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The Rainy Season

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The Book of the Week is “The Rainy Season, Haiti Since Duvalier” by Amy Wilentz, published in 1989. In this hodgepodge of a volume, the journalist-author recounted her and others’ personal experiences during several regime changes in Haiti in the course of approximately four years, interspersed with the history of the Caribbean territory.

In the new year 1986, the author and her fellow journalists from various nations held discussions at a hotel bar about the rumor that the-then Haitian dictator, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier, and his family were going to leave the country. For dissatisfaction among his enemies had reached critical mass, and tensions might boil over. There had been protests in Cap Hatien, on the northern coast. In February 1986, compliments of American taxpayers, the said rumor came true.

Thereafter, a six-man interim National Council of Government allegedly took charge of Haiti. Two institutions remained: its Army (a junta funded by the U.S.), and organized religion. General Henri Namphy headed the National Council and the Army. A few leaders of the old regime were sent to country-club prison for a few years, or secretly fled the country. Ordinary Haitians celebrated in the streets.

But anarchy persisted. The Army shot at anti-government and anti-U.S. protesters, the Tontons Macoute (the former dictator’s private militia, who operated a highly lucrative cocaine-export business) and Catholics– with machine guns. The protesters who were violent, armed with rocks or machetes, committed atrocities against the Tontons Macoute. Their reasoning was, since Haiti was a lawless, military dictatorship (the top leaders ignored rule of law), “the only way to find out what rights you have to is to exercise them until you get a reaction.” Arson was common, too. Unsurprisingly, lots of people died amid the violence.

The Christians hated the voodoo practitioners. The voodoo community knew how to survive political chaos in the long run, supporting whichever group had the power. A spellbinding Catholic minister named Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide preached inflammatory rhetoric that appealed to disaffected, dark-skinned, Haitian peasants. Quoting the Bible and pushing for socialist work-collectives (which people were actually forming as he spoke), he blamed the mulattoes (who were elitist), the Army, the Americans, and high-level Catholic leaders for Haiti’s corruption and misery. His philosophy was called liberation theology.

Haiti had been a slave state for two hundred years, as the property-owners hired (or imported) dark-skinned people to work their land for food and housing, but no pay. The owners kept them illiterate, and sent their own children to study abroad to become government officials, soldiers and priests.

An Article in Haiti’s new March 1987 Constitution banned thugs from the old regime from running for president in the “free and fair elections” to be held in June 1987. Unsurprisingly, it was deja vu all over again– lots of people died amid more violence. Voters and candidates were harassed, and polling places were burned down, too. This was before election day.

Emotionally-charged American propaganda (including gruesome images) broadcast from Haiti portrayed ordinary Haitians as the bad guys. The frenzy of hatred did go both ways, in the form of atrocious frontier-justice. From their history of governing through fear and force, federal and local leaders (with the U.S. as their accomplice!) would never break the country’s cycle of military dictatorship.

One of the author’s scores of interviewees commented, “Ah, the long arm of the State Department… Avril is really going for that U.S. aid. I bet Reagan is happy tonight. [The U.S. withheld aid to Haiti unless it engaged in a specific series of public relations gestures in connection with ‘free and fair elections’.] “

Read the book to learn numerous other details about roughly four years’ worth of drama queens’ political shenanigans, and their victims, in the bloody charade characterized by the lack of leadership in the U.S. puppet of Haiti.

Between Two Fires

The Book of the Week is “Between Two Fires, Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s Russia” by Joshua Yaffa, published in 2020.

In this volume, the author described various workers in entertainment, tourism, war, religion and humanitarian aid– under Vladimir Putin’s reign. In order to avoid getting arrested or worse, the subjects needed to play well with the government, which funded a large percentage of their activities. Each of their stories was chronologically disorganized, wordy and redundant, but the author clearly conveyed their plights and mentalities.

Putin came to power when Boris Yeltsin resigned at the beginning of the year 2000. Shortly thereafter, Putin’s government took over the media, forcing a mogul (whose TV channel could reach as much as 98% of Russian households which had a TV set) to sell his media empire to the State (the Russian government).

In the late 1990’s, the site of a closed Russian prison called Perm-36 was turned into a museum whose curators tried to inform the public about crushing oppression suffered by Cold-War Era Soviet dissidents there. After Putin had come to power, German university students who believed in the cause of democratic freedoms, volunteered to do maintenance work on the site.

