More in ‘Roya Hakakian’

• Cleverly named they’re not, but there are at least 18 still-operating Jewish-run business in Atlantic City that are over 50 years old, including Nathan Levin Furs, Mel’s Furniture, and Fischer Shoes. [Jewish Times of South Jersey]
• Israelis and Palestinians have managed to agree on something: supporting the Dead Sea as a candidate for the ...

Roya Hakakian is unhappy with American news coverage of Iran. Instead of treating Iranian civil society as a subject worthy of regular attention, the Iranian Jewish writer argues, U.S. media outlets focus obsessively on the smokescreen of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Ignoring the complex relationship between the country’s citizens and rulers, journalists are left ill-prepared to interpret news like the last two weeks’. Hakakian’s writing may prove an antidote—a journalist for CBS, a memoirist, and a poet, she has written searingly but lovingly about her homeland since she left Tehran for the United States in 1985. Hakakian spoke with Tablet from her home in California about the future of the Ahmadinejad regime, the reaction of Iran’s 30,000-strong Jewish community, and how the whole thing reminds her of 1979.

Raised in an intellectual, integrated Tehran family, Roya Hakakian was 13 years old when the Iranian Revolution began. Early on in her memoir, Journey From the Land of No, political events compete with her own personal dramas—slights received at school, sexual experiments with a neighbor girl, an uncle who wants to marry a Muslim—but gradually ...