Flight from Babylon: Iraq, Iran, Israel, America

As the spirited teenage son of an Iraqi Jewish family in the 1940s, Haddad refused to passively accept the persecution of Jews by Muslims and joined underground groups such as the Zionist organization Haganah. At 15, he was admitted to medical school in Baghdad; he eventually earned the first doctorate in medicine awarded in modern Israel. Now an ophthalmologist in the U.S., he (with the help of magazine writer Rosenteur) here recounts in absorbing detail his Baghdad childhood, conversion to Zionism, and involvement in the smuggling of Jews to Palestine until he himself was forced to flee to Tel Aviv. Haddad's experiences cause him to doubt that coexistence between Arabs and Jews is possible, and he maintains that it was the prejudice of western Jews in Israel against those from the East and Africa that motivated his move to America. (March 24)