However, they got offended when a former prisoner was forgiving and even behaved in a friendly manner toward a former guard, who had become a security officer at the museum. The German’s were “bound by strict, categorical norms, an ethical prism born [sic] of Germany’s admirable– if often inflexible– attitude toward totalitarianism and those who serve it. A political prisoner and his guard should not shake hands, and from that flows a whole way of seeing the world.”

The former prisoner explained: The guard had been young and therefore impressionable, easily brainwashed into rationalizing that he was simply following orders as a messenger, putting prisoners into solitary confinement. The guard didn’t directly kill anyone; he was subjected to the same drab environment and fed the same food as the prisoners.

On the immorality / morality spectrum, no one’s perfect. Nevertheless, it appears that, in human history, the kinds of people who are evil– on the extremely immoral end– have become dictatorial world leaders in disproportionate numbers.

The author spoke with a local “fixer” in the war in Chechnya in the 2010’s. She served as messenger, bailed dissidents (anti-government rebels) out of jail, and aided journalists covering the war. She had adopted a kind of pragmatism– cooperating with the administration of the Soviet-appointed leader of Chechnya– even though he and his ilk brought genocide, atrocities and crushing oppression to her people.

For approximately the first decade of Putin’s dictatorship, ordinary Russians’ living standards improved due to modernization, plentiful oil, and an increase in consumer goods in the stores. They also enjoyed religious liberalization (except for Western Christian and Catholic worshipers– those denominations competed too much for congregants with the Russian Orthodox Church). Freedom rang until it didn’t, as Putin’s hunger for, and amassing of power got him “reelected” as supreme leader in 2012. From then on, under Putin– Russia’s, Crimea’s and Ukraine’s leadership became Stalinist all over again.

At any rate, like the United States media, the Russian media has its trivial distractions. A scandal, which the State investigated for two years, erupted when a contemporary art museum’s curator allowed an Azeri exhibit to feature children’s dolls in gruesome positions.

After a while, employees in many workplaces, couldn’t guess what would spark an inquiry from the authorities. There were neither written nor spoken rules on acceptable behavior. Of course, spies were everywhere, ready to arbitrarily wield power.

Read the book to learn much more about various workers in the Putin years.

Children of Radium

The Book of the Week is “Children of Radium, A Buried Inheritance” by Joe Dunthorne, published in 2025. The morbidly curious author wrote this book after engaging in “roots tourism” to learn about his (Jewish) great-grandfather’s and grandmother’s lives in Germany and Ankara in Turkey before, during and after WWII.

In the 1930’s, the author’s grandmother grew up in Oranienburg in Germany, the most radioactive town in the country. There was a chemical weapons factory there, at which her father (named Seigfried) worked as a creator and tester into the mid-1930’s. Just around that time, German schoolchildren were supplied with gas masks and taught how to protect themselves from wartime air-contaminants. The chemicals from the factory were disposed of through burying, burning or pouring into a river. One of the chemicals was phosgene, which smells like a freshly mowed lawn. In 1935, Siegfried’s family moved to Ankara, but he continued to test gas masks there.

In 1937, the Turkish government purchased chemical weapons from Germany to ethnically cleanse residents in Dersim in the mountains in eastern Turkey. Over the course of two years, the roughly thirteen thousand people who died presumably served as the Nazis’ preliminary test-case of the mass murder of the Jews a few years later. Toward the end of the war, in August 1944, it seemed Turkey had an attack of conscience (or else its strategic interests changed!)– because it broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and detained a couple of hundred non-Jewish refugees, but granted continued liberty to war-refugees whose passports said they were Jewish.

From the 1990’s into the dawn of the twenty-first century, the author read his family’s documents archive, met with some neighbors of his ancestors, and went to see whether his family members’ homes still existed. Most didn’t. The Russians destroyed the aforesaid factory after the war. But decades later, an entrepreneur bought the site (which was still a toxic waste dump, consisting of 26,000 tons of poisons), and built a nightclub and swimming pool on it, complete with imported controlled substances.

