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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The Price of Being Jewish: An Interview with Judea Pearl

The downward slant of Judea Pearl’s eyes lends a perpetually sorrowful expression to his bearded face. Yet, he is rarely somber during our talk; in fact, even his serious reflections have a way of meandering to wry observations that prompt his ready smile and easy laughter. The 70-year-old Pearl has just come from accepting a posthumous humanitarian award on behalf of his son, slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. In his thick Israeli accent, Pearl tells me about the speech he’s just given in which he repeated some of Danny’s final words: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.” Daniel Pearl, the Journal’s South Asia bureau chief, was abducted on January 23, 2002. Lured by the promise of an interview with an Al Qaeda leader in the Pakistani port city of Karachi,...

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