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…
(Reuters) – A Canadian-born immigrant to Israel has become the first foreign woman to join Kurds battling Islamic State in Syria, a Kurdish source said on Tuesday, as details of the volunteer’s turbulent past surfaced. Gill Rosenberg, 31, is a civil aviation pilot who enlisted in an Israeli army search-and-rescue unit before being arrested in…
Today’s lesson is about the importance of learning from history. You know what they say: Those who don’t are doomed to repeat it and all that. What they never tell you is how important it is to learn the right lesson. Otherwise you’ll just follow your first mistake with a bigger one. That’s the part…
Well, this is weird. Iraqi TV is rolling out a new satirical series, “Superstitious State,” that portrays the leader of ISIS as the spawn of Satan and — you guessed it — a Jewish woman. In a promo for the soon-to-come anti-ISIS show, broadcast several times daily on Al-Iraqiyya, we meet a Jewess adorned with…
I The Sunni extremists of ISIS who recently in Mosul destroyed the shrine that is believed to mark the tomb of the prophet Jonah knew what they were doing. What they almost surely did not know is the special poignancy that attaches to their deed. Jonah was not a run of the mill prophet, if…
Dozens of demonstrators shouted menacing slogans about Jews at a rally at one of the largest immigrant neighborhoods in The Netherlands. The demonstrators gathered Friday in the Schilderswijk, a neighborhood of approximately 33,000 residents in The Hague where half the population was born either in Turkey or Morocco, or to parents who were born in…
(Reuters) — A Kurdish diplomat has played down the significance of Israeli advocacy of independence for her people, saying it was not coordinated with the autonomous Kurdish government in Iraq and may be intended to served Israel’s interests. While acknowledging that Israel had sway in Washington, which wants to prevent a break-up of sectarian war-torn Iraq,…
