Israel Story

The Last ‘Rabbi’ of Baghdad

Jews have been in Iraq for more than two-and-a-half millennia. Today, the entire Jewish community of Baghdad can fit in a single car. In this special Thanksgiving bonus episode, a conversation between Mishy Harman and Emad Levy.

November 26, 2019

It’s a busy week. Many of you will be traveling, and those of you staying put will probably be cooking turkeys and preparing cranberry sauce. And while you are doing all that, we wanted to keep you company.

With the kind of storytelling we do, most of our interviews end up on the proverbial “editing room floor.” And we’re often sorry about that, since we’d like you to hear them too. So today, in a new experiment for us, we bring you an edited version of an interview we recently recorded. Want to know what the last “rabbi” of Baghdad is thankful for? Listen and find out.

Zev Levi edited this special. The end song, “Tahdini,” is by Dudu Tassa & The Kuwaitis.

Listen to the special here, or download it from iTunes. You can hear all of Israel Story’s episodes in English here and in Hebrew here.

Israel Story, the English-language version of the popular Israeli radio program Sipur Israeli, is distributed by PRX and produced in partnership with Tablet.

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