Here’s André Aciman in the New York Times:
“The president never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) “proud tradition of tolerance” of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.”
I did, and recommend it.
I was struck by this silence. How can you go to Cairo, speak about refugees (or Copts still living in Egypts), but not about *Jewish* refugees?
Thousands of Jews were pushed out from Egypt under Nasser’s rule. Why not even a word for them?
Sylvain:
It’s the $64M question, isn’t it, that all other nations have a claim to some part of the globe somewhere except for the Jews and the Roma.
With the Jews, however, there has been such a re-write of history as to assume that there weren’t any left between the Jordan and the Med since the fall of the Roman Empire, and if the countries surrounding Israel punished the Jews in their midst for the creation of Israel, well — that’s all understandable.
“all other nations have a claim to some part of the globe somewhere except for the Jews and the Roma.”
Using the term “nation” here prejudices the answer to mean they are “missing a national territory and government to rule”. Although this may certainly be the case, the Jews and the Roma are not in a class all their own. How about hundreds if not thousands of indigenous tribes worldwide, all through the Americas, Asia, Africa- really, most of the world. It’s mostly the European tribes that melded with other tribes and morphed into a national identity like “Spanish” or “Italian” in first an imperial then a republican sense. The Romas and the Jews are ones from Europe missing a “state”. But outside of Europe, this is the normal state of affairs since Western colonialism. Should the Jews be given land like the American Cherokees are given land. I guess they should get casino rights also.