A New Blow To Iran’s Forgotten Jews

That year’s annual State Department report on international religious freedom presented a very different picture from the one Cohen had painted. Iran’s 25,000 Jews were the victims of

“officially sanctioned discrimination, particularly in the areas of employment, education, and housing,” according to the 2009 report. The ruling regime “limited the distribution of Hebrew texts, particularly nonreligious texts, making it difficult to teach the language.” In addition, “There was a rise in officially sanctioned anti-Semitic propaganda involving official statements, media outlets, publications and books.”

Cohen tried—not very persuasively—to politicize the controversy. He claimed that allegations of Iranian Jewish suffering were conjured up by his political foes. “The hawks’ case against Iran depends on a vision of an apocalyptic regime” that is “frenziedly anti-Semitic,” Cohen asserted. Yet it was Barack Obama’s State Department that was portraying Iran as frenziedly antisemitic. It seemed Cohen was using Iran’s Jews to advance his own agenda—to soften Iran’s international image in order to encourage Western rapprochement with the ayatollahs.

The troubling phenomenon of political interests trumping human rights is something with which the leaders of “3 Generations” are all too familiar.

The group’s founder, Jane Wells, is the daughter of Sidney Bernstein, who was assigned by the British Ministry of Information in the spring of 1945 to make a film documenting the atrocities in Nazi death camps—until politics interfered.