My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

To a degree unrivaled by any other nation, Jews became a people whose very survival was predicated on the school, the house of study, and life as a never-ending process of learning. “When does the obligation to study begin?” asks Maimonides. “As soon as a child can talk. When does it end? On the day of death.”

Jacob never knew how to answer the question “Are you religious?” He’d never not belonged to a synagogue, never not made some gesture toward kashruth, never not assumed—not even in his moments of greatest frustration with Israel, or his father, or American Jewry, or God’s absence—that he would raise his children with some degree of Jewish literacy a

WHEN I WOKE UP, it was daylight. That is when I remembered that I had a father. During the alert, I had followed the mob, not taking care of him. I knew he was running out of strength, close to death, and yet I had abandoned him. I went to look for him. Yet at the same time a thought crept into my mind: If only I didn’t find him! If only I were rel