Queen Esther and the Bad Mullah: Roya Hakakian on being both Jewish and Iranian
What is most astonishing about the Iran of 2009 is how much, despite 30 years and the doubling of the population, it remains the Iran I knew as a teenager. I’d not find my way around Tehran, where the streets have been renamed and new roads have sliced into the heart of the city. But […]
When Eyes Get Averted: The Consequences of Misplaced Reporting
On the day that the Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, charged with espionage by Tehran, was handed her eight-year sentence, I received several dozen messages asking if I planned to write something about the case. It is a natural question for those who know me: I am Iranian. I write about Iran, and I often write […]
Then They Came for the Bahai
“Then They Came for the Bahai.” In mastering the knowlege that even bigotry is relative and comes in gradations, I was a premature pupil. I learned this lesson when I was only 10. In 1977, in an eclectic neighborhood in Tehran, my Jewish family lived on a narrow, wooded alley in what was then an […]
The End of the Dispensable Iranian
DAWN had always arrived in Berlin’s Turm Strasse with the bustling of shopkeepers and the drowsy hiss of buses pulling into their stops. Always, except on the morning of April 10, 1997. On that day, the street had been cleared of traffic and blocked to anyone but pedestrians. On the rooftop of every building leading […]
Reading the Holocaust Cartoons in Tehran
THE news of the exhibition of Holocaust cartoons in Tehran took me back to a moment in my childhood. In 1974, his first year at Tehran’s Academy for Visual Arts, my brother mounted an exhibition of his own cartoons. The drawings were a novice’s best attempt at political satire, but they were enough to alarm […]
Purim as Queen Esther’s ‘Coming Out
“Purim as Queen Esther’s ‘Coming Out.’” We don’t tend to think of holidays as occasions into which we grow, but that is, in part, what they are. Thirty years ago, as a child growing up in the shah’s Iran, Purim was just another holiday to me. Later, on my family’s departure from Tehran — when […]