The Iraqi site believed to be the burial place of the biblical prophet Nahum is in danger of being destroyed by the Islamic State, or ISIS. Nahum’s Tomb in Al Ooosh, an annual pilgrimage spot for generations of Iraqi Jews, is 10 miles from territory controlled by ISIS, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported. Until the…
In her for the Forward, Shayna Zamkanei correctly asserted that American (and European) Jews are largely unaware of the Farhud, the Baghdad anti Jewish pogrom of 1-2 June, 1941. The flourishing Babylonian Community which existed for 24 centuries is also largely unknown in the West. Jews felt very much at home in Iraq and considered…
By now it’s become a Washington cliché: Barack Obama stumbling cluelessly through a Middle East in flames. He’s leading from behind, surrendering to Iran, withdrawing from the world, pivoting to Asia. He tried to disengage from Middle East entanglements, but the region sucked us back in. Or did it? Here the cliché gets muddled. In…
(Reuters) — Islamic State fighters have looted and bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, the Iraqi government said, in their latest assault on some of the world’s greatest archaeological and cultural treasures. A tribal source from the nearby city of Mosul told Reuters the ultra-radical Sunni Islamists, who dismiss Iraq’s pre-Islamic heritage as idolatrous,…
Getty Images Journalist Bob Simon, who died last night in a car accident, had a brush with death almost 25 years earlier. As a prisoner of the Iraqis, during the first Persian Gulf War, he worried “his Jewishness might cost him his life,” JTA reported in this 1991 article: CBS News correspondent Bob Simon was…
A new exhibition of ancient clay tablets discovered in modern-day Iraq is shedding light for the first time on the daily life of Jews exiled to Babylon some 2,500 years ago. The exhibition is based on more than 100 cuneiform tablets, each no bigger than an adult’s palm, that detail transactions and contracts between Judeans…
Israeli scribes restored a 200-year old Iraqi Torah scroll that arrived in Israel under mysterious circumstances. The Associated Press reported Thursday that the scroll, written in northern Iraq by two scribes using pomegranate ink, was delivered, water-damaged, to the Israeli embassy in Jordan in 2007, and was transferred to Israel in 2011 when riots were…
Call it a confirmation bias. Everywhere I turned this year, I saw a new expression of Arab Jewish identity. The revival seems to be happening across all fields — literature, food, music — yet somehow nobody’s talking about it. As an Arab Jewish writer (my family hails from Morocco, India and Iraq), I couldn’t be…
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