The disaster unfolding in Afghanistan is a tragedy we’ve seen before. Images of Afghans falling from airplanes and streaming into terminals, desperate to leave, evoke past scenes of collapse: Saigon at the end of Vietnam, the airlifts of Ethiopians from Israel and the desperate efforts of Jews and others to flee Europe as governments fell…
As the Taliban entered Kabul, one former translator for the U.S. military felt she was living through a horror movie. “Nobody wants to leave their home because they don’t know if they’ll make it back alive,” she told me via WhatsApp on Wednesday. “The past 20 years feel like a dream. Overnight everything has changed.”…
The simple stone facade of the Yu Aw Synagogue in Herat, a city in western Afghanistan, conceals an elaborate interior, including a blue, hand-painted dome that has in recent years been painstakingly restored by local craftsmen with funding from the newly deposed national government. Jewish sites received attention as part of a push to restore…
Just weeks after U.S. forces and their allies in the Northern Alliance had routed the Taliban from most of Afghanistan, the NY Daily News assigned me to accompany an odd delegation to the country on a 24-hour visit. It was Dec. 2001, and unlimited new prospects still seemed possible for the ancient land. I took…
President Joe Biden sought to assure the American people on Monday that he made the right decision to withdraw from war-torn Afghanistan after 20 years, despite the rapid Taliban takeover. But as the worrisome images of the way Americans were evacuated from Kabul circulated on social media, criticism of the administration’s approach and execution intensified….
(JTA) — As the old saying sort of goes, two Jews, three opinions. Add one headache for the Taliban. Meet Zabulon Simentov, 66, who is believed to be the last remaining Jew in Afghanistan. Emran Feroz recently profiled Simentov for Foreign Policy and uncovered some incredible stories about the feisty Afghan — including that the…
Even Rupert Murdoch can’t take it any more. “We cannot recall a more absurd misstatement of history by an American President,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board declared last week, under the headline, “Trump’s Cracked Afghan History.” Until then, the paper had managed to suck it up. It had held its tongue when Trump was…
(JTA) — A post office in Pennsylvania was renamed for a Jewish airman from Philadelphia who was killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan. Staff Sgt. Peter Taub, 30, died in December 2015 in a suicide attack on a patrol near Bagram Air Base by an assailant riding a motorcycle. Taub was assigned to the…
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