May/June 2009

Letter from the Editor
Nadine Epstein

Two years ago, I had lunch with a talented young journalist named Roxana Saberi. Over Korean bee bim bop, she told me about her life as an American-born woman living in Tehran. She struck me as gentle and warm, and courageous as well—Iran is a difficult place for journalists. A former Miss North Dakota and 1998 Miss America finalist, Roxana went to Tehran with master’s degrees in broadcasting from Northwestern and international relations from Cambridge. As a dual Iranian and American citizen (her father is Iranian-born),  she was uniquely positioned to shed light on Iran for a Western audience. During her six years in the country, she reported for NPR, ABC News and the BBC on everything from Iranian cinema to Iran’s nuclear program and was at work on a book about its people.

So I was horrified to open the newspaper one spring day to see a photograph of Roxana and a story about her detention by Iranian authorities. In April, after a one-day trial behind closed doors, the 32-year-old was sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of spying for the United States.

Roxana is not the only journalist persecuted in Iran. Hossein Derakhshan, a 33-year-old reporter, emigrated to Canada in 2000 after his reform-minded Tehran newspaper was shut down. In Toronto, he launched a popular Farsi-language political blog and used his technical savvy to help a new generation of Iranians do the same, sparking Iran’s blogging revolution and challenging the government’s stranglehold on the press. In 2006, this Iranian “blogfather” caused a sensation when he visited Israel to help promote dialogue between Israelis and Iranians. “As a citizen journalist,” Derakhshan wrote, “I’m going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like. The Islamic Republic has long portrayed Israel as an evil state, with an agenda of killing every single man and woman who prays to Allah, including Iranians. I’m going to challenge that image.” Shortly after returning to Iran last year from Canada, Derakhshan was imprisoned.

The charges against him are still unknown, but the Iranian press quoted him as “confessing” to spying for Israel. We’ve heard this accusation before. Back in 1999, Iran arrested 13 of its Jewish citizens for spying for the “Zionist regime”—10 were convicted, and it wasn’t until 2003 that the last of them were released.

I hope that justice will be swifter for Roxana and that she will be free by the time you read this. I hope the same for Derakhshan and others whose cases have received less attention. For at least one Iranian blogger, there are no such hopes. In March, Omidreza Mirsayafi, charged with insulting Islam, committed suicide in Evin, the notorious Tehran prison where Saberi and Derakhshan are being held.

Iran promises to be the focus of the new Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He heads an unwieldy coalition that has prompted new interest in what many consider to be a critical structural flaw in Israel’s democracy—an electoral system that gives small, often fringe parties extraordinary influence in coalition governments. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was infuriated by his country’s electoral system and, like many reformers since, fought unsuccessfully to change it. Moment’s Jeremy Gillick takes an in-depth look at this subject in “Can Israel’s Electoral System Be Fixed?”

In our last issue we profiled Minority Whip Eric Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in the House of Representatives. Moment returns to Capitol Hill to meet Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the first Jewish congresswoman from Florida. The mother of three young children, she has risen rapidly through Democratic congressional ranks and has come to symbolize a new generation of political women.

The designation of May as Jewish American Heritage Month is one of Wasserman Schultz’s legislative accomplishments. In recognition, we launch our Jewish American Heritage Guide on page 57. It features museums, archives and galleries and an introduction by historian Jonathan Sarna. We also present our “Publish-A-Kid” and “You Can Save the World” writing contest winners. These are accompanied by interviews with author Jerry Spinelli, who wrote Milkweed, a popular children’s book about a boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Princeton bioethics professor Peter Singer, who argues that giving is central to living an ethical life. His provocative ideas are well-worth thinking about.

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