First published in 2013, Sheela Rohekar’s novel Miss Samuel is set in the Bene Israel community of western India, and recently appeared in English. Susan Blumberg-Kason writes in her review:

Rohekar is perhaps the only Jewish author in India who writes in Hindi. Her novel reads as two stories in one: the fictional saga of six generations of a Bene Israel family from Amdavad (the Gujarati name for Ahmedabad) and a more general history of the Bene Israel, the earliest group of Jews to settle in India, some 2,000 years ago, thought (by some) to be a lost tribe of Israel.

The narrator for much of the family saga is Sarah, the daughter of Bobby, the family historian who was murdered when he was mistaken as a Muslim. It’s Bobby’s written history of the Bene Israel that forms most of the second half of the book. . . . Sarah also narrates the difficulty her father Bobby had in getting a job because he was Jewish and was perceived to have loyalties to Israel, not India. In one interview, he was asked for his name and caste. When he answered, he was told he was too old and didn’t have the right experience. He tried to convince his interviewers that he was loyal to India, but that didn’t seem to matter.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”