Roya Hakakian is the author of a selected volume of poetry in Persian, For the Sake of Water, and three books of nonfiction in English, including the acclaimed Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown, 2005) and A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious (Knopf, 2021).
Roya Hakakian
By Roya Hakakian
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Opinion How Iran Is Winning the Media War
In 1999, I joined CBS 60 Minutes II to help create a segment about a leading political prisoner in Iran. It had been a difficult piece to report, and in it I had invested months of legwork and personal contacts. Now, the late beloved Bob Simon was to tell the tale of the Iranian Andre…
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Opinion Iran’s Jewish Rorschach Test
This past March, I stood alongside hundreds of others lining Madison Avenue to watch New York’s Persian Day Parade. I am not the parade-watching type, but nostalgia for the country of my birth at times moves me to behave in uncharacteristic ways, like cheering for mediocre trumpeters and papier-mâché monuments. Among the marchers at the…
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Opinion Then They Came for the Bahai
In mastering the knowlege that even bigotry is relative and comes in gradations, I was a premature pupil. I learned this lesson when I was only 10. In 1977, in an eclectic neighborhood in Tehran, my Jewish family lived on a narrow, wooded alley in what was then an upscale area, alongside two other Jewish…
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News Purim as Queen Esther’s ‘Coming Out’
We don’t tend to think of holidays as occasions into which we grow, but that is, in part, what they are. Thirty years ago, as a child growing up in the shah’s Iran, Purim was just another holiday to me. Later, on my family’s departure from Tehran — when I was just beginning to understand…
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Opinion Under the Veil of Iran’s Nuclear Aspirations
The Iran of May 2005 is, in some ways, looking very similar to the Iran of November 1979. Back then, when the American embassy in Tehran was seized by hardline university students, every other domestic issue was cast into oblivion. Nothing mattered more than the hostages. Nothing superseded the war with the “Great Satan.” The…
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Opinion The Fundamentals of an Iran in Exile
The diplomatic officer asked, for the third time, how I’d been persecuted as a Jew in Iran, as he leafed through my application for political asylum. But I said nothing. His stern tone, his fierce gaze demanded certainty, clarity and conviction — all the things that I could not find within. Sitting opposite him in…
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