In the 1990’s(!), there were still homes getting destroyed and people getting killed by unexploded bombs, and homes getting built on radioactive sand dating back to WWII.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s adventures in learning about Seigfried’s state of mind as a Jew who was (possibly initially unwittingly) aiding in the German war effort, his activities, and those of his other family members.

Zbig

The Book of the Week is “Zbig, The life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet” by Edward Luce, published in 2025. In this slightly sloppily edited tome, the author threw in the kitchen sink on every historical event that occurred during Brzezinski’s lifetime. Yes, Brzezinski was a major influencer of certain events, but such brief descriptions are overwhelming (or tedious and boring!) for young students of history. For more knowledgeable readers, this is a reference book.

Anyway, Brzezinski’s ancestors were royal family members in what is now Poland. Brzezinski was born in 1928 in Warsaw, but spent his early childhood in various European countries. In autumn 1938, his family fled Europe for Montreal, Canada. He became a Canadian citizen in 1951, and an American citizen in 1958.

Academically, Brzezinski was a genius. He won all sorts of awards. Together, he and Carl Friedrich of Harvard’s Department of Government theorized about totalitarianism of the U.S.S.R. In their book, they wrote of its traits: a monopoly on violence and communications, a majority group who truly believes in their ideology which is imposed officially, ruling by fear and force via law enforcement, and a government-directed economy. But the U.S.S.R. didn’t have a majority group of true believers; it was comprised of diverse territories and peoples. Sounds familiar.

In the second half of twentieth century, Brzezinski’s counterpart turned out to be Henry Kissinger, president Nixon’s foreign-policy sidekick. Kissinger had been born in Europe, had a foreign accent in the United States, was multilingual, and was enjoying a brilliant career. When Brzezinski saw what Kissinger had achieved, he realized he himself had a chance to do the same. He did, as president Jimmy Carter’s foreign-policy sidekick.

After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the CIA claimed that Khrushchev said the U.S.S.R. would economically catch up to the United States by 1970. Kissinger agreed with the CIA, that that would happen. Brzezinski personally visited the U.S.S.R. and saw that it was in decline. His writings contradicted the prevailing Cold War nonsense.

It was unclear whether the CIA was extremely incompetent in its intelligence-gathering, or was lying in order to incite Cold War animosity among the American masses. Journalists would call such dishonesty, “disingenuous” but nowadays, the public is wise to propaganda such as that. There is hyper-awareness of the general conditions of every country of the world.

Brzezinski became obsessed with convincing those around him that the world should simply let the U.S.S.R. dig its own grave. In 1972, he, along with a few other alpha males with hubris syndrome, founded the Trilateral Commission. It was a nonpartisan think tank that contemplated the geopolitics of the future. The opinions the Trilateral Commission expressed were perceived as evil in different ways on both sides of the political spectrum. That might have been intentional. Currently, all think-tanks are partisan, but there is still this kind of super-rich boys’ club running the United States.

Kissinger, knowing journalists find it easier to write stories about colorful characters who make foreign-policy rather than write stories about complicated foreign-policy issues, played the media. He stroked their egos. Brzezinski accused him of flip-flopping, but the two maintained a relationship of healthy disagreement and civil discourse; they kept the drama going to stay in the headlines in order to stay relevant.

Read the book to learn much, much more about Brzezinski and his times.

The cliche is true: The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the last forty years, three presidents of the United States have become senile while in office: Ronald Reagan, Joseph Biden and Donald Trump. Here’s a song about that, and other universal political conundrums.

EVERYTHING IS CYCLICAL

sung to the tune of “Everything is Beautiful” with apologies to Ray Stevens and to whomever else the rights may concern.

A politician loves his flock of voters,

all the voters of his world.

He’s always ready to fight.

He cares nothing for wrong or right.

A politician loves his flock of voters in his world.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America,

three prezzes covered up their senile brains.

Everything’s cyclical, in its own way. It’s human psychology.

The pendulum’s gonna swing the other way.

The voter is in a bind, as backroom deals he cannot see.

We must prepare for what’s in the minds, of our leaders who say we’re free.

At every election, the hypocrites are standing by.

You know candidates’ resentments smolder.

It’s time to take action on ethics and grow up.

Honest stakeholders need to get bolder.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America,

three prezzes covered up their senile brains.

Everything’s cyclical, in its own way. It’s human psychology.

