Dreaming of Iran: A Conversation with Writer Roya Hakakian

Hey, I'm Noam Weissman, and you're listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History... is dedicated in memory of Armin Lindenbaum by his wife, Jean, and children, Felice, Amiel, and Arielle Lindenbaum-Sabad. If you're interested in sponsoring an episode of Unpacking Israeli History,

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Allah Tamat Medina Yudhishthira Israel. We, the people of Israel, are prepared and anxious to meet the representatives of our neighbors without any preconditions. There are people in Israel. And elsewhere, say it's impossible to make peace between the Arabs and Israel or the Jewish people. I think they're wrong.

Over the past few weeks, we've been talking about the big stories behind the news, the histories that led us to this moment. And all of those are so important for understanding not only today, but tomorrow. But history is not just the geopolitical international stories. It's also the product of billions of individual people, their daily lives, their choices, their struggles, their triumphs.

There's a German artist named Anselm Kiefer who wrote, History is formed by the people, those who have power and those without power. Each one of us makes history.

History doesn't just happen. It's made by the collective actions of billions of people. And sometimes history is best told through the lives of a single person. Today, I am excited to talk with one of those people. She's lived through some of the events. that we've discussed recently that have led us to where we are today. And she hasn't only lived through them, she's spoken out about them. Today, my conversation is with Roya Hakakian.

Roy Hakakian is an Iranian-American writer, poet, and journalist whose work explores themes of exile, authoritarianism, and human rights, particularly the struggles of women and immigrants. Born into a Jewish family in Tehran, and arriving in the United States as a refugee in 1985, she first gained acclaim for her memoir, Journey from the Land of Noh, detailing her youth during Iran's 1979 revolution.

Her subsequent books, including Assassins of the Turquoise Palace and A Beginner's Guide to America, have received wide recognition for their narrative power and political insight. A former Persian poet and Guggenheim Fellow, she has written for major outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, collaborated on major TV journalism, and served on human rights boards. She's a fellow at Yale and the SNF Agora Institute and had a very influential voice on Iran, democracy, and immigration.

Make sure to stick around after our conversation for our five fast facts and enduring lesson as I see it. Summarizing all the information that we covered in our discussion, Roya, thank you so much for joining. I'm so glad to be with you.

Roya, you and I first met each other a few months ago in Nashville. And I falled over you because I'm a fan of your podcast. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm so happy to have you. together with me and with our team today to have this conversation about the story of Israel and the story of Iran. I just blushed when you said that, but I totally skipped over it. But anyway, I want to start with the whole story of...

Iran through kind of a personal story. And we'll go through the history of the last few thousand years, frankly, in Iran. And I want to get to different episodes throughout Iranian history and also your story. I want to just kind of like weave all of that together. But before we do that, I wanted to pause. I want to take a moment and I wanted to ask, how are you doing today? What emotions are you feeling right now?

And very crestfallen. I thought that we had come to the very edge of the annihilation of the current regime. And while I didn't think that we needed to overthrow the regime or replace the regime, I just thought that a couple more days of what was going on. if had it continued the destiny of Iran, the destiny of the region, Israel, the world could have been different. And the fact that they...

now will continue to be in power really is a huge blow. Oh, wow. So interesting. So you look at the last few weeks and you say to yourself, you're actually not... Now, we don't know. People might be listening to this in a month from now and a year from now. But at this very moment, you're saying you're not thrilled. You're not thrilled right now. I would love to be proven wrong. I would love to.

be able to come back on your show, you know, three months from now and say, you know, Noam, I was wrong about everything. And, you know, and it would be the first time I've apologized or confessed to my mistakes. I am not even saying let's look at the course and the span of history for the last 100 years. I'm just saying let's look at the last year. Israel weakened Hezbollah. tremendously, got rid of Nasrallah, and the dominoes fell. You know, Lebanon has changed. It may not last.

Lebanon has profoundly changed and there's hope for Lebanon to be a country very different from what it has been. Syria transformed and we don't know exactly. how Syria will sort itself out in the next five years. But for all intents and purposes, it looks a lot better than it did two years ago, or even a year ago.

So there was one more piece in this domino that needed to fall, and that was the supreme leader in Tehran. And the fact that he didn't, you have to realize, feeds into his... 46-year narrative, which is, God is with us, this was divine intervention, and I live because God wanted it so. think that gives him far more power to repress the people internally and to carry on with all the terrible policies that they were carrying on with to begin with. Wow. So I wasn't expecting you to say crestfallen.

But I hear I hear what you're talking about. I didn't think about it from that perspective. I want to get into understanding Iran and the current day of Iran versus 50 years ago. And throughout this conversation, I think it's like one of the most.

Sorry to speak about it in like an antiseptic way, like I'm distant from it in some way, but I find it fascinating to understand Iranian history, first of all, for the last couple thousand years. And then also, I'm just like that history nerd guy, which you know.

