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Poet and refugee advocate Roya Hakakian talks about how words can help create change in Iran
Roya Hakakian is a poet, author, journalist and advocate for refugees. Every one of these roles is an offshoot of her own life experience as a child and teenager in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran and as an immigrant to the United States. Her poetry appears in many anthologies around the world, her books take a candid look at life under Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic regime and her documentaries tackle important issues like underage children in wars around the world. In our interview, we discuss what people can do to support the current uprising in Iran and the role poetry can play in revolutions.
These must be emotional times for you and the entire Iranian immigrant community. How are you holding up?
It is very exciting and also, as you can imagine, gut-wrenching to watch teenagers, children, and other people perform these great acts of courage and then suffer as a result of it. So, it’s a heroic time and, like all heroic times, whether in history or in epic stories that we read, it’s always associated with a great deal of tragedy too. And all of that is on full display. I wrote a memoir whose last chapter is called “1984.” It’s the last year I was in Iran, and I was describing what Iran had become and how the entire society was divided between two people—the regime and their allies, and then us, which were the ordinary citizens. I thought it was amazing how much time had passed, and yet nothing had changed in that division I described in that chapter. The circumstances, the frustrations, the inequalities, the injustices are the very issues that have brought a new generation of Iranians onto the street.
Iran once had a thriving Jewish population. Do you have any memories of what it was like to be a Jew in Iran before the revolution?
I was 12 years old when the revolution took place, and all my memories at the time before were happy childhood memories—going to the synagogue with my father. We lived within walking distance of a synagogue. I didn’t experience the sort of things that my father had talked about growing up, of the severe antisemitism that he had experienced as a child in a small village in central Iran. And I didn’t experience the sort of things my mother talked about. And she grew up in Hamadan, which is where the tomb of Esther and Mordechai are. The ’60s and the ’70s were the golden time of religious egalitarianism in Iran. And then came the revolution, and things quickly changed. And, you know, it wasn’t so much the ordinary citizens who were being antisemitic, but the regime gave a leg up to Shiite Muslims. So it wasn’t that Jews were barred from anything; it was that it was far more advantageous for you to be a Shiite Muslim.
You have been in danger from Iranian operatives in the United States. I think of Salman Rushdie, who refused to let threats intimidate him, but he ended up severely injured. Is this something you worry about?
The answer is yes for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the FBI came to my house a couple of years ago, warning that they had spotted my name on a list because of the work I do and the books I published, especially my memoir and the second book, which was about a series of murders that Iran had orchestrated in Europe. But I think what’s important, and something that What I hope to bring to the attention of the broader public in America is that everyone is in danger, that if the Iranian regime has gathered enough influence to go after the dissidents that they don’t like in the United States, then we become only the primary targets and everybody else will follow. And I’m incredibly concerned about that.
You recently testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. What was your message? Also, what should the United States be doing to help the protesters in Iran?
My main message was that this movement that began in Iran in September is the most serious movement that Iran has seen in 40-plus years. Immediately a few senators afterward told me, “Oh, Iran has protests all the time, and the regime always suppresses them.” Well, this one has already proven to be different. It has certain qualities that none of the other protests in the past have had. This is a deeply secular movement; it’s a movement that demands the separation of government and religion. And none of the previous movements had these overtones.
For the past 20 years, we’ve only been interested in Iran from a nuclear perspective, and everything else has been in the shadows. Who are Iranians? What do they want? How are they different? What are their demands? The best thing we can do is to stop looking at Iran as just the nuclear program and begin to widen the perspective and recognize that if something changes in Iran, if these protests succeed, then so much else can follow.
Among your many identities are writer and poet. What is the role poetry can play in revolutions?
I became interested in the Iranian revolution in 1979 through poetry. Poetry was the language of that revolution, which in many ways, is why some of those poets who were so devoted to the uprising against the former Shah became far less popular in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution. Revolutions begin with certain social demands, but what fuels them, what keeps them going, is the power of the rhetoric poets and writers pour into them. That’s what literature has always been for me—a tool for grand ideas and grand expressions and, possibly, a tool for changing society for the better.
What do you plan on discussing at the Z3 conference?
I want to talk about my own journey back to defining myself as a Jewish person after leaving Iran and coming to the US. It wasn’t my issue, antisemitism wasn’t my issue, Jewish identity wasn’t my issue because I was a writer. I didn’t have to think about these things. Over the years, have rediscovered my own relationship with Judaism. That is basically what I want to talk about.
