New York City–based performer/playwright Valerie David’s award-winning, internationally acclaimed solo show, Baggage From BaghDAD: Becoming My Father’s Daughter, is about one Middle Eastern Jewish family’s true inspirational journey of being forced to flee from religious persecution during the 1941 “Farhud” pogrom in Baghdad. It is the story of Valerie’s father and his family’s struggle to transcend their harrowing past and build a new home in America. As father and daughter learn to love and to accept their differences, the importance of family takes center stage as she begins to understand how his tale of survival and perseverance shaped her convictions and her future. 

Because the play is rooted in the historical civil unrest for the Jews of Iraq, Baggage From BaghDAD also mirrors the current struggle of today’s Ukrainian refugees, and the continuing rise of racial and religious discrimination worldwide.

Some of the universal themes of Valerie’s solo show center on immigration, refugees, social injustice, generational trauma, discrimination, prejudice, mental health, Alzheimer’s, repression, bullying, and the love and loss of family. This play celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit. It finds humor and hope, even in the darkest of times.

It is an accepted fact that Hitler had Mein Kampf translated into Arabic and thus began the trouble for the Middle Eastern Jews. There were plans for concentration camps and gas chambers, as over one million Jews lived in the Middle Eastern countries in the 1930s/the ’40s, and the Middle Eastern Jews’ existence in the Middle East dates back thousands of years. Valerie’s family was part of that diaspora. Over 1,000 Jews were murdered during The Farhud. Her family fled that night only with what they could carry, never to return.