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Meet the 2 Jews of Guyana, a South American nation with a tradition of religious tolerance
(JTA) — When Janet Jagan, an immigrant from the United States, made history by becoming Guyana’s prime minister in 1997, she was thought to be the country’s only Jew.
In fact, another Jew had recently purchased an island off the coast of Guyana, and 25 years later, there are at least two Jews living in the tiny South American nation. One is a Guyanese-British-Israeli guesthouse operator who has been working in Guyana since the 1970s. The other is a former Madison Avenue marketing executive from Chicago who until recently ran the country’s largest tour operator.
Both offer a window into three dynamics that define Guyana: a government that embraces all faiths, an economy based on extractive industries and an expansive rainforest the country hopes will be a draw for its growing ecotourism industry.
Guyana, an English-speaking country of roughly 800,000, came to international prominence in 1978 as the site of the Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones were killed, either by suicide or murder.
These days, though, the country is drawing attention for the recent discovery of oil off its coast. ExxonMobil announced the discovery in 2015 and promptly began developing Guyana’s oil resources. With over 11 billion barrels of reserves and producing over 350,000 barrels per day, Guyana is on track to produce more than 1 million daily barrels by 2030, potentially transforming one of South America’s poorest countries.
It was an earlier extractive industry that first brought Raphael Ades to Guyana. Born in Tel Aviv in 1951 to an Italian-Jewish mother and a Syrian-Jewish father, Ades had a peripatetic childhood. The family moved first to Milan when Ades, who goes by Rafi, was 11, after his father Meyer entered the diamond trade, then two years later to southwestern Germany. They landed in Pforzheim, known at the time as Goldstadt because of the prominence of jewelry and precious stone trading locally.
But the family was not yet settled: In 1967, Meyer took the family to London, where Ades finished high school and took his university entrance exams, excelling in all of the languages he had picked up — English, French, Italian, German and Hebrew. As a psychology student at the University of London, Ades began helping his father, who maintained an office in London’s diamond district, at work. His father contracted out the polishing, and one of the polishers was Indo-Guyanese.
“That day, my dad took out the atlas and started to read up on Guyana,” Ades recalled. “‘This is somewhere I want to go,’ he told me.”
During a trip to visit an Israeli friend in Venezuela, Meyer went on a prospecting trip to Guyana, and registered the Guyana Diamond Export company. When he suffered a heart attack, Ades and his mother flew to Georgetown to be with him. Barely 21, Ades stepped in to take a larger role in the business. He flew with other diamond buyers into the rural mining areas, and learned the operations were producing thousands of carats of diamonds.
“I stayed in Guyana through the second half of 1972 and fell in love with the place,” Ades recalled. “I went to the [main] Stabroek market in Georgetown, seeing all of the iguanas and macaws. When my dad recuperated, I started going back to Guyana myself.”
His mining business thrived. In 1997, he bought Sloth Island, a 160-acre outpost about a two-hour journey from Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, requiring an hour-long car ride through the small villages that dot the Atlantic coast, and then an hour’s boat ride down the widening Essequibo River, passing pristine forests lined with mangroves and Indigenous villages.
When Ades bought the property, it was mostly underwater. He brought in workers from neighboring villages to pump out the water, build up the sand and retaining walls and add structures. Sloths were already there, but he brought ocelots and monkeys from neighboring islands, as well as other birds. (The ocelots, he said, used to eat the electrical wires and open the fridge.)
Now anchoring Sloth Island is a blue and white guesthouse, a series of covered huts for dining and hammock relaxation and a wooden walkway for nature walks through partially cleared forest. Indigenous guides identify the numerous species of plants and birds. The pandemic has receded as a threat to business, and the island hosts tourists every weekend — though climate change is presenting new issues.
“There are many times that the river floods part of the island and I lose sand and soil,” Ades said. “We have to keep on pumping out water and repairing damage to the buildings when that happens.”
The year after he bought the island, his widowed mother, then living in Belgium, broke her hip. When she was well enough to travel she moved to Guyana to be with her son, dividing her time between Georgetown and Sloth Island. When she died in 2009, Ades was at a loss given the lack of a Jewish cemetery, synagogue, and minyan required to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. He was interested in burying her across from Sloth Island, on a hill in the mining town of Bartica just across the river. But a Jewish friend from France facilitated a connection with the Surinamese Jewish community, who prepared the body for burial in the cemetery adjacent to Paramaribo’s main synagogue.
