{"id":8513,"date":"2015-04-21T15:47:53","date_gmt":"2015-04-21T19:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lilith.org\/?post_type=articles&p=8513"},"modified":"2015-04-21T15:47:53","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T19:47:53","slug":"the-persian-problem","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/lilith.org\/articles\/the-persian-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"The Persian Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"
It has been more than three decades since the fall of the Shah, when tens of thousands of Iranian Jews fled their ancestral home for the freedom of the American West. Visit any sidewalk caf\u00e9 on the streets of Beverly Hills and it is plain to see that this immigrant community has done well recreating their lives and their lot. But what happens when a community so deeply identified with a cultural past must reconcile itself to a strange, new future?<\/p>\n
Two words: identity crisis.<\/p>\n
Who are Iranian Jews, really? Are they quintessentially Iranian, with their teeming families, ritual quiddities and 3,000-year history? Are they Persian, their preferred title, since it denotes a rich cultural heritage and not the Iran of today, which is thoroughly Islamic and avowedly anti-Zionist? Are they\u2009\u2014\u2009slowly, painfully, deliberately\u2009\u2014\u2009becoming American? Or, is the community some hybrid-form of ancient\/modern, eastern\/western that doesn\u2019t quite know what to call itself?<\/p>\n
These are the questions with which the community is wrestling within and without, as a generation that never knew Iran and came of age in Beverly Hills tries to forge its own future. The conflicting strains of identity that comprise L.A.\u2019s Persian Jewish community also provide ample fodder for the emerging Iranian-American literature of Los Angeles, a field dominated by women, whose voices have been given full volume in the new American world.<\/p>\n
As Gina B. Nahai puts it in her soaring new work, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.<\/em>, (Akashic, $17) \u201c[W]riting seemed to be the weapon of choice for every bored Iranian housewife in New York and Los Angeles, it was not the kind of work self-respecting men willingly engaged in.\u201d<\/p>\n