I just find it so interesting. So I want to get into the understanding of your family's story. And because this is a history podcast. I want to weave it into the larger history of Iran. And I want to start way back. I'm going to go through a lot of history in a short amount of time. So listen to the history in Iran. From 678 to 550 before the Common Era, Jews are exiled to Babylon.

And in 550 to 300 or so, around that time period, Cyrus, a great Persian leader, allows the Jewish people back into the land of Israel to rebuild the temple. We have the story of Esther, by the way, a little bit after that, right? That's where that story comes from a little bit later.

There's a whole amount of Torah scholarship, Hebrew Bible scholarship that flourishes in this empire from like around 200 to 500 of the common era in this broader region. Then there's the Muslim conquest at a certain point in time of Persia. And maybe I'm going to mispronounce the word because I always mispronounce this word. Jews become Dimi or Thimi. How do you say it?

Dimi. Dimi. Okay, Dimi. But it's an H after the... Right. So I always say, like, Dimi or Dimi. Okay, Dimi. Okay, fine. Fair enough. And then there's the Mongol rule, by the way. There's the Mongol rule, 13th to 14th century. Around 1500 to 1730, we start seeing the Safavid dynasty come in to the Shia Islam becomes a state or whatever state means at that point in time, religion. There's violence against Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Sunni Muslims.

Then there's the Najasat laws are maintained, which are laws of impurity, meaning non-Muslims are impure. And what happened is these Jewish people had to hold jobs that Muslims could not do, like cleaning excrement.

handling gold and silver objects, serving as musicians and dancers. And then I heard about this. I'm going to say this for a little bit right now in the history part of this all. I didn't know about this, but I want to give credit to the Center for Israel Education, who recently put out. Something that was fascinating, on March 27th of 1839, Jews first settled in the northeast Iranian city of Mashhad in 1741, some say 1735.

when approximately 40 families were relocated by the Persian ruler Nader Shah from other parts of Iran. Nader Shah uprooted the Jews so they could guard the treasures he had brought to Mashhad after conquering India. He chose the Jews for this work because as a Sunni Muslim, he did not trust the local Shiite population with his treasure. Mashhad's status as a holy Muslim city meant that it was closed to non-Muslim settlement. Therefore, the Jews settled in a special district called Idga.

meaning place of celebrations. Mashhad's Jewish community grew and prospered as merchants and traders, but was almost entirely segregated from the Muslim residents of the city. In addition to their economic prosperity, Mashhad's Jews also developed a considerable Jewish life and education system. And here's what I really did not know. The tensions between the local Shiite population and the Jews erupted on March 27th.

1839. Now, I thought problems only emerged in 1979. I'm reading this, and then it says, following an alleged misconduct by a Jewish woman, the Idga was, maybe I'm not pronouncing that correctly, was attacked by a mob. Between 30 and 40 Jews were killed. The synagogue was burned. Homes were looted and children were abducted in the violence that followed. Following the riots, the entire community of nearly 2,400 Jews were forced to convert to Islam, an event which became known as the Al-Adad.

As has been the case in Spain in the 15th century, most of those who converted continued to practice Judaism in secret. The new converts were known as Jadid al-Islam, new to Islam. Some Jews left Mashhad and settled in Herat, Afghanistan. in order to escape conversion, while others went to Tehran or abroad. I did not know a lot of that, okay? So then...

It was new to me too. I just didn't know this. And then 1925 to 1979, there's major Jewish conversion to Baha'i, something that I heard, and major Jewish populations in Isfahan, Hamadan. and other cities that I will not try to pronounce incorrectly, and my apologies, but Shiraz, Tehran, and others emerged, and then 1979 happened. I want you to talk to me. Within all that history, you are Iranian. You're Iranian-American, but you're...

raised initially in Iran and your family's from Iran. Could you say a little bit about where your family history fits into this broader history of Iran? There's something interesting when you were talking about Cyrus, which is that there is a belief that the current model of Jewish diaspora was set by Cyrus, meaning that Cyrus said...

Jews, you know, I set you free. You can return to Jerusalem, to the Holy Land if you want to. And some Jews said, you know, we don't want to return. And then Cyrus says, well... If you don't want to return, then you need to contribute to the rebuilding of all that was destroyed, you know, the temple and everything. And so in some ways...

If the account that I've heard is correct, Cyrus was the one who said either, you know, make Aliyah, or if you don't make Aliyah, it's your responsibility to make contributions to... to the health and well-being of Israel, which is really interesting. So where does my family fit in? I have been wondering about that myself. So a few years ago, I did one of those, you know, DNA. 23andMe thing? I did the National Geographic one.

a long time ago. And I was wondering, did I have ancestry outside of Iran, somewhere else? I was hoping for some European blondes to be related to me. But it turns out that our family was last. trace to Spain. And then I assume that from Spain, we just trickle down to... you know, to Iran, and I was 99.9%, you know, an Iranian Jew. There was nothing else that they could find within the DNA. And my...