“That’s the last time I was in a synagogue, in 2010, after my mother passed,” Ades recalled.
A view of Raphael Ades’ resort on Sloth Island. (Seth Wikas)
The absence of Jews in Guyana is a notable lacuna in a country that otherwise boasts a broad range of religions. History records a colony of Dutch Jews who settled in northwestern Guyana in the 17th century to produce sugarcane, but the English destroyed that colony in 1666, dispersing the Jewish residents. Jews from Arab lands moved to Guyana in the late 19th and 20th centuries to escape persecution but then migrated elsewhere; Jews fleeing Europe came in 1939 but did not settle long enough to establish a sustained community.
Janet Jagan was an anomaly: Born Janet Rosenberg in Chicago, she married a Guyanese man in the United States and moved with him to Guyana in 1947. Her father Cheddi Jagan was trained as a dentist but entered politics as Guyana gained independence from Great Britain, serving as the first premier of the semi-independent colonial government in the early 1960s and then as the country’s fourth president in the 1990s. When he died in 1997, Janet Jagan was sworn in as his replacement and then won a term of her own later that year. She died in 2009.
According to the 2012 census, Guyana is about two-thirds Christian, a quarter Hindu, and less than 10% Muslim, with smaller populations of Rastafarians and Baha’is. Guyana’s cities and towns are dotted with churches, mandirs and mosques, and the country has enshrined freedom of religion in its constitution. Christian, Hindu and Muslim holy days are national holidays.
“We embrace all faiths and are always looking to build bridges across communities,” Mansoor Baksh, a leader within the country’s Islamic Ahmadiyya movement, told JTA. Omkaar Sharma, a member of the country’s Hindu Pandit Council, said something similar: “We have a long tradition of co-existence and celebrating each other’s holidays. It’s what makes Guyana special.”
On the occasion of the Hindu festival of Diwali last month, President Mohamed Irfaan Ali, South America’s only Muslim head of government, emphasized the country’s inclusivity when he told the nation: “Under the One Guyana banner, our people are coming together, rejecting the forces of division and hatred, and uniting in the pursuit of peace, progress and prosperity.”
The sentiments have had practical implications for the country’s two Jews. In 2017, when a Guyana Tourism Authority group was slated to travel to Suriname for a conference on travel catering to Muslim tourists, the Mauritanian organizer of the event protested the presence of Jewish participants. There were supposed to be two: Ades, and Andrea de Caires, then head of the country’s largest private tour operator, Wilderness Explorers.
“I got a call from the Guyanese Tourism Minister at 1 a.m., who asked me if I was Jewish, and he explained the situation. And I thought, this [antisemitism] is still going on in the world?” de Caires remembered.
The Guyanese tourism minister refused to abide by the ban, de Caires proudly said, and told the Surinamese hosts and conference organizers: “If Jews aren’t allowed, then none of us are going.” The Surinamese, long known for their religious tolerance, also refused to accept the prohibition, and said that all participants were welcome (in Suriname’s capital Paramaribo, a mosque stands next to a synagogue and they share a parking lot). Both de Caires and Ades attended the event.
“When I arrived at the conference, the Surinamese minister of tourism welcomed me, and the director general of Guyana’s tourism ministry gave me the microphone to open the conference. We [Rafi and I] went in with our heads held high,” de Caires said.
De Caires has lived in Guyana since 2010 but her path to Guyana took a different route from Ades’. Born Andrea Levine in Chicago as the granddaughter of a rabbi, she traveled extensively as a child with her physician father, who taught her the importance of creating a Jewish home.
“Judaism was always a part of my life — we celebrated the holidays, lit candles on Friday night, but my father would often say, ‘Going to temple doesn’t make you Jewish,’” Caires said.
De Caires moved to New Jersey and trained as a jeweler, working with clients that included Tiffany’s. She transitioned to working at Bloomingdale’s in sales and then management, and then she moved on to the cosmetic company Borghese, where she became vice president of sales and marketing.
