What a strange Jewish New Years’ gift – a denunciation of anti-Semitism and praise of the Jewish people from the last standing (at least occasionally) giant of the Cold War.

So it was that forever revolutionary Fidel Castro sent a message earlier this week to Iranian President Mahmound Ahmadinejad via a guy named Jeffrey Goldberg, one of today’s great journalists and coincidentally a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. (Goldberg’s blog, which is both very smart and very witty, is a must read: http://www.theatlantic.com/jeffrey-goldberg/#middle.)

Goldberg was in Holy Havana for his publication to interview the iconic and ailing 84-year-old about life in a world with communism as a receding shadow, long-view death bed thoughts and the likes. And the topic seemed to keep coming back to the Jews – which would not be strange for the descendants of Abraham and Sarah this time of year, but is definitely out of whack for a guy way high on the list of big shot godless communists.

Here’s some of what Goldberg wrote, quoting Fidel:

“I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything. [The Iranian government should understand that the Jews]“were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here’s what happened to them: Reverse selection. What’s reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation…The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.” [Goldberg writes] I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. “I am saying this so you can communicate it,” he answered.

In a strange way, it was a shanah tovah greeting from Fidel Castro. And if he can accept a Jewish State of Israel, and if he can acknowledge anti-Semitism’s pernicious historical quality, and if he can understand the profound depth of the Shoah’s eternal tragedy, maybe there is a wee bit more hope on this birth of the world Jewish holiday than I had thought.

May it be a year of health and peace to all.