Maternal side of the family was from Hamadon, which is where Esther and Mordecai's tombs are. And this is one of the most memorable... events of my life because we traveled to my mother's birth city when I was really little. And I remember walking into the tombs and being told that this is where Esther is and this is where Mordecai is. Wow. It was like a Hajj. It was like a pilgrimage, too. It was like something special to go to their tomb.

Completely. You know, something that, you know, you said Iran's history with Jewry, with the world Jewry is very complicated. I want to add the adjective rich. You know, the most sacred sites of Jewish history outside of Israel are in Iran. Whether these places are really what they say they are, they claim to be, or not is... of course, including the story of Esther to begin with. And so there is in Isfahan the home of Serah Bat Asher, and then there is the tomb of Prophet Daniel.

You know, and tons of synagogues, which... ironically, shockingly, have turned to tourist sites in Iran. I had a friend who came to me a couple of summers ago and said, you know, I was just in Iran for the summer and guess what I did? And then he told me that there are tour guides who have created this tour of Jewish sites of Tehran. And because so many of them have been abandoned, they take tourists through former Jewish centers and synagogues and worship places and all.

Interesting. I want to get into different aspects of the history in a second also, but I'm just like, excuse my ignorance, but I'm going to assume people listening also might be ignorant also. Roy, if you went to Iran right now, would you feel safe? I particularly wouldn't be safe, but that's because of my writings. You know, I've been a persona non grata.

as far as the government is concerned, for at least 20 years because of what I've published. But there are Iranian Jews based in the United States who have traveled back and forth to Iran. Very often, up until very recently. And as you know, since you haven't mentioned, I'm sure you were coming to it, so I'll jumpstart. There is still about 8,000 Jews left in Iran.

Which, fun fact, is the biggest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel. Well, I'm not sure. I think that floats around. What else? Who's in competition? Turkey. Turkey. Okay. If it's Turkey or Iran, the reality is, and this is the gist of this. Don't say they're both the same. No, no, no, no. I'm not that American. But what I was going to say is that.

we have 8,000 or so Iranian Jews living in Iran. And you're like, okay, there used to be a lot, a lot more than that, hundreds of thousands. And I think there was between 90 to 100,000 in the 20th century, right?

So I'm going to jump a bit to the modern era, and I want to talk about three distinct periods in Iran's history. The first is the 1940s to 1953. So I want to start there. I want to start with what was Iran like before the creation of the state of Israel? And did it change anything? Now, you wrote something in the Sapir Journal. You said on his daily walks to school in Kanzar.

My father and his siblings were often pelted with rocks. That was on sunny days. On rainy days, they were not allowed to attend schools. The locals believed Jews to be nudges, unclean, and feared that any splash of rainwater off their bodies onto theirs

could dirty them too. Thus was the fate of my father's education tied to the whims of the clouds. Really poetically, beautifully written. What would you say about what it was like from 1940 to 1953 so like i always view it as from 48 to 79 things were good for iranian jews is that too simple is it no no actually it's actually very true so My father was a kid in the 30s, in the late 30s. And Iran undergoes really major changes. And by many accounts, if not by all, the golden...

Years of Iran, at least in the modern times, began with the reign of the first Pahlavi Shah. who was Reza Shah, the father of the Shah who fell in 1979. And he came to power in the early 1920s. And by the way, one of the things that he did... which is hugely important to remember, is that he was the first Shah, again, in modern times, or the first Shah compared to, you know, the other dynasties before him, who went to visit a synagogue.

That was a huge statement of, you know, of acknowledgement of the Jewish community as a legitimate community, as a well-regarded community. The reason he did that... I suspect, it was that the Palavi's project was to create a unified Iranian nation. Because you have to remember that Iran shares a border with Pakistan, with Iraq, with Afghanistan, and all these countries have had and to a great degree continue to have.

ethnic stripes within their own population. And Iran was not all that different, although Iran always had a much stronger and more unified sense of, you know, peoplehood. But Reza Shah realizes that in order for Iran to really industrialize and make leaps towards modernization, the nation needs to...

feel that they're all one, that it's one people. So part of the reason he pays a visit to the synagogue and is part of the larger agenda of bringing in all the ethnicities, whether they're religious or ethnic. minorities in from the cold and helping them all become and feel part of a single people. And that really gathers momentum. after the 1940s when the son of the Shah, after the end of World War II, is installed as the Shah of Iran because his father was accused of having been...