The pendulum’s gonna swing the other way.

We shouldn’t care about Trump’s unruly hair, or his apish orange skin. We must focus on his crimes and make sure they don’t happen again.

We need to work together now. Dictatorship is out. Fine.

Stop wasting time on trivial distractions, my friend, and pay liars no mind.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America,

three prezzes covered up their senile brains.

Everything’s cyclical, in its own way. It’s human psychology.

The pendulum’s gonna swing the other way.

Everything’s political, in the current leaders’ reign.

In the last forty years in America…

Major Noah

The Book of the Week is “Major Noah, American-Jewish Pioneer” by Isaac Goldberg, published in 1938.

Born in July 1785 in Philadelphia, Mordecai Manuel Noah was raised mostly by his grandfather. In the 1810’s, Noah, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the governor of Pennsylvania and other “Yankees” (people living in the then-northeastern United States) were expansionists– proposed that the U.S. annex Canada and Florida.

Noah engaged in various profit-seeking pursuits in his lifetime: playwriting, literary criticism, speech-making, newspaper publishing, and international diplomacy. In 1813, he was named Consul on the Barbary coast. His territory included Algeria, Tunisia– where lived about sixty thousand Jews, and Spain. He hopped a ship to get to the Mediterranean. His goal was to stop the activities of pirates in that region, and to negotiate the release of twelve Americans who were then-prisoners of the Algerians.

As is well known, early-nineteenth-century Britain had the world’s best navy; she trained boys seven to twelve years old, in seafaring. In July 1813, a British navy boat captured Noah’s, as the War of 1812 was still raging. There ensued a long, complicated,(and weird!) series of events.

Fast-forward to April 1815. American president James Monroe sent a letter to Noah informing him that he should never have been hired as Consul because he was Jewish; his religion was unfavorable with regard to foreign-service negotiations in northern Africa, so Monroe was firing him as Consul. That letter didn’t get to Noah until July 1815, at which time, Noah was “headed to a dungeon in Tunis.”

Fortunately, the deliverer of the letter, an American commodore, hadn’t read it because it was addressed to only Noah, personally. Bristling and posturing, Noah lied to the commodore in such a way that led him to demand that the British pay his personal debts. After that, Noah “got the hell out of Dodge.” He had actually gone rogue– sort of a cross between Oliver North and Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen. Upon returning to the United States, he printed his own propaganda to paper over his indiscretions, and used his friends in Congress to exonerate himself.

Noah then went into the newspaper publishing business. In the 1810’s, “American journalism was not yet out of its black period– an orgy of assault, battery, libel, recrimination, accusation, bribery, scurrility, chicanery, such as makes the succeeding development of yellow journalism appear by comparison, a Sunday picnic. Such was indeed, the tradition of journalism in our adolescent United States.”

In 1820, Noah, (actually seeking to profit in real estate), put forth a big idea of purchasing Grand Island, in the city of Buffalo, New York State, to provide a colony for the “wandering Jews” of the world.

Five years later, Noah had sufficient financial backing consisting of other people’s money to start his venture, which he called “Ararat.” He gave himself the titles Governor and Judge of Israel, making announcements in newspapers worldwide. Poland’s government wouldn’t allow Noah’s public notice to be published, as his campaign was perceived as a plot to overthrow the Hapsburg monarchy.

British rabbis to whom Noah gave fancy titles and invited to his new Israel, politely declined his offers of employment, saying they were happy where they were, and that he was undeservedly acting like the Messiah; only God would know the location of apocalyptic Israel. The French and Austrian rabbis weren’t fooled either, and actually called Noah a charlatan.

In the 1830’s, when pressured to explain himself as to why he switched political parties from Democratic to Whig (conservative), he gave the best excuse ever: The party, not he, had changed! His former party had become unprincipled. So in the interest of good conscience, he switched.

Read the book to learn much more about Noah’s philosophy, writings, and machinations.

From That Place and Time

The Book of the Week is “From That Place and Time, A Memoir 1938-1947” by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, published in 1989. In this slightly sloppily edited, completely chronogically disorganized volume, the author detailed her: experiences during a time of anti-Semitism and war, and then 20/20 hindsight.

Born in 1915 in New York City, the author was sent to Hebrew school, but was only “culturally Jewish.” This, to American Jews, means celebrating the major annual holidays, but neither going to services nor observing the vast majority of religious laws on a daily basis.

