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🏠 Second Home: NPR’s Daniel Estrin spotlights Russian individuals who have fled the country and moved to Israel, based on the Law of Return that allows the descendants of Jews to immigrate. “More than 28,000 Russian nationals have acquired Israeli citizenship since the war began, according to Israeli government figures. They include a pop superstar, a top photojournalist and many other creatives in art, theater, film, music and dance. ‘Staying behind the Iron Curtain was incredibly scary,’ Russian artist Victor Melamed says, comparing Russia’s current isolation to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Melamed, whose portraits have appeared in the New Yorker magazine, fled to Israel in June. He says: ‘I want to be a person of the world.’ Russians are relocating mostly to Turkey, Kazakhstan and Georgia. But Israel offers one big advantage: Those with at least one Jewish grandparent can get Israeli citizenship for themselves and their close family. ‘When the war started, I think, like, everybody literally remembered their Jewish grandma,’ says Liza Rozovsky, a Russian-born Israeli journalist tracking Russian celebrity arrivals for the Haaretz newspaper.” [NPR]
🇮🇷 Talkin ‘bout a Revolution: In The Wall Street Journal, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy recounts his meeting with Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad and her, and three other activists’, subsequent meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron — whom he praises for his response. “As she described the meeting to me, Ms. Alinejad goes on the attack over Mr. Macron’s handshake with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September. Mr. Macron listens, takes it in, explains that, faced with an uprising of this nature and the repression with which it has been met, the head of a democratic nation can’t forgo the weapon of diplomacy. She answers the French president in the spirit of the duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. ‘Is this a revolt?’ Louis XVI asked in 1789. ‘No, sire,’ the duke answered, ‘it’s a revolution.’ Mr. Macron responds in the terms he will use in the press release issued after the meeting: France supports the revolution in Iran. Yes, he said ‘the revolution.’ He is the first head of state in the world to use the word, which changes everything and earns him the fury of the mullahs.” [WSJ]
⛵ In the Same Boat: In The New York Times, Vanderbilt University professor Michael Eric Dyson weighs in on the backlash from the Ye and Kyrie Irving antisemitism scandals, and the dynamic between Blacks and Jews as two groups who have suffered persecution and continue to fight bigotry. “Ye’s Blackness could not rescue him, especially when he made the specious claim that, after all, he was punching up at the all-powerful and controlling Jews who were attempting to make his life hell. Ye met his match on the battlefield of symbolic politics and racial dispute: The people he attacked had just as much cultural cachet as Black folk do, because they too survived trouble, terror and trauma. His Blackness offered no shield from the undoing he faced for recklessly assaulting another group of people whose suffering had inspired the sorrow songs of his own people more than a century earlier. Ye, Irving and the rest of us would do well to remember that African Americans and Jews are passengers on the same ship facing the ferocious headwinds of bigotry and hatred. The author and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon said he learned to be ‘responsible in my body and soul for the fate reserved for my brother,’ understanding that ‘the antisemite is inevitably a Negrophobe.’ That is a lesson we should all learn.” [NYTimes]
🪖 IDF at the IDFA: Deadline’s Matthew Carey interviews Israeli film director Guy Davidi about his film “Innocence,” which explores the impact the Israel Defense Forces has on Israeli society, and which was played at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in the Best of Fests category. “Davidi is troubled by the depiction of the IDF in entertainment media as an invincible force. These depictions are exported to other countries, including the U.S., where they influence attitudes, he says. ‘I am just surprised… how much Israeli military is portrayed in American film, television. ‘Fauda’ is a big TV series on Netflix and creates an image of a strong Israeli society because of the military. And that, to me, is immoral. If you’re in the science fiction world or whatever, that’s fine — but we’re talking about the reality of lives of people and to just remove what it means to have a militarized society and just present Israel as a successful society because of the military service, because they are strong, because they are controlling their own fate, just for me, it’s a distorted thinking. And unfortunately, a lot of people, especially those who are connected to Israel,’ Davidi says, indicating he means American Jews, ‘they buy this image, strangely. They think that this is a positive image of a successful country.’” [Deadline]
🏆 World Cup Woes: Omer Carmi, a former military fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, looks at the challenges facing Iran at this year’s World Cup. “In the past, sports helped Iran’s leaders marshal some degree of nationalistic unity despite simmering public discontent. Yet the uprising has led many current and former athletes to align with the protesters. Football legends such as Ali Karimi and Ali Daei supported the demonstrations from the very beginning and recently turned down invitations to attend the World Cup. In response, hardliners have publicly threatened their assets and even their lives. Last month, Javan — a newspaper affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — warned Daei that ‘whoever doesn’t know his limits will perish,’ while Karimi was charged in absentia for ‘acting against national security.’” [WINEP]
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