“Tell her what you told me. About the tampons.” I gawked at this face-off between my mother and my seventh grade science teacher, Ms. Johnson. “Mrs. Yashari, tampons do not make women lose their virginity,” she said. My whole life was a lie. The following week, I gathered my friends for a group meeting. With…
Pasagardae, Iran —— In the heart of Fars Province on Iran’s high desert plateau in the South, a stark and bare large limestone tomb juts out of the landscape. It’s in the middle of nowhere. But the understated burial place of Cyrus the Great still draws Iranians on pilgrimage. Mohammad Parvi, a retired sugarcane factory worker,…
In no time at all, we went from being unknown to notorious. When I moved to Los Angeles in August 1977, perfectly intelligent, well-meaning Americans would ask me if we had roads and automobiles in Tehran, or if I had taken a camel to elementary school every day. The ones who did know Iran wanted…
As Iranian Jews prepared traditional Rosh Hashanah pots of abgoosht — the community’s lamb-based answer to Ashkenazi chicken soup — the topic on many of their minds was a somber one. Will Israel strike at the place Iranian Jews once called home? “A lot of people are talking about it, and it is a topic…
A campaign to convince Iran’s 25,000 Jews to flee the country has stalled, with most opting to stay in their native homeland despite President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial and anti-Israeli speeches. In recent months, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Israeli officials and some American Jewish communal leaders have urged Iranian Jews to leave. But so…
Before the red-carpet fanfare of the Emmy Awards proper, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences customarily honors the behind-the-scenes toilers who make television programming look and sound as it should. At this year’s technical awards ceremony, history was made when Lila Yomtoob, a sound editor on the HBO documentary “Baghdad ER,” became the first…
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