“I got caught up in Madison Avenue, a single mom of three kids, and then I met Salvador,” she recalled. “And I knew there was no point in pursuing a relationship if I wouldn’t move to Guyana.”
Salvador is Salvador de Caires, her Guyanese husband whom she met through her sister. Visiting Guyana for the first time in 2008, she fondly recalled her first visit to the Karanambu Lodge in the country’s south, a former cattle ranch that is now a conservation hub sitting at the center of Guyana’s forests, rivers, and savannahs. The most accessible route is via airplane from Georgetown and then four-by-four vehicle. While based at the lodge, de Caires continued to take conference calls for her New York-based career, while learning more about Guyana and the business of running a tourist destination off the beaten path. She and Salvador moved permanently to Guyana in 2010 to take over the day-to-day management of the lodge.
“When we moved to Guyana, it never occurred to me there would never be a Jewish community here. There’s a Jewish community everywhere,” de Caires remembered thinking. “That was pretty startling.”
Andrea de Caires is shown with Guyanese President Irfaan Ali. (Courtesy of de Caires)
So when they moved from Karanambu in 2016 to work at (and eventually lead) Wilderness Explorers in Georgetown, de Caires was committed to opening her home to Guyanese friends and neighbors with Hanukkah parties and Passover seders.
“The first year we had a Hanukkah party, our invitation went out for latkes and black cake (a traditional Guyanese dish), and we had government ministers, ambassadors and local friends over,” she recalled. “I told the story of the holiday and we lit the candles.”
It wasn’t the first time de Caires had been single handedly responsible for the fostering Jewish traditions in Guyana. She recalled an incident in 2012 when a Colombian-Jewish tourist came to Karanambu Lodge during Passover and asked her to make matzah brei. Under a thatched roof, she was able to make the holiday delicacy for her visitor.
For Ades, too, it is hosting that makes him most appreciate his chosen home in Guyana.
“I will always remember Feb. 1, 1963, the day we left Israel. We had always planned to return,” he said. “But I’m still here. Between then and now I have lived in so many places, and Guyana has been my home for a very long time. One of the best parts of my week is meeting new people who come to Sloth Island — people of different backgrounds from around the world. It is wonderful to welcome them all.”
De Caires plans to share her Jewish traditions once again next month, hosting another Hanukkah party for her Guyanese friends and neighbors. And with the worst of the pandemic in the rearview mirror, both Ades and de Caires are looking forward to booming tourist seasons. De Caires and her husband are also ready to begin a new professional chapter: They recently accepted new positions with a Guyanese conglomerate to develop its tourism operations at a riverine resort.
Does de Caires feel like she has lost something by establishing roots in a place without an established Jewish community?
“If I left here, that would mean there’s one less person to support others [including Jews],” de Caires replied. “I think it’s interesting Rafi and I are both in tourism — you need to have a lot of tenacity, but it’s important that we welcome others to this beautiful country.”
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Quotation Marks That Silence Iran
Traces of an Iranian missile attack in Tehran’s sky, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 3, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
There are times when journalism errs not in what it states — but in how it chooses to frame the issue. Quotation marks, the ultimate symbol of fidelity to another’s words, can also become instruments of distortion when stripped of the conditions in which those voices exist: fear, coercion, and imposed silence.
Recently, the British newspaper The Guardian — one of the most influential media outlets in the world — published the following statement from a man in Tehran: “Nothing good can come of this, since obviously the US and Israel don’t give a damn about the Iranian people.”
Presented in quotation marks, the phrase acquires an air of legitimacy. But what is not in quotation marks is precisely what matters most: who can speak freely within Iran.
The statement appeared in an article whose title was, in itself, a warning: “Iran calls on young people to form human chains around power plants as Trump deadline looms.”
The article described an official call for young people to surround power plants as a deadline set by the United States approached, under threat of attack. This was not a marginal detail, but the very core of the report: civilians being summoned to physically occupy potential targets — a practice that, by deliberately exposing the population to risk, violates not only international law, but any basic notion of humanity.