The author’s parents came to the United States from Poland around 1908. They thought the Yiddish language would be the common element that would unify the Jewish community. Around the 1910’s, an American Jew, Chaim Zhitlowsky tried to popularize that idea. The author therefore was fluent in Yiddish.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, there were four different educational Jewish factions (contentious with one another) in New York City that taught Yiddish: Zionist and socialist, socialist and anti-Zionist, Communist-affiliated, and non-political but culturally Jewish (For a description of the different aspects of Zionism, type “Zionism” in the search bar on the upper right side of this blog; the term “Zionism” like “feminism” and “global warming” was hijacked for emotionally-charged propaganda purposes.). The author fell into the last group.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the author perceived that American Jews didn’t have the same fears of getting bullied and victimized by discrimination as their European counterparts did. The Americans weren’t “wandering Jews.” Of course, she was always among her own kind of people, so she wasn’t exposed or subjected to hatred against her group.

In 1935, there existed a group named the Freeland League who were searching for a homeland for the Jews, other than Palestine. One place they looked at, was Kimberley in Australia. It seems the current territorial disputes between Jews and Palestinians are focused on lands they claim their ancestors occupied for centuries, and no substitute territories will do.

Anyway, Dawidowicz’s father instilled in her a hostility toward the religious aspects of Judaism, as well as toward Zionism. “Furthermore, [in the mid-1930’s] in Palestine, the Zionists denigrated Yiddish and demanded that Hebrew alone be the national language of the Palestinian settlement.”

In March 1935, in rearming for world conquest, Hitler tore up the Versailles Treaty. Stalin felt he needed to make nice with the West in order to gain security for Russia. So in August 1935, the Soviet leadership announced a new policy that pivoted away from Marxism. It was the new Stalinism: collectively fighting against the Nazis and Japanese militarism.

In spring 1938, the Polish government hated its own Jews, and was looking for an excuse to refuse to accept Jewish refugees from Germany. Nevertheless, that autumn, the author went to study and do research at the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Poland. In August 1939, Stalin reversed himself and allied with Hitler so the two could take over Poland.

Read the book to learn of the author’s anguish at the historical events of the next decade, and how they affected her generation.

The Warburgs

The Book of the Week is “The Warburgs, The 20th-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family” by Ron Chernow, published in 1993. This ginormous, slightly: chronologically disorganized and redundant volume, recounted mostly, the life-stories of four males born to a German Jewish family in the mid to late 1800’s, and the life-stories of their descendants.

Through the decades, different family branches traveled or moved from Germany to other countries, such as England, Sweden and Italy, due to discrimination against Jews, and world wars. Some became fully assimilated in their adopted countries and married outside the faith. Some moved to the United States.

In September 1922, “Paul [Warburg] saw America sunk in an intellectual coma and warned Washington that ‘we are surrounding ourselves with a wall and moat of cynicism and selfish materialism…’ ” As ought to be well known, there’s nothing new under the sun.

The Warburgs were “international bankers”– Hitler’s anti-Semitic code language for Jews, whom he claimed were the cause of all of Germany’s problems in approximately the two decades leading up to, and during WWII.

Aby was the black sheep of the family. He had a brilliant career in art history. The other Warburg brothers, Max, Paul and Felix became financiers, philanthropists and activists. In the 1920’s, the German government began to persecute its Jews more than was historically usual, but until the late 1930’s, the brothers evaded the brunt of the Nazis’ human-rights abuses.

The Warburgs had special influence with government officials because they had substantial assets, and their businesses’ financial transactions had a major impact on the German economy, and worldwide.

In late winter 1936, the Warburgs struck a secret deal with Heinrich Himmler that allowed them to continue doing business. However, later that year, they lost their connections to power when the Nazis forced corporate boards’ directors who were deemed Jewish, to resign. The brothers had been on dozens of boards.

The culture of the German people in their place and time was characterized by blind obedience to authority and passionate love for one’s homeland. Even after September 1937 when the brothers’ bank in Hamburg was ejected from the Reich Loan Consortium, they still clung to the hope that the Nazis’ amassing of power and menace was only temporary.