an ally of Germany. And that's one of the, you know, in case history is, we have a card too, and we need to have that discussion, we can, but he's totally misunderstood. misremembered in history. He wasn't an ally of the Germans. He was just trying to keep Iran out of the war. That's besides the fact. So out of World War II, one of the changes that comes to Iran is that the son of...

of that first Pahlavi Shah, who was very young at the time, becomes the king. And then, you know, the process of modernization really speeds up in Iran. time of prosperity for Iran in general, but the Jewish community's fortune completely changes to the point that the traditional and sort of historic ancient... ghetto, Jewish ghetto in Tehran, while it remains where it was.

which was in south of Tehran, busts up. In other words, if you're Jewish, it's not mandated that you live in that part of town. You can go anywhere you want. You can... live in any neighborhood you want. And so Jews start to get out, get out of that southern corner, which had... a lot of stigma attached to it. You know, you were poor if you lived there and, you know, the quality of education and health and hygiene was low.

And so the Jews begin to move out and begin to take up residence throughout Iran, throughout Tehran. And there were no... professional limitations really put on Jews. I was happy to hear that you were talking about how Jews as dhimis were limited in the sort of jobs that they could take. the late 1940s up until 1979, when the Iranian Revolution took place, Jews could be anywhere and do anything, which was mind-blowing.

Yeah, it's mind-blowing to me that that's mind-blowing. That doesn't sound mind-blowing to me. That sounds like that ought not be mind-blowing. I mean, why shouldn't it be the fact? But it's happened while... you know, Jews were being thrown out of Europe. So it is really mind-blowing that while the, you know, westernized, advanced European countries... were doing to the Jews what they were doing. Iran was making such advances that it was allowing Jews to actually become absolute equal citizens.

So it's 53 to 79 now. Let's go there for a second. And I want to know what life was like under the Shah. I know there was a brief period where the Shah was overthrown by the elected nationalists in 1953, Mohammed Moussa Dick. who, but then the CIA, there was a CIA coup that took Mao Zedek out of power, put the Shah back in. And the Shah ran a very pro-Western, but seemingly dictatorial country.

You grew up during this time period. I came a little later, but okay. So closer to the 70s. Yeah. In the 70s, let's say. And I want to know what it's like for you to, first of all, to grow up there. as a young Jewish woman, what was it like? What's like a story of, did you interact with Muslims that lived in Iran with you? Was it...

Was the Shah viewed as someone who was so bad? And it seems to me like there was 1979, there were Marxists, there were liberals, there were Islamists, there were feminists, a lot of people that overthrew the Shah. Now, the Islamists consolidated power ultimately in 79. But it sounds to me like there was a lot of people that did not really appreciate the way that Shah was running the country. So I want to know what it was like for you. Do you have any stories?

And if you have any pushback on my description of it from 53 to 79. See, I think the fairest way to kind of look at the Shah, the younger one. who was overthrown, the second one, is to kind of look at the global backdrop. This is the age of, you know, the Soviet Union, the Cold War. Everybody forgets this. And it is such a key piece of information that while we think of Iran as a Shiite...

countries surrounded by Iraq and Afghanistan and all these radical Muslim nations, to the north of Iran is the Soviet Union. And the impact of the Soviet Union and its culture. and its politics on the Iranian elite was huge, huge, more than anything that Shihism has ever done. was the influence that was coming from the Soviet Union into Iran with all the full package of Marxist communist propaganda. So was the Shah bad?

Well, the Shah was a guy who was modernizing Iran, who had given equal rights to women. My God, you know, women, his father. forced women to set aside their veils because he wanted the society to modernize. He sent out cops who went and... pulled the scarf, pulled the hijab off the heads of women. And a whole generation of women in the 30s were traumatized.

by that experience. So you fast forward and his son gives equal rights in marriage, equal rights in inheritance, and allows women to join the workforce, which is a huge, huge leap, you know, evolutionary leap, evolutionary political leap for the... Iranian society. And it's actually where Ayatollah Khomeini, who then leads the opposition against the Shah and overthrows him, picks on. In other words, his biggest beef against the Shah was really against what he had done.

to allow women to become equal citizens because he thought, you know, this was corruption, to let women expose their hair, to let women wear mini skirts, to let women... go to work. And he says in a lot of his sermons, you know, these women go to work and they are so distracting, men can't do their work. And therefore, he's corrupting the society and on and on and on and on. And that's all he was talking about.

you know, in the early 60s. So he brings all these changes to the society. Okay. But he's also a Middle Easterner ruler who... it doesn't exactly know how to create a democracy because he himself hasn't really experienced it, right? And there is no model that he can aspire to and say, oh, you know, my father, you know, had a democratic society, so I know how to build it.