The coverage noted that attacks on civilian infrastructure can constitute war crimes, a correct — but incomplete — statement. It omitted the fact that the use of civilians as human shields, or the deliberate placement of populations in the line of fire, is equally a grave violation of international humanitarian law. This is not an isolated practice: the Iranian regime and its proxies have repeatedly relied on the exposure — and, ultimately, the sacrifice — of civilians as a method of warfare, both in defense and in attack. In its most literal sense, this is terrorism.
The question, then, is not only what this man said, but under what conditions he could have said anything different.
The reality is unequivocal. Estimates from independent organizations indicate that the death toll from the 2026 protests in Iran may have reached as high as 43,000 — people killed for daring to challenge the regime. This is part of a systematic policy of repression.
The executions of young protesters continue, often under charges such as “war against God” — a vague formulation that, in practice, turns dissent into a capital crime. In Iran, disagreement is not merely dangerous. It is, daily, a death sentence.
This pattern is neither new nor incidental. For years, the Iranian regime has exercised strict controls over information, suppressing dissent not only through force, but through fear that shapes what can be said — and what must remain unsaid.
Journalists operate under severe restrictions, and ordinary citizens face imprisonment or worse for statements deemed disloyal. In such an environment, even seemingly spontaneous public opinion becomes inseparable from the boundaries imposed by the state. What is presented to the outside world as a civilian voice may, in reality, be a reflection of survival.
This dynamic is further compounded by the regime’s broader strategy, often mirrored by its regional proxies, of embedding military objectives within civilian spaces. The result is a systematic blurring of lines between combatant and non-combatant — one that not only endangers lives, but also distorts how those lives are represented in global narratives. In Iran, what is said cannot be taken at face value—nor should it be presented as such.
So is it legitimate to treat a statement gathered under a system that punishes dissent with death as an authentic expression of public opinion? Or are we, however unintentionally, amplifying the narrative of a regime that controls words?
When the international press publishes quotes without acknowledging the climate of coercion in which they are spoken, it risks becoming a vehicle for propaganda.
Quotation marks are not neutral. They carry the weight of what can be said — and of everything that has been silenced.
In authoritarian regimes, the question is not only whether we are listening — but what, exactly, we are being allowed to hear. By ignoring context, are we helping create the conditions for Iranians to one day speak freely — or are we helping silence them for good?
Nira Broner Worcman is a Brazilian journalist, CEO of Art Presse Communications, and author of A Sisyphean Task (translated from the Brazilian edition, Enxugando Gelo), on media coverage of the war between Israel and terrorist groups. She was a Knight Science Fellow at MIT and earned her master’s degree at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program.
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The Pakistan Gambit: Why Islamabad’s Mediation Should Worry Israel
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif meet in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 17, 2025. Photo: Saudi Press Agency/Handout via REUTERS
The two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran has been widely celebrated as a triumph of Pakistani diplomacy. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has received effusive international praise, and Islamabad has positioned itself as the indispensable broker of a deal that pulled the region back from the edge of catastrophic escalation.
The congratulations, however, are premature. For Israel and for American policymakers thinking seriously about long-term regional security, the architecture of this ceasefire and the identity of its architect should raise as many questions as the ceasefire itself.
Let’s start with what Pakistan actually is in this equation.
Islamabad is not a neutral party in the conventional sense. It shares a long border, and deep cultural and religious ties with Iran. It represents Iranian diplomatic interests in Washington, where Tehran maintains no embassy. It is home to the world’s second-largest Shia Muslim population. It has simultaneously cultivated a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia and maintains a close alliance with China, which is Iran’s largest trading partner — and which, according to reporting, helped bring Tehran to the negotiating table.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister coordinated with counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt before flying to Beijing for further consultations. This is not the profile of a disinterested mediator. It is the profile of a state managing an extraordinarily complex set of overlapping interests, some of which are structurally misaligned with the security requirements of the United States and Israel.
Field Marshal Asim Munir’s personal rapport with Donald Trump is real, and it clearly mattered in the final hours before the deadline. But personal rapport is not a substitute for strategic alignment. The same Pakistani military establishment that built this relationship with the Trump White House has also spent decades maintaining ties with actors whose interests are fundamentally hostile to the American-led regional order.
