"A few years ago, in response to a #Palestinian critic who made a disparaging remark about the fact that I don’t speak #Arabic, I felt compelled to write an article explaining why that is the case. I said that under different circumstances, I could have been born in an #Arab country and grown up speaking Arabic. My father’s family had been settled in #Iraq for generations, but they fled to #England in 1941—the same year that #Baghdad’s #Jews were convulsed by a June #pogrom known as the #farhud—presaging a much larger exodus of Iraqi Jews over the next decade.
Among my father and his relatives, there was little nostalgia for the old country, and therefore no reason, as they saw it, to ensure that their children born outside Iraq learned Arabic. It’s not that they didn’t appreciate the centrality of Iraq to Jewish history..."
https://www.jns.org/u.s.-news/does-iraq-deserve-the-return-of-its-jewish-archive