He didn't. He had to create it from scratch. So in those ways, as far as civil rights were concerned, as far as freedom of press, freedom of expression were concerned, he was terrible. And, you know, writers lived under censorship. But all of that were amplified by a thousand because of the communist and the Marxist propaganda that...

basically dominated the Iranian literary and intellectual elite. Wow. So what about you, though, in the mid-70s? I don't know, were you... Not part of the revolution, but were you oppositional to it? Were your parents nervous about it? Well, I talk about all this in my memoir at length. Everyone should read the memoir. Yeah. Journey from the land of no. So I was 12 years old when the revolution in 1979 takes place. So you can do the math. And I was excited about the revolution because...

You know, what young Jewish person was not excited about any revolution anywhere in the world? I mean, wasn't Trotsky a Jew? I mean, what young Jew ever said no? to being on the forefront of revolutionary change. It was also really my first time that I was seeing sort of a collective effort, a collective coming together. of the whole nation towards something. And, you know, it was very exciting to watch. You know, thousands of people are...

marching on the street, chanting the same thing. It was hugely exciting. But it was obviously, as far as the Jewish community was concerned, a division between elderly. or elder Jews, I always say 40 and up and 40 and under. So if you were a younger Jew, if you were a high school student, especially if you were a university student, you were being stirred by this revolutionary promise, which at the time wasn't an Islamic, you know, utopian society. It was all about, you know, and...

greater freedom and democracy and an equal society. And Khomeini, Ayatollah Khomeini, who was the cleric who led the revolution, really... before he came to power, really squeezed all the juice out of these ideas because he realized that the communists and the Marxists were very popular. So he amplified and echoed. a lot of their messages. So he came and added to it and he said, I am going to come back to Iran.

make all utilities free for all Iranians. So nobody would have to pay for electricity, for water, for gas, for this, for that. You know, we have oil. Why should we pay for anything? It sounds like the fourth grader who's running for... president and tells everyone they have recess all day kind of thing exactly exactly yeah And people believed him. That's worse because not only he was a fourth grader, the country that bought it was a country of fourth graders at the time.

Yeah, so he came to power in February of 1979. And the Shah had already left the country about 10 days before that. And then... You know, electricity didn't become free. Let me just leave it at that. But you weren't afraid. So I think that's something that I just learned because I did not know this. I always imagined that the Jewish community in Iran in 1979.

was not in favor of the revolution because the revolution, at least soon thereafter, became the function was to subvert American power in the Middle East as part of the IRGC's goal was to...

not really appreciate America, take down America and death to Israel. No, no, that's totally true. So the under 40 year olds were okay with the death to Israel stuff in the Jewish world? You know, they weren't okay. We thought that it's part of... I mean, the majority of even under 40 year olds took it as sort of this feverish stuff that they were saying, but they didn't really mean it, which ironically, ironically is.

how Iran has been justified to the rest of the world for the past 46 years. So Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to... columbia university to give a talk he's the former iranian uh president president and and he said oh, there are no gays in Iran, which made the whole auditorium blow up when he said that with laughter. And then Saturday Night Live made a skit about it, which I still watch after all these years. But he also said that...

you know, we intend to wipe Israel off the map of the world. And then everybody else said, oh, you know, he doesn't really mean it. He doesn't really mean it. He's being poetic. What he means is that, you know... Sounds like Emerson. But what I'm trying to say is that this is how Iran's very violent rhetoric has been justified. That they say it, but they don't mean it. This is how...

the language works, you know, my foot. But, you know, in 1979, you have to remember something really important. Not only, you know, not only the piece about Soviet Union, which is very significant to remember. is something that I want to leave you with. But the other is that there are no Osama bin Laden's. There is no Sinwar. There was no ISIS. There was no Taliban. None of this existed in 1979. And because none of that existed, when he was saying all the things that he was saying, people...

didn't have a historical reference to say, oh my God, this is very dangerous because he's going to build tunnels under Tehran and then stage attacks on this one and that one. And he's really going to arm people to go into Israel. and behead people because a lot of Iranian intellectuals actually looked at Khomeini and said, he looks like Mahatma Gandhi. That's what they thought of.

you know, this guy in this turban and cloak, he didn't remind them of sort of all the dangerous Islamic fundamentalist figures who showed up after he did. he first appeared like another nationalist in the region who wanted independence and sovereignty.

So, so fascinating. I did not know this take at all. I shouldn't know this. And so we have 79 now. And I want to know, you live there, you left in 85, I believe. You left in 84. OK, so just like a why did you choose to leave? And and I think and and what I'm interested also in, in understanding Iran from 79 to today, there's.

There was a study that was done by the group for analyzing and measuring attitudes in Iran, Gaman, and this is something that I just keep on reading about, because I just... Again, I just I keep on saying to myself, I didn't know this. And I'm I should have known it, but I'm learning it now. I it seems to be the case that only 32 percent of Iranians identified as right now as Shia Muslim.