Hermann Goering scotched free trade when he formed his five-hundred employee fiefdom– the Office of Raw and Synthetic Materials. It allowed Germany to prepare for war. The Nazis needed funding for re-arming Germany, and the eventual theft of Jews’ assets would come in due time. The Jews were pawns in Hitler’s evil plan of Aryan world conquest.

A minor action symbolizing this, was the hanging of a gigantic oil painting of Hitler in the newly seized Warburg brothers’ Hamburg branch-office in May 1938. The Warburgs were allowed to choose two Aryans to run the bank indefinitely; of course, it was then unclear when or if the family would be able to reclaim their business.

In the twentieth century, the Warburgs wore the label “Jewish” that the world had thrust on them, whether observant or not, assimilated or not, for having a Jewish last name, or for having “Jewish” relatives (at the time Europe was ruled by Hitler), or having been raised by family members in this identity they felt was immutable.

“It wasn’t their [the Jews’] alien quality so much as their familiarity, their uncomfortable resemblance to other Germans, that enabled Hitler to tap fears of ‘racial pollution.’ “

Post-Holocaust, the discomfort about Jews has continued. Could it be that women who dye their hair blond, don’t want to look Jewish? And then– could it be that the Jews started the “dumb blond” jokes?

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about the histories of Warburg family members, and their times.

Bad Jew

The Book of the Week is “Bad Jew, A Family’s Quest From the Minsk Ghetto to Netanyahu’s Israel” by Piotr Smolar, translated from the French by Anthony Roberts, published in 2024. This sloppily edited volume with confusing descriptions of the author, his father and grandfather– contained a brief overview of the mentality of Eastern European Jews and Arabs. As is well known, these peoples have had a long, intertwined and inter-tribally violent history in Palestine (currently Israel). American-English language would say, “self-hating Jew” not “bad Jew.”

Born in 1974, the author grew up in Normandy in France. As an adolescent, he asserted his identity by practicing Catholicism with his aunt and uncle in Warsaw, Poland. He never did receive a formal education in Judaism.

The year 1967 saw an anti-Semitic Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Polish government’s first secretary, denounce the author’s Polish grandfather for his Judeo-Communist views. The grandfather wrote op-ed pieces for his newspaper with a pro-Zionist, pro-Israel bent (For a description of the different aspects of Zionism, type “Zionism” in the search bar on the upper right side of this blog; the term “Zionism” like “feminism” and “global warming” was hijacked for emotionally-charged propaganda purposes.). Gomulka also spread propaganda that the Jews were the ones who committed Stalin’s crimes.

In 1968, the Polish government allowed Jews to leave with the clothes on their backs, with the condition that they never return. Many went to Israel. Although he didn’t explicitly say so, the author was trying to convey the idea that, even in the late 1960’s, there was such rife anti-Semitism in the world that Israel was still relevant as a homeland for the “wandering Jew.” Israel has certainly been an exceptional sovereign territory. During its short existence of only three quarters of a century, with American financial aid, it has:

established agricultural collectives in the desert;
developed salinization and irrigation technologies;
built a military-industrial complex; and
founded numerous Big-Tech startups.

Given all the historical hostilities in Israel, one would think that the only people who still live there are ideologically dogmatic Darwin-award candidates. The author spoke with some residents who gave that impression. They are willing to risk their lives to defend what they consider their own respective tribe’s property which their ancestors owned for centuries. On the other side, the Palestinians have the same mentality.

Read the book to learn about several other reasons why the Palestinians (and Arabs) and Jews can’t work out their differences, and more about the author’s and others’ family backgrounds.

Sledgehammer

The Book of the Week is “Sledgehammer, How Breaking With the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East” by David Friedman, published in 2022.

First of all, the title of the book is an exaggeration. The author, an alpha male with hubris syndrome, penned this bragfest– along with his “funny, smart and strategic” boss (president Trump)– to take credit for campaigns he helped implement with regard to Israel and America’s Arab allies, and to express his views on Israel. He served as America’s ambassador to Israel during Trump’s presidential term of January 2017 to January 2021.

It appears he and Trump moved the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to get both of their names on a plaque on the wall in the main building there. They’ve secured themselves a footnote in history, as long as that building stands. Never mind the controversy and violence that ensued. Others might disagree– as they feel extremely strongly that there is archeological evidence that Jews occupied that particular location in ancient times, and therefore, they have a claim there. Another argument is that Jews militarily captured that location in the Six Day War in 1967.

