A Final Push to Free Yemen’s Remaining Jews

As a diasporic people, the call to aid Jewish lives has been echoed throughout the world over millennia. Of course, the inherent threat--past or present--to Jewish liberties varies significantly from place to place. Within my specific Sephardic community, it is more subdued, present in a weariness of outsiders and a fierce commitment to tradition, family, and a common Brooklyn ZIP code. And yet, our defining characteristic is in itself a contradiction; we are inherently suspicious of our surroundings and simultaneously inclined to succeed in them. It's a tendency best attributed to our roots in Arab lands, where our ancestors lived for centuries, largely in peace with their neighbors. That changed in 1947, after the U.N. voted on the partition plan.