It says that 73% oppose the use of religion in laws. It talks about how Iran versus Egypt or Saudi Arabia versus Turkey versus Indonesia and Pakistan. It seems like Iran is actually of the people there are the least. practicing of the religion. Now, this makes sense. Now, when I see pictures of 60s and 70s of Iranians, they look very Western. They look very European in many ways. And when people look at the Middle East, they see one thing. They see...

deeply religious. They see maybe, and I like religion as much as the next guy, but I'm saying they don't look like the Western world. And yet, when you look at the studies, And only 32% of whatever of Iranians identify as Shia Muslims compared to the 95% official number. And you see that only 40% say they pray daily or something like that. Around 60% oppose the mandatory hijab.

It's like I'm so interested to understand Iranian society versus the IRGC is since 79. Could you say a little bit more about that? Yeah, I mean, this is. I get very frustrated because, you know, cameramen and news broadcasters go into Iran. And of course, it's very attractive when you see a crowd at a Friday prayer. You know, and they're chanting and they're throwing their fists into the air and saying death to America, death to Israel. It's good. It's good visuals, you know, especially if you.

don't follow the language if you're an English speaker, don't know what the hell they're saying. It's exciting. You know, it's a bunch of people. They look, you know, really worked up. And they're dressed in a funny way. And they're very actively, you know, doing things with their arms and fists and things. So as opposed to, you know... you know, an underground Iranian rock music group or a bunch of rappers who look like you and me.

Everyone says I look like a rapper. That's true. You could. Okay, thank you. It takes very little. But, you know, we're not... all that interesting for the cameras because they're looking for what's exotic and what...

It reinforces the narrative, which from 1979 onward is that Iran is religious and we misread the country. So that's what's going on. I mean, all the statistics that you just recounted, all that... really says is that here's a nation that's very dissatisfied with its leadership and what it's decided it can do. now that it can't successfully overthrow it, is to define itself in opposition to it through daily practice, or actually I should say daily non-practice.

They don't pray. And by the way, one of those statistics also says that Iranians are having less babies than any of their neighbors. Actually, the birth rates in Iran are so low, they match. the European birth rates, which is, you know, one more sign of a secular society.

Yeah, so, you know, another very interesting statistic is also the one that the ADL has been doing of sort of the Global Antisemitism Index. And whenever you look at... or the ADL has looked at Middle East and North Africa, the rates or the frequency or the occurrence of anti-Semitism in Iran is significantly lower.

in the Middle East and North Africa compared to, you know, everybody else. And there was one that they did in 2010, and then there was a second one 10 years later, and both substantiate the same thing, that Iran is the least. anti-Semitic nation in the region. And you must have seen in the research that you did, you saw that there were other than official protests in Tehran.

After October 7th, there were no popular protests in support of October 7th or in support of Hamas. And in fact, the opposite of it happened. at a soccer stadium when, you know, the flag of Palestine went up, started chanting, take the flag of Palestine and shove it. Forget Palestine, think of us, was the idea, I think. It was that, but after October 7th, when at the soccer stadium they showed the flag, they were more vulgar than they had been in the past.

I have one more question for you about the future of Iran. You just busted a few misconceptions that I had. And if you busted a few misconceptions that I had, then you're going to do that for so many people. So I thank you for that. Do you have any stories of Little Roya in Iran? I know that's in your memoirs, but is there any story that you can share with me about...

I don't know, a moment that you felt Jewish in Iran, a moment that you felt Iranian in Iran, a moment, I don't know, something about your upbringing. I'm imagining a 12-year-old Roya. you know, that's confused about the revolution. I want to be part of it, but it seems to be there's some things about it that maybe don't speak to me, but some things that maybe do speak to me. Are there other, is there, is there a moment, a story that you could share? Yeah. I mean, first of all,

I think, you know, I go to shul because, you know, we all go to shul. But part of the reason, you know, my additional reason to go to shul is because I am really blown away. And I'm sure other people find this to be an odd statement because, you know, every Jew must feel that way. But I'm blown away. by how I can be in a shul in the United States, in Connecticut, and still hear the same tunes that I heard. For instance, Adon Olam. It, you know.

is sung in the same exact way when people don't try to modernize and change. And whenever they do, I get really upset. I'm like, I am coming to hear that Adorno love. And with that tune, don't change it. It takes me back to everything I remember. It makes me feel like I never left. It makes me feel like, you know, there's continuity. But so a lot of my... memories of childhood are associated, you know, with my father walking me, holding my hand, walking me to synagogue on Friday evening.

It's about, you know, being rowdy in the courtyard of synagogue. And, you know, everybody, all the adults shushing us all the time. And one of the things I like about my synagogue currently is that nobody shushes the kids. Yeah, that's great. I know I'm in a more civilized society when I realized that nobody wants to quiet down the kids. And so it's a lot of that.

