Yona Sabar

Yona Sabar (; born 1938 in Zakho, Iraq) is a Kurdistani Jewish scholar, linguist and researcher. He is professor ''emeritus'' of Hebrew at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a native speaker of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic and has published more than 90 research articles about Jewish Neo-Aramaic and the folklore of the Jews of Kurdistan.

Sabar was born in the town of Zakho in northern Iraq. His family moved to Israel in 1951. He received a B.A. in Hebrew and Arabic from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1963 and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 1970.

His immigrant journey from the hills of Kurdistan to the highways of Los Angeles is the subject of an award-winning memoir by his son, Ariel Sabar, an American author and journalist. Ariel Sabar's book [http://www.arielsabar.com ''My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq''] won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Provided by Wikipedia