This talk with Leah Mirakhor (Yale University), Lior Sternfeld (Penn State University) and moderator Atina Grossman (Cooper Union) celebrates the new groundbreaking work of two social historians on Iranian Jewish life and community in the 20th century between immigrations and diasporas in Iran, Israel, and the U.S.  The speakers will pay tribute to the work of HIAS in helping Jews immigrate and resettle in the U.S. in the years post the 1979 revolution in Iran.

Leah Mirakhor is Lecturer in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (ER&M) and the Program in American Studies at Yale University. Mirakhor’s writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, African American Review, The James Baldwin Review, and Studies in American Jewish Literature. Mirakhor is the author of “After the Revolution to the War on Terror: Iranian Jewish American Literature in the United States,” which appeared in Studies in American Jewish Literature 35.1 (2016).

Lior Sternfeld is a social historian of the modern Middle East with particular interests in Jewish (and other minorities’) histories of the region. Sternfeld teaches at the Jewish Studies Program at Penn State University. Sternfeld’s new book, Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth Century Iran, examines the integration of the Jewish communities in Iran into the nation-building projects of the twentieth century. This book examines the development of the Iranian Jewish communities vis-à-vis ideologies and institutions such as Iranian nationalism, Zionism, and constitutionalism, among others.