Persian Jewry

This story from Tablet is worth reading.

For centuries, Persian Jews marked the holiday of Purim by traveling to the shrine in Hamadan. There they were often joined by Christian and Muslim supplicants seeking divine cures to infertility and other human ailments.... The memories of Persian Jews born in Iran are increasingly all that remain of their heritage. The Hamadan shrine is not the only site at risk of destruction. In April 2008, for example, seven ancient synagogues in Tehran’s historically Jewish Oudlajan district were razed to make way for high-rise developments.

The greater and lesser Seitan: Iran and cooking for inlaws

I just finished a meal with olives and gorgonzola, as well as lemon juice and parsley, cooked for Koreans. (And praise seitan made from scratch. Not bad for a first try, but I wonder if it will get better.) Talk about culturally inappropriate. Dong-sa trying the gorgonzola with chopsticks before not adding any to his dish was... Yes, I intentionally try to cook just outside guests' comfort range. For my wife and her sister, it can sometimes be wonderful experience. My wife previously couldn't stand olives. But with multiple guests, Dong-sa gets screwed.

Anyway, I've mostly stayed off the events in Iran. Despite personal interest, I've largely limited the topics on this blog in a way that they previously didn't seem to fit. But I do need to pass along this bit of news. Chavez is supporting Ahmadinejad. Chavez is no Leftist, but is often inexplicably treated as such. Screwiness on the Left often has repurcussions for Jews, so this was a good excuse to share.

And while I'm at it, let me recommend Richard Jeffrey Newman's careful interpretations. Often, democracy is best understood as institutionalized power for the individual. But often, for the sake of moving beyond dualism, it is better understood as the ability of the government to listen to the people. Newman bridges that gap as well as anyone.

Update: My wife instists it's dong-SUH. Like I'm some kind of expert transliterator.

J street already "too Jewish"

Judeosphere notes that JStreet is already saying things "progressives" will hate. What will the moderates say when "more progressive" people start saying that they knew all along that it would just be another arm in the Zionist Lobby.

Vaguely related, since, as Judeosphere noted, J Street is concerned about Iran ("US policy towards Iran is not working. The threat of a nuclear Iran, its destabilizing regional influence and the vile rhetoric of its President are all real":) Seven ancient synagogues in the Iranian capital, Tehran, have been destroyed by local authorities

Presentographies

I recently linked to Benny Morris's article on how history is used to demonize Jews. The same sort of thing happens often with the present. Consider the case of the IAEA reports and the US National Intelligence Estimate when it comes to Iran. So much contextualization and minimization (in the name of not demonizing anyone) gets used to demonize Israel and Jews who are worried about the very real threat posed by Iran. Instead of dealing with the facts of the matter, Jews are accused of acting out of that "2,000 year old panic" (as it's described in Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite recently reviewed by Christopher Hitchens on the occassion of its re-release). The facts, as related in a New York Times article here at Middle East Analysis: the IAEA did write that Iran cooperated -in part, but not on some particularly concerning matters. And the NIE report not only concluded that Iran had been, at some point, working on nuclear weapons; it concluded that Iran was still working on part of its nuclear program:

Since the intelligence report came out, America's allies have spun all kinds of theories about the internal machinations that led to it, including that intelligence analysts were boxing Mr. Bush in, preventing him from taking military action against Iran's nuclear sites.

Officials who worked on the report have denied any such intent. The director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, told Congress he now regretted how the intelligence estimate was presented, saying it failed to emphasize that Iran was moving ahead with the hardest part of any bomb project: producing the fuel.

A few links to substitute for substance

Marko Hoare accuses Western Leftists of stupifying moral relevance. It would seem that, in the face of brutal repression from the state in West Bengal, Chomsky, Zinn, et al. have decided to blame the oppressed for disrupting the unified front of anti-imperialism by being beaten so loudly.

It's been wonderful to hear lately that the latest intelligence estimate suggests that Iran probably does not have an active nuclear weapons program. Judeosphere points out something some may overlook though. Iran did have an active nuclear weapons program. (Actually, from what I understand, Iran's continuing enrichment program can be seen as part of a disjointed, semi-active program.) So, there's much greater likelihood that there's time for negotiations to prove fruitful. Iran is now to be viewed as a slightly less immediate threat. But for all the people who said there was never such a program, perhaps because it was consired haram - you're the one's who have been proven to be the most wrong.

On the other hand, Norm Geras points out that some view this latest National Intelligence Estimate as a continuation of the idiocy of politicized intelligence.

Sepia Mutiny has a discussion of hate crime statistics in the US. Unfortunately, such statistics so far rely on the Uniform Crime Reports, in other words on crimes actually reported to the authorities. Since some groups, such as illegal immigrants, may not be as trusting of authorities as other groups, the statistics are rather hard to read. The National Crime Victim Survey, especially when used in conjunction with other means, is somewhat better but started tallying hate crimes only more recently. In that context, it's interesting to note how the readership responds to the surprisingly (to them - I've come across this before) high rates of antisemitic hate crimes.
And what to say to those who think it's a plot organized by the ADL?

And, if you haven't seen Mitchell Cohen's article on "Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn," check it out now. But also see Judeosphere's post on the article. When it was the Stalin disguising antisemitic propaganda as "anti-Zionist," the Guardian got it right. Well, the people quoting Stalin are a bit different today, but the propaganda isn't. The Left hasn't merely failed to learn; it has regressed.

For the first time since the anti-Zionist campaign began, the Kremlin has seen fit to categorically deny that anti-Zionism can be equated with anti-Semitism. The denial was made in a leading article of the Soviet Army newspaper, Red Star, on Friday. And the choice of vehicle is significant since it is in the Soviet Army that latent anti-Semitism has always been most strong. The struggle against Zionism, Red Star declares, has nothing to do with anti-Semitism: Zionism is the enemy of the working people all over the world, of Jews no less than Gentiles.

Certainly Stalin has only himself to blame for the common Western assumption that he has taken over Hitler’s mantle as the chief persecutor of Jewry. Although Zionism, as distinct from Jewry, has consistently been made the chief scapegoat of the new terror, the constant stress laid on the Jewish origin of nearly all those individually indicted has given the impression in the Soviet Union, no less than in the outside world, that the Jews as such are the target.