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The post Poet and refugee advocate Roya Hakakian talks about how words can help create change in Iran appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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DOGE Staffers Used ChatGPT to Cut Holocaust History Grants During Counter-DEI Purges: Lawsuit
Elon Musk holds up a chainsaw onstage during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, US, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard
The US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) relied on the ChatGPT large language model program when deciding to cut grants for Jewish-related history programs, including one focused on violence against women during the Holocaust, according to a new class-action lawsuit.
DOGE staffer Justin Fox is named as one of the defendants in the suit filed in US federal court on Friday by the Authors Guild, which alleges that he was the one who developed the method of using ChatGPT prompts to determine which grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) — also a defendant — to cut in the name of eliminating any programs related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Fox said in a deposition that he regarded any grant related to a minority group as qualifying as “DEI” and thus up for elimination. When asked about a grant he chose to cancel related to violence against women during the Holocaust, he responded, “It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture.” Fox added, “It’s inherently related to DEI for that reason.”
The Trump administration has made a point of targeting DEI programs, especially on university campuses, arguing they foster bigotry by replacing merit with identity-based preferences. Many Jewish groups have criticized DEI initiatives for often excluding Jews, ignoring antisemitism, or characterizing Jews as white “oppressors” rather than as a historically oppressed minority group.
The lawsuit alleges that Fox and his fellow DOGE staffer Nathan Cavanaugh “made and executed the termination decision without any legal authority conferred by Congress. There is no jurisdictional barrier to vacating these unlawful terminations, and permanent relief is warranted.”
One of the projects targeted by DOGE was a translation project titled In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers From the Soviet Union, which the lawsuit describes as “a critical, annotated translation into English of Yiddish and Russian works written in the aftermath of the most significant Jewish tragedy of the 20th century.”
ChatGPT put the book on the chopping block, stating that “this anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust in the USSR.”
According to the suit, the DOGE cuts “are unconstitutional several times over. The record establishes, without genuine factual dispute, that the terminations violated the First Amendment by targeting grants for their viewpoints and perceived political associations; that they violated the equal protection guarantee by classifying grants based on race, sex, and other constitutionally protected characteristics.”
DOGE also allegedly targeted Catholic efforts to promote Holocaust studies. The suit notes that another grant Fox and Cavanaugh chopped was support for the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University.
In a deposition, NEH’s acting chair Michael McDonald said he did not know DOGE had relied on ChatGPT and rejected including Holocaust-related grants under DEI. He also claimed DOGE ignored his disagreements. DOGE possessed the final say about which projects to cut.
In response to the question “In your view, does this grant relate to DEI?” McDonald answered “no.” When the lawyer followed up with “would you consider this to be wasteful spend?” he replied “I would not, no.”
Since the NEH’s founding in 1965, the agency has provided over $6 billion in grants to fund over 70,000 projects in all 50 states.
The lawsuit details that Fox and Cavanaugh lacked “any relevant background in the humanities, public or private grant administration, peer review, or government service of any kind prior to joining the administration.”
According to the filing, the two DOGE staffers met with McDonald and Assistant Chair for Programs Adam Wolfson on March 12. However, Fox and Cavanaugh “entirely controlled the process of selecting grants to terminate and executing the terminations — their approach was top-down, viewpoint- and race-based, and indifferent to the views of NEH leadership or the ordinary processes of grant administration.”
DOGE’s mastermind, billionaire Elon Musk, has a professional rivalry with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.
Musk faced multiple controversies last year involving alleged antisemitism, Nazis, and the Holocaust. Following his decision to make a gesture at a Jan. 20 rally which many interpreted as resembling a “Sieg Heil”-style salute, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) initially defended the billionaire before criticizing his choice to promote Holocaust humor on his X social media platform.
“We’ve said it hundreds of times before and we will say it again: the Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it. Elon Musk, the Holocaust is not a joke,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO and National Director, wrote on X in response to Musk.
Musk faced criticism days later when addressing a gathering of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, where he said, “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” Critics decried the comments, arguing they minimized or dismissed the Holocaust.
“The remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society,” Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, said in response to Musk on X. He warned that not focusing on learning lessons from the past is “an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.”
In July, following an upgrade to Musk’s ChatGPT rival Grok, the program began promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and in one instance labeled itself “MechaHitler.”
Two months later, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) released a report revealing the rise of antisemitism on X.
The report utilized OpenAI’s since-discontinued GPT-4o model and drew on a year-long investigation to find that “679,000 posts sampled violate X’s policies on antisemitism, and posts identified as antisemitic got 193 million views in the 11 months of this report, despite X’s promises to limit their visibility. Also, antisemitic conspiracies appear to perform disproportionately well on X, constituting 59% of posts in the sample but 73% of likes.”
