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…
(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…
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