From Iranian.com.In my last post on Iranian Jews, Op-Ed columnist Roger Cohen said all signs seem to indicate that Jews in Iran were doing pretty well. In “Iran, the Jews and Germany, he’s responding to the backlash he’s gotten from voicing this opinion. I was even more cynical about this story than I was about his last one.
Memoirs of a Jewminicana 
There’s a culture of “total onslaught” that makes for political correctness in much of the American Jewish community. That said, I think Roger Cohen wrote two very thoughtful articles notwithstanding the desire of some Jewish hardliners, like the crowd at the American Enterprise Institute, to “bag Iran” as if two bad wars in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan, aren’t enough for one generation of Americans!If you read Robert Baer’s works or Hooman Majd’s “The Ayatollah Begs to Differ” you see that contemporary Iran is a very complex place where mullahs scream about modesty while Iranian girls try on the latest fashions and, as Roger Cohen points out, the synagogue functions very well right across from the mosque. I grew up in Indianapolis, a citadel of evangelical Protestantism. I would have loved for my born again high school classmates to have said “Indy Jews have their prophet and we have ours” like the Irani Muslim quoted in Cohen’s first piece. Instead, in my four years at North Central High School, I was regularly treated to suggestions that I become a “completed Jew” lest eternal damnation be my ultimate destination.
LikeLike