Lebanon and Its Bygone Jews

Lebanon has been much in the news during the past year, and since the late 1970s it has been home to a series of forces dedicated to attacking Israel. But once it was home to a many-centuries-old Jewish community, and Lebanese congregations can still be found in the U.S. and elsewhere. Franck Salameh’s 2018 Lebanon’s Jewish Community is one of the few books in English about the Jews of this small Mediterranean land. Although this conversation with Drora Arussy is nominally about this work, it is in fact a fascinating investigation of Salameh’s own encounters with Lebanese Jews and Lebanese anti-Semitism, what place names reveal about the layers of Middle Eastern history, and much else. (Audio, 54 minutes.)