The Jews.

The Jews of Baghdad.

I would like to open discussion about what life is like for Jews in all parts of the world. I don't want their stories to remain silenced, or to reflexively folded in to political stories, or opinions.

News stories and related discussion of Jewish life are welcomed here.

an excerpt

In the harsh reality of today's Iraq, those Jews who remain are much freer than they were under Saddam, who watched them all as potential spies. But they say the remnants of their culture are in greater danger now, and so are their lives. Baghdad's last open synagogue, behind a high wall in the district of Bataween, was locked and shuttered about two weeks before the American invasion began, and has not been used for regular services since. "We cannot let anybody enter the synagogue," Levy explains, "because the neighbors see people and say, ?'They are Zionists.' And, then, it is so easy to throw a bomb over the wall."

The community has lived through millennia of persecutions and prosperity, panic, hope and despair. "We have been here for 2,600 years, from the time of Nebuchadnezzar," says Levy, when the Babylonian tyrant carried thousands of Jews from Jerusalem into exile. ("By the rivers of Babylon," says the psalm, "there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.") But they could not survive the frightening tumult of an Arab world inflamed for more than 60 years by anger against modern Zionism. And it's that deeply cultivated hatred, now stoked again by television images of Israeli-Palestinian warfare, that makes high-minded plans to transform the region seem so remote from the reality on the ground.

"The people here, they blame everything on the Jews," says Levy. He should know: his family persevered in Iraq as virtually all other Jews left. His father was alive to witness the atrocities committed against Iraq's Jewish community in 1941, when hundreds were killed in riots. After 1948, more than 100,000 Jews left everything they had and fled to the new state of Israel. Perhaps 6,000 remained, among them the wealthiest. But a series of mysterious bombings persuaded most of those to leave as well in the early 1950s. The rage that followed Israel's lightning victory in the 1967 war, then the rise of Saddam's lethally paranoid regime and the public hanging of alleged Zionist spies, pared the community down to hundreds, then scores, and now only those couple of dozen who are left. Most are in their 70s or 80s. There's not a single woman for Levy to marry.

Many Jews in Israel, Europe and the United States want to face down the hatred in Iraq. "There is a trend to demonize the Jew, and it has to be confronted," says Shuker. "If we are fearful and we don't do something about it, then we are contributors, too." Author Joseph Braude, an American of Iraqi Jewish decent, argues that "exiles serve as an important bridge of mentality between their past country and their new country."

But every report of Israeli business initiatives in Iraq, often in partnership with Jordanian or Turkish companies, feeds rumors on the street that the U.S. occupation is a Zionist plot to take the country away from the Arabs. Stories about a firm called the Iraqi International Law Group (IILG), for instance, are an anti-American propagandist's dream: its president is Salem (Sam) Chalabi, nephew of Iraqi Governing Council member, Ahmad Chalabi, a Pentagon favorite. One of the partners of the company is Marc Zell, an American-born Israeli and outspoken advocate of the settler movement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.