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Why is the Ukraine war more Jewish than the Iranian uprising? A year after Mahsa Amini’s death, that should change.

(JTA) — I regularly post Middle Eastern Jewish feminist content on social media, so right when Mahsa Amini was murdered, TikTok’s algorithm flooded my account with videos of women from Iran, giving a play-by-play account of events.

Amini was a 22-year-old woman from Kurdistan, visiting her relatives in Tehran. Despite the fact that she was covered from head to toe, wearing the compulsory hijab, the “morality police” arrested and beat her to death because they did not approve of how she was dressed. That incident was Iran’s equivalent of George Floyd’s murder in the United States, and sparked a woman-led revolution throughout Iran and Kurdistan — with protesters flooding the streets, women publicly burning their hijabs, and police arresting tens of thousands of protesters, as well as brutally torturing and murdering hundreds. The incident shook me to my core and felt very personal to me, specifically as a Jew.

The degree to which the murder of a Muslim woman in Tehran affected a Jewish woman in Seattle might surprise many in the American Jewish community. To understand, let’s take a little trip back through time: Jews throughout the Middle East and North Africa hail from the Babylonian conquest of ancient Israel, Yehuda, which is how we got our name, Yehudim, or Jews. Fifty years after that conquest, the Persian empire conquered the Babylonian empire and not only allowed the Jews to go home, but helped rebuild the Temple — the wall still remaining today in Jerusalem. Many Jews nonetheless stayed put or migrated throughout the Asian and African continents — including my family, who remained on the land of Babylon until being exiled from Iraq in 1950. We are collectively known as the Mizrahim.

Contrary to popular belief, Arab Muslims are not indigenous throughout the Middle East and North Africa; rather, they rose up from the Arabian Peninsula and conquered the region, similar to the Christian crusaders of Europe. Many indigenous ethnicities and religions predated the Arab Muslim presence by well over a millennia — including Jews, Persians and Kurds. Still, all were subject to the whims of Muslim rule — including the injunction that all women, including Jewish women, had to wear the local variations of the hijab.

I inherited my grandmother’s abaya, a black silk head-to-toe garment that she wore in the blazing heat of Baghdad, day after day. In the introduction to first edition of my 2003 book, “The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage,” I talked about coming across this garment in the attic of my parents’ house in the Bay Area, where I grew up. After putting it on, I looked in the mirror — two brown eyes peering back at me, with my face and body otherwise shrouded in black.

How did my grandmother feel wearing it? I wondered. I will never know, because the stories of my family were filtered through my father, lacking the woman’s perspective.

When I first finished compiling and editing my anthology, 30 years ago, it was in fact called “Behind the Veil of Silence” — not only because of the theme of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish women physically wearing the veil, but also because of additionally being shrouded by a veil of obscurity in each of the communities to which we belong/don’t belong.

Case in point: Nobody wanted to publish the anthology for another decade — not the Jewish press, the people-of-color press, or the feminist press. I was told we needed to include Ashkenazi women, non-Jewish women of color, and even men, to make the book relevant or valid. Standing on principle and integrity, I insisted that we were relevant and valid in our own right, and over the years, could wallpaper my apartment with rejection letters.

Then 9/11 happened; consciousness shifted; I had several top literary agents fighting over the book; and ultimately, one of the many publishers I had approached years prior ended up publishing the book in 2003. By then, everyone was writing books about Middle Eastern women and veils, so I ended up having to change the title. The veil, however, remained and remains not only an apt metaphor for the invisibility of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish women, but also for our collective physical experience of donning the veil under Muslim rule.

Which all goes to say, the murder of Mahsa Amini, and the subsequent uprising in Iran, not only feel very personal to me, but are inextricably intertwined with Jewish identity and history. From this deeply personal and Jewish place, I wrote the poem “#MahsaAmini” just a day or two after Amini’s murder, and months later, I turned it into a song, incorporating the style of traditional Middle Eastern Jewish prayers. My band finished developing the song several weeks ago, just in time to release it on Saturday, the anniversary of Amini’s death.

On the day the song automatically begins streaming, I will be chanting the ancient Iraqi prayers for Rshana (Rosh Hashanah). Come to think of it, as the first woman worldwide that I know of to publicly lead Sephardi/Mizrahi prayers, starting back in the early 1990s, and having led the women’s section of an Iraqi synagogue in an uprising back in the 1980s, when I was just 14, the timing is perhaps a particularly fitting coincidence.

I recently let numerous Jewish media outlets know about the release, with little traction, and one responding that while it is “truly a powerful and important song…we don’t think there’s a clear enough Jewish component to cover.” Out of curiosity, I looked up articles on the Ukraine war in this very same outlet, and found numerous articles on the topic.

How is the Ukraine war more Jewish than the Iranian uprising? The difference is one of Ashkenazi perspective and frame of reference. Despite the strides of Jewish multiculturalism permeating mainstream Jewish consciousness; despite Persian Jewish history predating European Jewish history by as much as two millennia; and despite Mizrahim comprising between 50% and 70% of Israel’s Jewish population since the mid-20th century, “Iran” still does not equate with “Jewish,” whereas countries like Ukraine, Poland and Germany do.