At the moment of the revolution, yes, I felt torn in many ways because one memory that I really worked hard to build up in my memoir is of a time when... in an act of protest prior to the fall of the Shah, everybody, all Iranians were supposed to go to their rooftops. and chant, God is great. So my mother and I are on the rooftop. It's pitch black. It's 9 p.m. at night. And, you know, there is no light anywhere. And I'm standing with my mom and dad. And it's really exciting because, you know.

everybody's doing the same thing and it's dark and you know it was it was really cinematic and then um and then they start chanting aloha aloha and And, you know, yes, I was 12, but I was really full of myself. And I already was thinking that I'm a great writer and, you know, my language is Persian and Allahu Akbar is Arabic. And so I wasn't worrying that I'm a Jew. How can I say Allahu Akbar? I was worrying that I am a Persian, you know, great Persian.

future of the Persian literature, how could I say Allah Akbar? And then I'm torn. Meantime, my mom and dad are saying that they are scared. You know, my father was elbowing my mother saying, if you don't say Allah Akbar, you upset the Goyim. The non-Jews, yeah. And so I'm standing there kind of wondering what's going on. But at the same time...

There is electricity in the air. All of your neighbors are on their rooftops and they're all chanting the same thing. It's really exciting. Of course, what is... incredibly earth-shattering to me is that those two words, Allahu Akbar, never left the Islamist theater that we saw unfold. Exactly on October 7th, when they were pushing Naam Alivi into the van, they were also saying Allahu Akbar. And I could not not remember that.

how I first was introduced to these two words and where it led. That is profound. That is profound. I'm going to have to reflect on this right after because this dialectic between being... Persian in Iran versus being Shia Muslim in Iran. Seems like there's like a real tension between these two elements, right? Yes. So Ayatollah Khomeini, who's...

the cleric that leads the revolution and then becomes the supreme leader. And then his replacement is the current supreme leader. He cares nothing about Iranian-ness. He's all about Islam. And one of the things that he's trying to do from the moment he gets there is to really quash all the manifestation of this Iranian identity, because it gets in the way of this.

greater Islamic hegemony that he's envisioning. He wants to be the leader of the Muslims of the world. And if these pesky Iranians keep pressing... that they are a different nation, that they have a different language, that they have a different culture, that gets in the way of creating this unified Islamic, greater Islamic nation that he wants to lead.

And so one of the things that he immediately does after he returns is that he says, to hell with the Iranian New Year. Now, the Iranian New Year happens on the first day of spring. So it's a celebration of... the arrival of spring. And it's a pagan tradition that has remained in the country since the reign of Zoroastrianism, which was...

a pagan religion and had nothing to do with Islam. In fact, Iranians were forced to abandon Zoroastrianism and become Muslim when Islam came to Iran. And people reacted. so intensely to the no celebration of the new year in Iran that they had to, they had to... walk it back and they had to say, oh, you know, we didn't mean that you couldn't, but, you know, what if we do X, Y, and Z? And you can also see it in the way it, you know, see this tension in the way that...

The propaganda out of Iran over this war that just ended came out. So, you know, usually all the Iranian leadership is talking about Islam, Islam, Islam, Islam. But as soon as Iran was attacked and they needed to bring the nation together, it was all, you know, Cyrus the Great and, you know, the motherland and patriotism. These are things that they... Never talk about. You know, it's never about.

Cyrus. It's never about ancient Iran. It's never about that grand civilization. It's always just about Islam. But the moment they were threatened and they needed something bigger. to thematically connect the people and rally them. It was, you know, all that Persian identity and Iranian past.

So why do you think, Roya, I'm going to ask this last question to a two-folder. Why do you think, because from hearing you, I kind of get the sense that Most Iranians, and from the stats I read and from the history and going back to the 60s and 70s and even before that, we see this, exploring the history, you see this tension between being Persian and being Muslim within Iran. Why is it the case that Iranians

have not overthrown this regime, a counter-revolution, if the majority of them do not seem to want to live this sort of way. I mean, why is it the case that the regime change hasn't taken place if so many Iranians do not want the IRGC to be in charge. And then I want to ask you, I never like to ask people to predict the future, but I want to...

hear from you, if you could share with us what your dream for Iran is. What do you dream about as part of Roya the Poet? What do you dream about for the future of Iran? I don't know. I can't really say why the regime is still standing, despite all the pressures. But I can also say that look at... Venezuela, look at Russia, look at China. And these are only three examples. There are several others. Belarus. None of these nations have been able to...

overthrow their regimes. And I think part of it is because there is a solidarity. During the Cold War, the solidarity was between all the communist countries, you know, they were a solid bloc. Now we're facing a different unified front, and that different unified front is China, Russia, Iran. Venezuela, North Korea, and they prop each other up and they spare no amount of violence in order to quash their local movements. That's one thing. And of course, there is no...

