Two new books on Iran bring the lives of ordinary people and ruling ayatollahs into sharper relief
Michel Foucault understood that truly free people must be willing to choose death, like the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. What would he make of the restrictions on liberty in our efforts to safeguard life from COVID-19?
The roots and legacy of Iranian resentment of the West, part of a weeklong look at 40 years of the revolution
The PLO’s greatest single contribution to the Iranian Revolution was the formation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but the Palestinian leader’s involvement with Iran didn’t end there
Face to face with the challenges of living a double life under the Iranian theocracy
In the 40 years after the Iranian Revolution, some women memoirists came to see obedience as the opposite of goodness
How Jewish musicians preserved—and are now saving—Persian music
In an excerpt from a new history of 20th-century Iran, the neglected story of the Jewish revolutionaries who participated in—or adapted to—the sweeping changes of 1979
Introducing Tablet’s week-long series on the 40th anniversary of the Khomeinist revolution in Iran
The horror and hope undergirding Jewish life in post-Revolution Iran
Recent protests in Iran join a long history of what today would be known as activism
Regime clerics steal everything, including the pistachio nuts
Iran Week: Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s astonishing and paradoxical account of his 1963 travels in the Holyland, newly translated and reissued as ‘The Israeli Republic’
The enlightened-benighted paradoxes of the Shia state have deep roots, and relations with Jews are at a historical nadir
The state of jihad and counter-jihad, in the middle of a long war
Early in his reign, the ayatollah received a secret visit from six Jews—a visit that may have saved thousands
Dan Shadur talks about his documentary about life under the Shah, and his parents’ golden years in Tehran
Thirty years after the Islamic Revolution made them exiles, the Persian Jews of Los Angeles are split in new ways by an old question: how much to hold on to religious and cultural traditions forged in a country that now hates them