It’s a vicious cycle: As Jewish institutes continue to fail entirely, or at least adequately, to teach about Jewish history and heritage from outside Central and Eastern Europe — despite ample opportunities and resources to do so — and as that which is Sephardi/Mizrahi and Ethiopian-Jewish continue to be treated as extracurricular and optional, contemporary issues significant for global Jewry will continue to seem entirely disconnected from Jewish relevance, and will be neither discussed nor taught, with the ignorance creating more ignorance.

The uprising raises so many decidedly Jewish questions: Where was the world’s outrage when Jews were being lynched publicly in Iran? How does the Persian Jewish community experience this new revolution? Can the older Iranians now recognize Jews as the canaries in the coal mine of the 1970s Iranian revolution?

Then there’s the fact that Jews are part of the revolutionary leadership in Iran. Take Armita Abbasi, a young woman whose name I deliberately speak in the #MahsaAmini song. After Abbasi led a demonstration, police arrested and gang-raped her repeatedly, otherwise tortured her, and barred her family from a hospital visit. Photos of Abbasi show her proudly wearing a Star of David necklace, and I imagine police were delighted by the two-for-one opportunity to destroy both a woman and a Jew.

The beauty of Jewish multicultural consciousness is that it inherently teaches there is no us/them. Jews are an integral part of the fabric of every society and culture around the world. We are the connecting thread, the bridge between the gaps of humanity. When we step into this consciousness, we can transmute divisive thinking that currently plagues our world. And perhaps then, we can truly serve as a light unto the nations.


The post Why is the Ukraine war more Jewish than the Iranian uprising? A year after Mahsa Amini’s death, that should change. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Treasure Trove: How a Polish-Jewish artist told Canadians about the horrors of Nazi Germany and produced beautiful illustrations

Arthur Szyk (1894-1951) was a Polish-Jewish artist whose work reflected the historic times he lived: the two world wars, the rise of totalitarianism in Europe and the birth of the State of Israel. In 1940, with the support of the British government and the Polish government-in-exile, he visited Canada to popularize the struggle against Nazism. […]

The post Treasure Trove: How a Polish-Jewish artist told Canadians about the horrors of Nazi Germany and produced beautiful illustrations appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Biden hits Fundraising Trail in Show of Strength after Dismal Debate Performance

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., June 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz/File Photo

President Joe Biden embarks on a series of fundraising events across two states on Saturday as he works to stamp out a crisis of confidence in his re-election campaign following a feeble debate performance that dismayed his fellow Democrats.

Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will visit the upscale New York beach enclave known as the Hamptons for a campaign fundraiser hosted by hedge-fund billionaire Barry Rosentein. Later in the day, he will travel to New Jersey for a fundraiser hosted by wealthy New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, a Democrat.

Fellow hedge-fund founder Eric Mindich and his Tony Award-winning producer wife Stacey, celebrity couple Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, and actor Michael J. Fox are all listed as members of the host committee at the New York event, according to an invitation seen by Reuters.

Biden told a rally in North Carolina on Friday he intended to defeat Republican rival Donald Trump in the November presidential election, giving no sign he would heed calls from Democrats who want him to drop out of the race.

Biden‘s verbal stumbles and occasionally meandering responses during Thursday night’s debate heightened voter concerns that the 81-year-old might not be fit to serve another four-year term.

The Biden campaign on Saturday boasted it had raised more than $27 million between debate day through Friday evening, but questions remain about whether the debate performance will hurt fundraising, at least in the short term.

The post Biden hits Fundraising Trail in Show of Strength after Dismal Debate Performance first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Arab League Rescinds the Classification of Hezbollah as a Terrorist Group

Mourners carry a coffin during the funeral of Wissam Tawil, a commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces who according to Lebanese security sources was killed during an Israeli strike on south Lebanon, in Khirbet Selm, Lebanon, Jan. 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Aziz Taher

i24 NewsThe Arab League no longer defines Hezbollah as a proscribed terrorist group, an official said on Saturday.

Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based Shiite militia and a proxy of the Islamic regime in Iran, boasts the world’s largest rocket arsenal of any non-state actor. It is animated by the antisemitic ideology of jihad and is committed to the destruction of Israel.

“In earlier Arab League decisions, Hezbollah was designated as a terrorist organization, and this designation was reflected in the resolutions,” Hossam Zaki, the assistant secretary-general of the Arab League, was quoted in Arab media as saying.

“The League’s member states concurred that the labeling of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization should no longer be employed,” Zaki said, adding that the regional body “does not maintain terrorist lists and does not actively seek to designate entities in such a manner.”

Hezbollah has unleashed numerous rockets, mortars and drones on northern Israel in the past eight months starting on October 8, a day after the Jewish state suffered the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust at the hands of the Palestinian jihadists of Hamas.

The post Arab League Rescinds the Classification of Hezbollah as a Terrorist Group first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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