“News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative.” This observation, made by a character in Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II, has never seemed truer than today. Just ask the citizens of Tunisia, who are marking on January 14 the third anniversary of the overthrow of Zine…
A conference commemorating the effects of the Holocaust on Tunisian Jews is being held in Tunis. Historians, scholars and authors are scheduled speak at the two-day conference, which ends on Sunday. The conference aims to remember the 5,000 Jews subjected to forced labor in Tunisia during a six-month Nazi occupation of the country. Some were…
Tunisia has been suspended from next year’s Davis Cup after it ordered one of its national players to withdraw from a tournament rather than face an Israeli player. The International Tennis Federation made the announcement on Saturday, saying in a statement that the Tunisian National team would be banned from the 2014 Davis Cup competition…
Tunisian Jews feel that they are in danger, the head of a Tunisian rights group said. Three serious incidents against members of the Jewish community have occurred in recent weeks, Yamina Thabet, head of the Tunisian Association Supporting Minorities, told reporters Wednesday, the French news agency AFP reported. Thabet visited the Tunisian island of Djerba,…
A French imam known for promoting Jewish-Muslim relations said he was physically assaulted in Tunisia by a man who called him a “Zionist.” The attacker of Hassen Chalghoumi, the imam of Drancy near Paris, punched him in the chest and shoved him to the ground on Sunday near Hotel Gammarth near Tunis, the capital of…
Israel’s Walla News site offers a fascinating and, I think, crucial insight (in Hebrew) into the turmoil in Egypt and Syria. It’s by Dror Ze’evi, a professor of Turkish and Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. He writes that the two conflicts, however similar or related they might appear on the surface,…
Africa’s oldest synagogue is playing host to that rarity in the Arab world – a religious gathering of hundreds of Jews drawn from Europe and Israel. Guarded by armed Tunisian police, Jewish revellers chant and dance in a three-day pilgrimage to the El Ghriba synagogue at an island resort 500 km south of Tunis. In…
Mamie Lily, a restaurant housed in a charming, French colonial-era building in La Goulette, a faded port town just outside Tunis, is a rare outpost of kosher cuisine in an Arab land. And the annual Seder it hosts seems to reflect something characteristic of Tunisia’s larger Jewish population: It is tiny, but functional and robust…
100% of profits support our journalism