The report noted that X had allowed for the rise of so-called “antisemitic influencers” and that “approximately one third of all likes on antisemitic posts were on posts shared by just 10 antisemitism ‘influencers.’ 9 out of these 10 ‘antisemitism influencers’ have more followers on X than any other platform, and 6 out of the 10 are verified on X. 3 out of the 10 profit from paid subscriptions on X.”
Amid the criticism, Musk has denied accusations of antisemitism and said his priority is to make X a bastion of free speech. He visited Israel in late 2023, weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of the Jewish state, and Auschwitz in January 2024. Following the latter trip, Musk said he was “frankly naive” about antisemitism and described himself as “Jewish by association.”
The Tesla CEO and X owner vowed to wear around his neck a dog tag reading “Bring Them Home” that was given to him by a parent of one of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza until all the captives were returned home.
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Trump’s Iran dithering puts Israel in an unprecedented position
Israel today finds itself in an unusual strategic position: It’s fighting a war that could last for weeks — or end almost instantly. And someone else will decide which way things go.
Down one path lies a prolonged campaign against Iran, with the possibility of regime change. Israel’s leaders openly hope that the campaign will enable the Iranian people to overthrow their rulers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently put it bluntly: “Our aspiration is to enable the Iranian people to cast off the yoke of tyranny.”
Down the other is a rapid cessation of the conflict, with incomplete results. President Donald Trump has already suggested that the conflict may be nearing completion. In a Monday interview with CBS News, Trump said bluntly: “The war is very complete, pretty much.”
Yet in the very same news cycle, Trump offered a strikingly different message. When asked whether the war was essentially over or just beginning, he replied: “I think you could say both.” He suggested he was considering the possibility of taking control of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical global oil chokepoint, and warned on social media that if Iran interfered with shipping there, the United States would strike it “20 times harder than they have been hit thus far.”
Those contradictory statements capture the extraordinary ambiguity surrounding the conflict. And that ambiguity has left Israel in a profoundly complicated position. Now, it must be prepared simultaneously for two radically different scenarios: a prolonged war whose outcome could reshape the Middle East, or a sudden declaration that the conflict is over.
A successful start, and mixed outlook
So far, Israeli and American forces have struck deep inside Iran, decapitating the regime and crippling major parts of military infrastructure. Iran has retaliated with missile and drone attacks against Israel, most of which have been intercepted by Israel’s air defenses, but some of which have brought tragedy.
In recent days, Tehran has picked a new supreme leader: Mojtaba Khamenei, a hardliner and the son of the longtime despot killed on the first day of the war.
If the conflict continues on this trajectory, the implications could be enormous. Sustained pressure on Iran could destabilize the regime. Even without that best-case scenario outcome, a prolonged campaign could dramatically weaken the Islamic Republic.
But a long war carries real dangers. Iran still possesses missiles capable of reaching Israel, and has been firing them daily. Israel’s multilayered defense system intercepts most of them, but not all. A cluster missile strike on Monday killed two; if the war continues, more deaths are likely to follow. And the longer the war lasts, the greater the statistical likelihood that one missile will slip through and cause a true catastrophe.
Even without a disaster, the cumulative strain on Israeli society is unmistakable. The acquisition of weapons and callup of reserve troops is further disrupting an economy that has been in various states of disruption since Oct. 7, 2023. It is also measured in the unquantifiable damage that the stress is causing pretty much every person in the country.
Many businesses are closed, and public life is minimal. Missile alerts — often in the middle of the night — repeatedly send millions of civilians into shelters (and, for a privileged minority, reinforced “safe rooms” in their home). Many offices are half empty. Parents struggle to work while caring for children who are afraid to leave the house.
With ordinary life on hold, a prolonged war could therefore become a grinding economic and psychological burden, even if Israel continues to win militarily.
Yet Israelis broadly support the war. A poll last week found that 93% of the populace backs the operation.
How will they respond if Trump abruptly pulls the plug?
War by whim
To a degree that is profoundly unusual in the history of democratic countries, the trajectory of the war depends largely on one person.
Trump has shown himself to be prone to making unilateral decisions with enormous consequences for the international order without undergoing any of the standard processes.
He launched sweeping tariff wars that upended decades of bipartisan policy on the benefits of relatively free trade. He revived the idea that the U.S. should acquire Greenland — and for weeks refused to rule out using force against Denmark, a NATO ally, to achieve that end. Earlier this year, American forces kidnapped Venezuela’s president, after which Trump openly stated that the U.S. needs “access” to the country’s oil resources.
Even the rhetoric surrounding the Iran campaign is sui generis. In recounting why American forces had sunk Iranian naval vessels rather than capturing them, he approvingly relayed that he was supposedly told by commanders that it was simply “more fun to sink them.”
