14 Jun
2006 November-December, Uncategorized

How Jew-Friendly Persia Became Anti-Semitic Iran

The complex tale of how the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great—the world’s “first” Zionist—metamorphosed into the Israel-Hating nation we know today. Abdol Hossein Sardari didn’t look like a hero. But when Paris fell to Hitler in June 1940, the 30-year-old Muslim—a dapper man with a receding hairline—took it upon himself to save Jews trapped inside Nazi-occupied France. Sardari, a junior official at the Iranian Embassy, had been left behind to look after the building when the Iranian ambassador and his staff abandoned Paris to establish residence in Vichy, the new home of France’s pro-Nazi government. Once the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sardari, without authorization from his government, made liberal use of the embassy’s supply of blank Iranian passports to assign new, non-Jewish identities to those in need, creating his own version of Schindler’s...

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28 Jan
2009 March-April, Issues, U.S. Politics

Can Eric Cantor Save the GOP?

  The new minority whip is the highest ranking Jewish Republican in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives. Not long ago, Eric Cantor wouldn’t have been recognized if he strolled outside the U.S. Capitol grounds. But now the 45-year-old minority whip and only Jewish Republican in the House of Representatives has become the face of Republican opposition to the White House. Photographs of the conservative congressman from Virginia were splashed on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers in February after he helped keep all 178 House GOP members from voting for President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package. That feat, as rare as pitching a no-hitter, won the grudging admiration of the acerbic New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote that “somehow the most well-known person on the planet lost control of the...

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03 Jan
2013 January-February

At Home With Norman Podhoretz

Having abandoned the left six decades ago, The 83-year-old former editor of Commentary and grumpy grandfather of the right is still waiting for the majority of American Jews to follow suit. A youthful Norman Podhoretz, with abundant black wavy hair, looks out from a sepia photo, circa 1943. He is standing with nine other boys in a Brooklyn schoolyard, all wearing identical dark club jackets with a big “C” on the breast pockets and smiles on their faces. The “C” stands for Cherokees, the street gang to which they belonged. While sitting in the den of his comfortable apartment on a quiet tree-lined street on New York’s posh Upper East Side, Podhoretz recalls that the main requirement for Cherokee membership “was to be tough and not to back down from a fight.” The Cherokees long ago faded...

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A green grass landscape
01 Aug
Uncategorized

How Going Green Will Make the World Safer for Jews—And Everyone Else

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman is best known for his views on foreign affairs as expressed in his popular column and in his books, including From Beirut to Jerusalem, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 and The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. But over the last few years, Friedman has emerged as a leading advocate for the environment, striving to raise awareness of global warming and the need to transform America’s energy policy. That his view of the world revolves around energy should come as no surprise. Friedman came of age as a reporter during the Iranian Revolution and the 1979 oil crisis. His first journalism job was covering what was then a new beat—the oil industry—for United...

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