May 3, 12 PM: Daniella Farah, "'We are also Iranians and we have rights in this home': Jewish Identity and Belonging in Twentieth-century Iran"

The UC Davis Jewish Studies Program is pleased to announce the final event in the New Directions in Jewish Studies 2023 Lecture Series: "'We are also Iranians and we have rights in this home': Jewish Identity and Belonging in Twentieth-century Iran" with Daniella Farah and Lior Sternfeld, responding, Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 12 PM PDT via Zoom. Please find a poster, abstract, and registration link below. 

We look forward to seeing you there!

Abstract: Jews have lived in Iran for over 2,700 years, and today Iran contains the largest community of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel. Despite their longstanding presence in Iran, there are few nuanced historical studies on this population, with the standard account positing that Iran’s Jews were insular, victimized, and politically disengaged. However, during the twentieth century Iranian Jews experienced rapid upward mobility, migrated within the country and abroad, and participated in Iran’s major political and social movements. Engaging with Jewish, Middle Eastern, and Education history, as well as transnational and diaspora studies, this talk will challenge the received narrative of Iranian Jews as peripheral victims by showing how they were active citizens who crafted multi-layered identities that reinforced and reflected their national agency, while also maintaining their religious distinctiveness. More specifically, the talk will explore the landscape of Jewish identity in Iran during the 20th century, with a focus on Jewish-Muslim interactions, political engagement and aspirations, and the intersection of education and integration. In examining how Iranian Jews navigated between their Iranian and Jewish identities in an era of new nationalisms, this talk will stake out new directions in Jewish Studies by offering insights into what Jewish emancipation and assimilation looked like in a Muslim-majority country. 

Bio: Dr. Daniella Farah (PhD Stanford University, 2021) is the Samuel W. and Goldye Marian Spain Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Rice University. In the upcoming academic year she will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of California, Irvine. As a historian of the Jews of the modern Middle East and North Africa, her research focuses on Jewish-Muslim relations, national belonging, and Jewish identity formation in nineteenth and twentieth-centuries Iran and Turkey. Her current book project, tentatively titled Jewish Belonging in Modern Iran: Education, the Press, and Integration, explores how Iran’s Jews leveraged education, the press, and nationalistic sentiment to claim belonging to the nation. Dr. Farah’s research has been supported by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies, and in 2021 she received a Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award. As an Iranian-American Jewish woman, she aims to give voice to the diverse experiences of Middle Eastern Jews.

Register here.