If Trump decides he is done, and the Islamic Republic limps on, Israelis will be left with the frustrating sense of having missed a huge opportunity to fundamentally alter an unacceptable situation in which Iran is constantly scheming to cause harm.
Iran has been, essentially, a fly the size of an elephant buzzing in Israel’s ear. Yes, the war will be spun as victory either way — but if it ends tomorrow, it will end without achieving all it could. And the current state of affairs, in which Israel effectively has a green light from a U.S. president as indifferent to convention as Trump, may not return.
A reopened Lebanon front
One complication that could outlast either of these scenarios is Hezbollah. The Lebanon-based militia, a regional proxy for Iran, joined the fighting almost immediately, launching rockets and drones toward northern Israel. That intervention may give Israel a strategic opportunity to address a problem that has festered since post-Oct. 7 fighting ended on the Lebanon front in November, 2024.
When that conflict concluded, the Lebanese government pledged that it would dismantle and disarm Hezbollah, finally restoring the state’s monopoly on force. In practice, little changed. Hezbollah remained entrenched in parts of central Lebanon, albeit no longer along Israel’s border.
Israeli patience with this renewed status quo has steadily eroded. But the devastation of the Gaza war had badly damaged Israel’s international standing, making Jerusalem see a renewed Lebanon campaign as diplomatically difficult.
Now, the regional picture has shifted. Lebanese officials — including the country’s president — have increasingly signaled that Hezbollah’s continued militarization is unsustainable. Beirut has in recent days already taken steps to curb Iranian influence, including by restricting activity by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Senior figures have made clear that Hezbollah’s role as an armed “state within a state” cannot continue indefinitely.
Elements of Lebanon’s government clearly hope Israel might finish a task they cannot accomplish themselves — the decisive debilitation of Hezbollah — though preferably without bringing another devastating war onto Lebanese soil.
What this means: Israel is likely to be at war, in some way or another, for some time to come. Trump may call time on the war with Iran; he has no such power when it comes to Israel’s own border conflicts.
But the biggest challenges, and biggest changes, facing Israel belong with the Iran war, which has the potential to truly redefine the region. Netanyahu may wield some influence over Trump, but the decision rests with the White House.
This is an unprecedented state of affairs in Israel’s history: A perilous war of aggression, conducted without real Israeli control. The cost of this is whiplash, as the country has no choice but to live with both possibilities at once: a long war that could reshape the region — or a sudden declaration that the war has been won. Netanyahu may be able to influence Trump one way or the other — but he won’t make the call.
For Israelis, that is the rub in the hyper-alliance with Trump’s U.S. Next month, as Israel celebrates its 78th Independence Day, that independence will feel a tad fictitious. An extreme dependency lies bare for all to see, and it will outlive Trump. His successor may not be as munificent.
The post Trump’s Iran dithering puts Israel in an unprecedented position appeared first on The Forward.
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FIFA COO Says World Cup ‘Too Big’ to Be Postponed by Israel-Iran War
Soccer Football – FIFA Club World Cup – Group D – Esperance de Tunis v Chelsea – Lincoln Financial Field, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US – June 24, 2025, General view of the FIFA logo before the match. Photo: REUTERS/Lee Smith
FIFA Chief Operating Officer Heimo Schirgi said the 2026 World Cup is “too big” to postpone and will proceed as planned despite the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Schirgi made the comments while speaking on Monday outside construction of the International Broadcast Center, which is located inside the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and will serve as a hub for international coverage of the World Cup. Schirgi was asked about Iran as it remains unclear if the country will participate in World Cup, after the US and Israel launched joint airstrikes against the Islamic Republic that led to the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other high-ranking Iranian officials. Iran has retaliated with strikes against Israel and civilian areas across the Middle East.
“At some stage, we will have a resolution, and the World Cup will go on, obviously,” Schirgi replied, according to NBC 5 in Dallas. “The World Cup is too big, and we hope that everyone can participate that has qualified.”
FIFA Secretary General Mattias Grafstrom previously said the organization is closely monitoring the situation in the Middle East ahead of the World Cup in June. Schirgi added that FIFA has been in contact with Iran’s soccer federation, but did not provide details about what was discussed, according to Reuters.
The FIFA World Cup will take place across cities in the US, Mexico, and Canada from June 11 to July 19. Iran qualified for the tournament through its participation in the Asian Football Conference. It is set to compete in Group G at the World Cup and is scheduled to face New Zealand on June 15 and Belgium on June 21, both in Los Angeles, before going head-to-head against Egypt on June 26 in Seattle. Soccer fans from Iran are already barred from entering the United States for the World Cup as part of a travel ban that the Trump administration announced in June.