Pakistan does not formally recognize Israel. It has never been part of the Abraham Accords architecture. It has no stake in ensuring that any final agreement with Iran leaves the Jewish State with an enhanced (or acceptable) security environment. Its interest is in ending a war that was disrupting its oil imports, threatening regional stability on its doorstep, and straining an economy already under severe stress. Those are legitimate national interests, but they are Pakistan’s interests, not Israel’s or America’s.
The contradiction at the heart of this ceasefire emerged almost immediately. Sharif declared publicly that the truce covered the conflict everywhere, explicitly including Lebanon. Netanyahu’s office issued a correction within hours, stating clearly that the ceasefire does not extend to Lebanon, where Israel continues operations against Iranian-backed Hezbollah. That is not a minor discrepancy in diplomatic language. It reflects a fundamental divergence in what the parties believe they agreed to.
Iran and Pakistan have an interest in framing the ceasefire as broadly as possible, foreclosing Israeli military options across every front simultaneously. Israel has an interest in preserving its freedom of action in Lebanon, which remains a live theater of operations with direct implications for its northern security. The fact that the broker of this deal publicly endorsed the Iranian and Pakistani interpretation, rather than the Israeli one, tells you something important about where Islamabad’s equities actually lie.
Then there is the deeper problem of what Iran brought to the table. The framework Tehran submitted includes demands for the lifting of all sanctions, release of frozen assets, American military withdrawal from regional bases, war reparations, and explicit recognition of Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment. This is not the negotiating position of a country that has been strategically defeated. It is a maximalist agenda that, if accepted in whole or in part, would leave Iran in a stronger regional position than it occupied before the war began.
The Iranian leadership has been explicit internally that it views the ceasefire as a validation of its wartime objectives. That self-assessment should be taken seriously. Regimes that believe they have won tend to negotiate accordingly.
The Islamabad talks will be shaped by this opening dynamic. The United States enters those negotiations having accepted Iran’s 10-point proposal as a workable basis for discussion, under time pressure, brokered by a state with deep ties to Tehran and no relationship with Israel. The agenda will be set by the parties who designed the framework. Iran’s nuclear file, its ballistic missile program, and its proxy network across the Levant will all be subject to negotiation in an environment that is structurally tilted toward Iranian preferences.
Israel’s task in the coming two weeks is to ensure that Washington understands the distinction between ending a war and ending a threat. A ceasefire that reopens the Strait of Hormuz while leaving Iran’s centrifuges operational is not a security achievement. It is a commercial arrangement with an existential footnote. A final agreement that includes American military retrenchment from the region under Iranian pressure is not stability. It is the precondition for the next conflict, fought under worse conditions.
Pakistan may have earned its diplomatic moment. But the morning and days after a ceasefire is when the real negotiation begins, and Israel cannot afford to let Islamabad write the terms.
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx
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How South Africa Embraced Iran — and Isolated Its Own People
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Chatsworth, South Africa, May 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Rogan Ward
It’s sometimes tough to be a proud South African. Not because of the place or her people, but because the African National Congress (ANC), the political party that leads our current “government of national unity” and which was once the party of Nelson Mandela, has become an abject embarrassment — and destroyed the ideals it was founded on.
On the domestic front, they have led the country into ruin, as massive levels of governmental incompetence and corruption have led to literally crumbling infrastructure, ruinous public institutions, massive wealth inequality, and one of the highest violent crime rates in the world.
And yet, however disgraceful the ANC has been in local matters, they’re even worse in foreign policy, where the government has aligned itself with the absolute worst, most despotic regimes on the planet. But more than cozying up to Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, it’s the ANC’s close relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran (and its proxies) that is the darkest stain on its increasingly tarnished reputation.
The ANC and the Islamic Republic: Brothers in Arms
The ANC and the Islamic Republic have over the years built a relationship that is almost romantic in its intensity and faithfulness. Never has the ANC had a bad word to say about the regime, and never has the regime failed to correspond in kind. Though, of course, the ANC’s loyalty is not entirely freely given reports that it clearly enjoys some financial support from the Islamic Republic.
Either way, whether out of misplaced loyalty to their “fellow revolutionaries” or mercenary self-interest, the ANC has stood by the Islamic Republic through thick and thin; through its nuclear ambitions, its persecution of religious minorities, and its mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent protesters.
