As the grandson of an Aleppan Jew, I needed to be reminded of what happened to Jews in two of the most ancient capitals of Middle Eastern Jewry—Aleppo and Baghdad—in the wake of the 1947 UN vote to partition Palestine.Matti Friedman accomplishes this very strongly in the opening section of his essay, “Mizrahi Nation.” By invoking events in present-day Syria, he also allows us to imagine what massacres would have resulted today had Syria’s remaining Jews not fled Hafez el-Assad’s viciously anti-Semitic regime.