It’s like Alice falling through the rabbit hole: step onto any university campus, and the world is bigger, more colorful, more full of chance and wonder than you thought possible. To be reminded of the beauty of youth, the innocence of the untested, the buoyancy and optimism of the untouched. It’s a transformative experience — [...]
“So,” the man in the lilac vest asks me by way of greeting, “Are you making any money these days?”
We’re at a Jewish Federation event at the USC campus downtown. It’s Sunday, and we’ve spent the morning listening to speakers talk about the many ways in which this world could become a better place.
At lunch, [...]
It gets worse.
You’ve been betrayed by the banks, the investment firms, the government. You skimp and borrow and try to send your kids to the best college they can get into; or you work the night shift at some bar and put yourself through college; or you’ve got a bachelor’s but no job and so [...]
Overnight, they lost their homes, their jobs, their life savings. At nine in the morning, they were well off; by noon, they were impecunious.
All the hard work and planning, the expensive education, the sacrifices, all the good fortune, the street smarts and common sense and old wisdom they had fallen upon or inherited or learned [...]
Imagine working for the same institution for thirty years, always earning below minimum wage, never getting any benefits whatsoever, then being let go without notice, without an explanation, without a severance package or a retirement fund or even a $.50 pen from Staples as a souvenir.
You think Wal-Mart employees are exploited?
What if I told you [...]
Still, the question remains: What, in this world filled with strife and need and uncertainty, is the use of art?
The planet’s on the verge of destruction, entire nations are starving to oblivion, man’s cruelty to man has reached new heights, and yet we persist — writers and musicians and painters and sculptors — telling stories [...]
We’re sitting around my parents’ dining room in Century City for Shabbat dinner, and the conversation veers toward our childhoods in Iran.
My cousin, who’s a few years older than I (though you’d never guess it by looking at her, because she has that remarkable ability to forgive the world instantly for all its cruelties), is [...]
Is it just me, or does Yom Kippur seem to arrive earlier and more frequently these days?
I feel like I’ve barely had time to recover from one when the next one’s announced, and then I have to toughen up and refrain from saying things like “oh no, not again,” in front of my kids, because [...]
I don’t know what will become of the legacy of Iranian Jews outside of Iran, how history will judge us in the context of the opportunities we had and the extent to which we helped make the world a better place with what we were given.
I don’t know what our kids will think of us [...]
Why do I feel like my already ailing IQ drops to below safe levels every time I pick up the Los Angeles Times lately?
The world is at war, the economy is sagging, Obama’s in the Middle East and Europe, a Bosnian Serb leader wanted for war crimes has been arrested after 13 years on the [...]
Forgive me for going on about this. I keep promising myself I’ll stop being outraged, turn off the radio and stop reading the papers. But if you’ll permit me one more question here:
Whatever happened to the Democrats being the party of tolerance and diversity?
These days, it’s gotten so people are [...]
I’ve been a Democrat since I was 16 years old and couldn’t vote because I was underage and not yet a U.S. citizen. I was a Democrat when most other Iranians considered that a dirty word — because “Carter was a Democrat who lost Iran to the mullahs and Afghanistan to the Soviets. He might [...]
I’m not one of those women who see a male-dominance conspiracy at every corner. And I understand that Hillary has baggage, while Obama doesn’t (never mind that’s because he hasn’t been around long enough or done much). I realize that he’s taller, younger, more charming than she, and that the American people tend to vote [...]
Last Thursday night at LACMA, I was treated to a reading of my own works by the very talented and beautiful actress Bahar Soumekh, and by UC Irvine professor Nasrin Rahimieh. Outside the Bing Theater, rain poured in sheets, and traffic on Wilshire was at a standstill because all the lights had been blown out [...]
Do you write from memory? Someone always asks, and I become tongue-tied and uncertain, scrambling for the words, the ways to make believable what I know will sound bizarre — a too-complicated response where all that is required is a simple “Yes” or “No” or “Sometimes; the rest is research.”
I lived in Iran for only [...]
Pour three cups of rice into a bowl. Fill the bowl with cold water. Stir the rice in the water, making sure you don’t crush the grains, then throw out the water. Repeat five times.
I’m 9 years old — in my mother’s kitchen on the second floor of our house in Tehran. It’s mid-morning, early [...]
If you grew up as I did, on more than one continent and surrounded by people of different faiths, you know what I mean when I say I’ve never had real heroes: For every truth in one place, I’ve encountered doubt in another; for every icon in one culture, I’ve met iconoclasts in another.
As I [...]
It’s 8 p.m. on a Wednesday, and I’m at the studios of KIRN — a Persian-language AM radio station on Barham Boulevard near Universal Studios. I’m a guest on a program called “Live From Hollywood.”
The host/producer, Suzi Khatami, is an Iranian woman who, like me, left the old country — long before the revolution — [...]
I came to America 30 years ago last month. I arrived in Los Angeles the night Elvis died. I was 16 years old, fresh out of a Swiss boarding school, about to start my first year of college.
This was two years before the Islamic Revolution, yet I had left Iran willingly and without regret, certain [...]
So I’m at the Jewish Book Council’s (JBC) open auditions, in the main sanctuary of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Manhattan, in the front row of the L-Z section of authors who have written a book with a Jewish theme and who would like to sell more than three copies of that book [...]
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