unified coalition in opposition to the regime, which is a second very important factor. But my dream for Iran is, I think, what I dream in some ways, for the future of Israel. My dream for Iran is for it to become a democratic society, a society where women can be women. You know, women can have the choice to dress as they wish. My dream is for Israel and Iran to have relations just as they did.

you know, in the 60s and 70s. My dream is for Iranians not to have to leave their country in order to thrive elsewhere. And I think that's not just good for Iran, it will change the region. if such an Iran comes into being. Iran is hugely influential regionally, and it's a huge country. And just as its Islamic revolution in 1979...

change the region for the worse, it's a better future, a democratic future in Iran can also change the region. Amen. Roya, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation. Thank you, Niwam.

Thank you. Okay, how awesome is Roya? Seriously, just a powerhouse. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. So it's hard to summarize so much history, but as always... Here are your five fast facts plus a bonus nerd corner alert. Number one. Jewish history in Iran goes back nearly 3,000 years. In fact, Iran has one of the highest concentrations of Jewish holy sites outside of Israel. I did not know this, including the tombs of the prophet Daniel.

Mordechai and Esther, and even Serach Bat Asher. Nerd Corner Alert about Serach. She doesn't get a lot of mention. And yes, this may be the first Nerd Corner Alert in a five fast facts ever. So take that. Sarech Badasher is the granddaughter of the Jewish people's great, great, great, great grandfather, Jacob, the daughter of his son, Asher. She shows up in the book of Numbers 46, 17, I believe.

Check me on that. When Moses surveys the Israelites, the only woman mentioned anyway, just that's my nerd corner alert in the five fast facts. Number two, Iran was tolerant of its Jewish minority until the rise of Shia Islam in the 16th century, when Jews began to be considered impure. Now, they still had a, broadly speaking, decent relationship often. But between the 16th and 20th century,

Jewish life in Iran was marked by the occasional outbursts of anti-Semitic violence, forced conversions, which you heard about, and ghettoization. Okay, number three. Number three. All that changed with the rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi. who recognized the importance of uniting all minorities under a single national identity. He was the first political leader in Iran to visit a synagogue heralding a new age for Iran's Jews. Like all kings, Reza Shah and his son, Muhammad Reza, was not, uh...

Bastions of democracy and liberalism, per se. Muhammad Reza was overthrown in part because of his illiberal policies, which included crackdowns on free speech and political dissidents. That said...

Many Jews viewed him as a modern-day Cyrus, ushering in a new golden age for their once persecuted community. Number four, but that golden age came to an end when Ayatollah Khomeini... seized power in 1979, forcing Persian Jews to choose between being fully and authentically Jewish and Zionist, which is part of their identity, and being good citizens of the Islamic Republic.

attention that Roya explores in her memoir. Check that out. And number five, and yet, surveys indicate that Iranians are the least anti-Semitic people in the entire Middle East. signaling that when, not if, when the regime collapses, Jews will once again be free to be their full selves without fear in Iran. Those are your five fast facts, but here's one enduring lesson as I see it.

It's tempting sometimes to take a narrow view of history, to zoom in and assume that the facts of the present will remain the facts of the future, that what is happening now will never stop. And if you're an Iranian... Living under an oppressive regime that has spent the past 46 years silencing and torturing you, it's easy to despair. To look at the multiple failed attempts at revolution and believe...

that the regime is immovable, that this will always be your lot. History teaches us otherwise. To study history is to be freed from the shackles of the present, to be free. to imagine a different world because things are changing all the time. The Jews who were exiled from Judea in 586 BCE could not have imagined a moment when they'd go back to rebuild. They dreamed of it.

They wrote and prayed and sang and wept by the rivers of Babylon. But who among them could have envisioned that in just a few short decades, everything would change? History is frequently grim, and sometimes... It's even depressing, but it can also be hopeful. And if history teaches us anything, it's this. Profound change is not only possible, it's guaranteed. For better or for worse, nothing is forever.

As my grandmother of blessed memory, Mama Bashi, used to say, the only thing constant in life, Noam, is change. And that means there is always hope. Hope for change, for improvement, for revolution. And our responsibility as students of history, as people who are trying to shape the future, is to remember that, to identify and seize those opportunities to build a better world.

Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an open-door media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend who you think will appreciate it and leave us a reading on Apple or Spotify. Five stars doesn't hurt you. It doesn't hurt to do that. And it really helps other people find our podcast. And one last thing I love hearing from listeners. So email me at noam at unpacked.media to share your thoughts.

Our amazing, amazing guest today was Roya Hakakian. This episode was produced by Rifki Stern. Our team for this episode includes Adi Elbaz, Alex Harris, and Rob Perra. I'm your host. Noam Weissman, thanks for listening. See you next week.