What does it mean for a fruit to travel under conditions of war, economic duress, and genocide? For the Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, a fruit that travels is a metaphor for exile. In 2006, Rakowitz imported dates from Iraq to the United States as a part of an artistic project called Return (2004-2006). And despite the name given to the artwork, return did not mean returning to Iraq. The dates’ journey to the United States was the one-way journey of a refugee. In this regard the dates stood in for both Rakowitz’s family as well as the millions who left the country during the U.S. occupation. Rakowitz’s family were Iraqi Jews who fled Baghdad in 1941, when Rashid Ali al-Gaylani came into power. An ally of the fascist governments in Germany and Italy, under al-Gaylani, a pogrom was instituted to target one of the oldest Jewish communities in West Asia.