how things were for Mizrahi Jews just after the founding of the State of Israel (hint: not easy.) More than biography, though, the author weaves together history, folklore, third-party recollections and the occasional juicy linguistic nugget to paint a compelling portrait of small-town Iraqi Jews (and their transformation from small-town Iraqi living) over the last 100 years. There’s a lot of important stuff here, and it makes for yummy and worthwhile reading.
My Father’s Paradise isn’t out yet, but you can pre-order it.
by Justin Goldstein · Sunday, June 29th, 2008
JERUSALEM (AFP) - Some 300 rare and valuable books confiscated from Iraq’s Jewish community by Saddam Hussein’s regime have been secretly spirited into Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.
The books include a 1487 commentary on the biblical Book of Job and another volume of biblical prophets printed in Venice in 1617, the Haaretz daily said… Many volumes were damaged during the bombing of government buildings in the opening weeks of the war, and after the fall of Baghdad most of the books were sent off to be temporarily stored at the Library of Congress in Washington.
Full article after the jump… More »