One other hotly debated issue is sovereignty over territories where residents currently consist of both Palestinians and Jews; territories believed by the author to belong to Israel in the first place. Friedman thought the Israeli government should control those lands militarily and politically. The Palestinians of course, disagreed.

The author conducted endless discussions with the stakeholders (with a pro-Israel bent) to broker a peace deal with the Palestinians. There were wrenches in the works which included but were not limited to: the Israeli government was holding elections for its top leaders, so anything said in diplomatic negotiations might influence Israeli voters; there were a few groups spouting propaganda who negatively affected the talks; and the Israeli borders with its neighbors (except for Jordan) had yet to be exactly mapped, delaying the finalization of the sovereignty issue.

The breakdown in talks with the Palestinians actually ended up helping Israel become less hostile toward a few of America’s Arab allies. The personalities happened to play well together. The then-leaders of Israel and then-leaders of: Jordan, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco made verbal agreements, or signed a brief, vaguely worded document. This, for which they had an excuse to have a signing ceremony and declare peace (and have a better chance of staying in office or getting reelected).

It wasn’t as sensational and as difficult a feat as the author described. For decades, Trump’s predecessors have held talks to give peace a chance, given changing hatreds, alliances, and global economic and geopolitical conditions.

Bahrain and Jordan already had had diplomatic relations with Israel for decades, so they were just preening for the media. For Sudan, the initial overtures were the start of a beautiful friendship. Two and a half years later, Israel and Sudan normalized their relations. About two years after Israel and Saudi Arabia began their talks, planes coming to and from Israel were allowed to fly over Saudi Arabian airspace. The author made it seem as though all this progress happened over the course of his ambassadorship. One would suspect that he is a historical revisionist for Trump.

Anyway, read the book to learn many more details on Friedman’s take on the issues and situations.

My Father’s Paradise

The Book of the Week is “My Father’s Paradise, A Son’s Search For His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq” by Ariel Sabar, published in 2008. In this sloppily edited volume, the author recounts the experiences of his father (named Yona) in Kurdistan, Israel and the United States, and his own generation– in America.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Ashkenazi Jews considered themselves superior to Sephardic Jews living in Palestine, and Kurdistan, a northern region of Iraq. The Ashkenazis had their own “old-boy” network, who subjected the Sephardics to institutional racism.

An oppressed group such as the Kurds are more likely than a dominant group to have impostor syndrome; as a society constantly smears a scapegoated group through social contagion, the victims begin to lose confidence in themselves and question their own competence. Ever since the Holocaust, the Jews, after centuries of passive acceptance of victimhood, decided enough was enough, and have fought back, releasing centuries of pent-up rage. Over the course of eighty years, they have gone from one extreme to the other. They have become ideologically stubborn and militarily aggressive.

Especially after WWII with the 1947 UN vote to partition Palestine, the Iraqi government stepped up its anti-Semitism. But in the first quarter of 1950, the Iraqi government allowed Jews to relinquish their citizenship, and move to another country with just the clothes on their backs, never to return. About four thousand Jews did so.

One consequence was that Iraq experienced brain drain. Israel continued to take in skilled and talented people (and other refugees in the previous decade) who considered themselves Zionists (For a description of the different aspects of Zionism, type “Zionism” in the search bar on the upper right side of this blog; the term “Zionism” like “feminism” and “global warming” was hijacked for emotionally-charged propaganda purposes.).

A January 1951 terrorist attack against Jews in a Baghdad synagogue that left three dead, prompted Israel to accept thousands more Iraqi Jews by 1952. Yona’s family left Kurdistan for Israel in April 1951.

Yona learned the languages of Hebrew and English, foreign to him. For, he was one of the dwindling native speakers of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus Christ. With that language, he built a career researching its history, and creating a dictionary to preserve it. The author rebelled against his father, but their relationship began to thaw as the son matured. He wrote, “The idea that workers in China could make a Passover plate with Hebrew letters that you could buy in Los Angeles for a grandson in Maine: This, for my father, was America.”

Read the book to learn much more about Yona’s life and times, and the author’s quest to find his long-lost aunt.