I have been asked more this year than ever what it’s like to be an Iranian Jew.
As a member of two diasporas — Iranian and Jewish — I live with a romanticized nostalgia for the past and a desperate desire to know what my future holds. Iranian Jews lived in Iran for nearly 2,700 years, our traditions blending and evolving within the country’s rich cultural fabric. Now, almost 50 years into our American experiment forced on us by the Islamic Revolution, what happens next in our story?
In an attempt to influence the answer, my friend and food writer Tannaz Sassooni and I pitched Reboot Studios (the production arm of Reboot, the Jewish arts and culture organization founded by Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s Righteous Persons Foundation and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies) on a new idea called Erev Yalda. The project fuses Hanukkah with Shab-e Yalda, the Iranian winter solstice tradition that predates even Judaism. With Reboot’s support, we began weaving the two together and bridging a gap I’ve felt for years.
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