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Three Worlds

Memoirs of an Arab-Jew

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Three Worlds

By: Avi Shlaim
Narrated by: Neil Shah
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About this listen

In July 1950, Avi Shlaim, only five, and his family were forced into exile, fleeing their beloved Iraq to the new state of Israel.

Today the once flourishing Jewish community of Iraq, at one time numbering over 130,000 and tracing its history back 2,600 years, has all but vanished.

Why so? One explanation speaks of the timeless clash between Arab and Jewish civilizations and a heroic Zionist mission to rescue Eastern Jews from backward nations and unceasing persecution.

Avi Shlaim tears up this script. His parents had many Muslim friends in Baghdad and no interest in Zionism. As anti-Semitism surged in Iraq, the Zionist underground fanned the flames. Yet when Iraqi Jews fled to Israel, they faced an uncertain future, their history was rewritten to serve a Zionist narrative.

This memoir breathes life into an almost forgotten world. Weaving together the personal and the political, Three Worlds offers a fresh perspective on Arab-Jews, caught in the crossfire of Zionism and nationalism.

©2023 Avi Shlaim (P)2024 Tantor
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Prejudice

This was an amazing account of what it felt like to be an Arab Jew in Iraq before 1950. Then the displacement that followed meant that only the children who migrated from Iraq to Israel adapted. However, although Ari Shlaim quickly learned to speak Hebrew he felt victimised throughout his childhood because he was not a European Jew. His tertiary education in England where he was accepted as an equal allowed him to blossom intellectually and emotionally. The stain of growing up feeling as though you are a second class citizen is crushing and prejudice is rife in almost every country in some form of another. In Israel the schism between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians has reached a cataclysmic crisis point.

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