The South African government was one of the few around the world to mourn the death of Ali Khamenei — and even as it has effectively cut diplomatic ties with Israel, even refusing the offer of Israeli NGOs to help solve the country’s water problems and to help fix our decrepit national health services, it proudly hosts all sorts of senior Iranian regime officials and maintains ever close ties to the Iranian embassy here.
Unsurprisingly, the ANC’s years-long relationship with the Islamic Republic intensified almost exponentially in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023. South Africa and the ANC immediately shifted the focus from the Israeli victims, to Palestinians who it said were experiencing “genocide,” “war crimes,” and “apartheid” before Israel’s defensive war even started.
Aside from taking Israel to international court, the ANC supported all of the attacks taken by Iran and its proxies against Israel. And then came the current war between Iran and the combined forces of the United States and Israel, and things took a bit of a turn once again.
Of Moral Bankruptcy and Terrible Alliances
To those of us paying attention, it’s been all but impossible to miss how different the ANC’s role has been in this war. The Islamic Republic clearly hasn’t used the ANC to constantly legitimize its cause or to propagate its propaganda in the way it did during the Gaza war. It doesn’t need to.
The ANC has already played its role perfectly in turning Israel into the ultimate aggressor on the world stage, and with President Trump’s historically low popularity both at home and abroad, the Islamic Republic may have already won what may be the most crucial battle for its survival: the war over public opinion.
And yet, even as the ANC tries to walk a fine line in not alienating Washington completely and has tried to present itself as a neutral party in the war — even offering to mediate talks between the Islamic Republic and the US — its allegiances remain as clear as ever.
Though it’s hardly the first liberal-democratic government to chafe with the Trump administration, the ANC-captured Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) has seemingly done everything in its power to antagonize Trump. Don’t get me wrong, Trump being Trump, a lot of this is his fault, especially with his insistence on there being a “white genocide” happening in South Africa and being decidedly undiplomatic in his thoughts on the ANC. But he’s also right about certain things. There really is no “white genocide” — as President Ramaphosa pointed out correctly, it’s not a question of race but of a high crime rate that targets everyone equally (this is somehow good news?) — but Trump is hardly imagining the ANC’s incompetence or its troubling tight relationships with the enemies of the free world.
The simple, inescapable truth is that the ANC is far more tolerant of tyrants and Islamist theocracies than it is of its fellow liberal-democracies.
Regardless of what you think of the current war in Iran, the ANC’s behavior towards the Islamic Republic since it massacred its own citizens by the tens of thousands over just a couple of days, has been nothing less than disgraceful.
It has also created an environment in South Africa where institutions fall directly in line with its terrible foreign policy. The University of Pretoria, for example, has stoked all kinds of controversy for its decision to “platform” the Islamic Republic’s ambassador to South Africa, while the University of Cape Town has decided to bestow an honorary doctorate on Imtiaz Sooliman, the “philanthropist” and founder of Gift of the Givers, known for his antisemitic statements — and especially his concerning ties to various radical Islamist groups.
A Million Wrongs Make a Right?
There is, however, a silver lining or two in all of this. The ANC is such an unmitigated train wreck at this point that it might be good that it is currently standing so fully on the wrong side of history. It has shown itself to be so wildly incompetent, corrupt, and morally twisted that it would almost be worse if it stood with America and Israel in all of this.
More hopefully, South Africa itself may benefit most from the ANC’s dreadful alliances, ironically. Ten years ago, the thought of the ANC losing power in the country was all but unthinkable — but given what’s happened over the past decade, that might be changing.
What is truly miraculous about all this, though, is that despite everything, South Africa genuinely remains a great place to be a Jew. Yes, there is still some antisemitism and like all Diaspora communities we still need armed security at our shuls, schools, and communal events, but despite the ANC’s best efforts to ingratiate itself to our very worst enemies, there is far less antisemitism here than in most countries and, at least within broadly Jewish and/or cosmopolitan areas, seldom any real need to hide our Jewishness.
And it is of the greatest of all possible ironies that we largely have the ANC to thank for this. At least the version of it that was around in 1994 — that crafted such an inclusive constitution and did its very best to engender a society where bigotry of any sort is entirely unacceptable. Except, of course, to sing “Kill the Boer.”