All I see is a sad, hazy gray

Last week I noted a number of recent articles on the condition of Jews in Iran, the most prominent of which was Roger Cohen's article in the New York Times.

Since that article, Cohen has been subjected to the exact type of ridicule and outrage that you would expect from the exact parties that you would expect. Cohen has responded to the criticism in a follow up editorial at the Times, but the insults continue to fly. For instance, Jonathan Tobin over at Commentary accuses Cohen of being a gullable "dupe of the ayatollahs" and an apologist for a repressive Iranian regime. Meanwhile, Ron Radosh over at Pajamas Media, the right-wing hackery blog conglomeration, equates Cohen with neocon Bill Kristol, whose contract with the Times was not renewed this year after a year of factually-flawed editorials, Radosh failing to see the distinction between Cohen's expression of opinion, which is legitimate on an editorial page, and Kristol's chronic dishonesty and factual distortion, which is not. Rodesh tags his critics, no less, as humorless - which, oddly enough, is the classic cover of unfunny right-wingers (Republicans, you see, or at least the so-called liberal media that reports on them, have been conditioned to believe that the hate spewed by Limbaugh, Coulter et. al. is "humor").

All of which is unfortunate in the way that any discussion that shifts from the orthodoxy of issues such as Iran's relationship with Jews. To recognize that there is gray area on an issue that most see only as black and white is no longer acceptable for a significant part of the opinion spectrum. Whether or not one believes that Iran is a great place to be a Jew - and I think it is quite obvious to us on the outside that there are much better options - articles like Cohen's open our eyes to a broader reality. Cohen points to an opportunity to find commonality, rather than distance; to not conflate our struggles against the deep flaws of an autocratic, theistic regime with the people who have to exist within that regime, whether in the specific Jewish minority or within the Persian majority culture; to not supplant our critique of Iran's leadership, but to move toward a guarded view of a chance to transform a poisonous and dangerous relationship.

These stories about the Jewish community in Iran are nothing new. Over a decade ago, the Christian Science Monitor reported on the relative freedom of Jews in Israel despite Iran's hostility toward Israel, but also pointing to the limitations of those freedoms:

Privately, there are grumbles about discrimination, much of it of a social or bureaucratic nature. Some complain it is impossible for Jews to get senior positions in Iran Air, the national airline, or in the national oil company. A woman teacher says she has been passed by for promotion several times because she is Jewish and now hopes to emigrate to Los Angeles. A car-parts dealer says Jews have to wait much longer for travel documents and exit visas.

Other stories, like this one from 2006 in the San Francisco Chronicle, refer to the same dichotomy:

Iran's history, like the history of many other nations, is not free of the blemish of anti-Semitism. But for every anti-Semitic blight, there are many more bright spots where Iranians have shown the wisdom to swim against the dark tide of rancor.

These quotes present only a limited picture, and I cannot do a sufficient job of summarizing them here, so go read the whole articles themselves. And read the other articles too, focusing, for example, on how Iranian Jews are, in the view of those commentators, manipulated into protesting Israel in its fight against Hamas.

This is a complex issue. And it deserves better treatment than we get from the hostile opinion crowd.