Community Days: “My Heart is in the East, But I Am in the West: The Iranian Jewish Experience”

This program illuminates the powerful and richly vibrant story of the Iranian Jewish community that began in ancient Persia nearly three millennia ago, suffered “ritual impurity” antisemitism for centuries, but ultimately thrived in the 20th century, until the community was forever altered by the 1979 Iranian [Islamic] Revolution and dispersed throughout the world. Tabby also speaks about the fate of Jews in Iran today, a community that constitutes the largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel. The Iranian Jewish experience is a story of tradition, resilience and above all, the beauty of Jewish continuity. And Iran, a magical and miserable land where Jews still pray at the tombs of Esther and Mordechai, is one of the most important, but little-known countries in the world for the American Jewish community.

Tabby Refael is a weekly editorial columnist for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, as well as a contributor to Newsweek, Los Angeles Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. Tabby served as co-founder and former executive director of 30 Years After, a non-partisan, non-profit that promotes the participation and leadership of Iranian-American Jews in American civic, political, and Jewish life. Named “a prominent chronicler of Persian L.A.” by the Los Angeles Times, Tabby was born in post-revolutionary Iran and came to the U.S. as a refugee and child survivor of the Iran-Iraq War in the late 1980s. She holds a master’s in public diplomacy from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s in communication from UC San Diego.