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For Iranian American Jews, Trump’s talk of regime change stirs hopes of return
Iranian American Jews are celebrating after the joint U.S.-Israel operation that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday — with many expressing newfound hope that they may one day return to the country they fled.
As the conflict has spread across the Middle East in the days since, the military action has sparked fears of a prolonged regional war and power vacuum in Iran. The attacks have claimed hundreds of lives, including 11 in Israel and four U.S. service members as of the third day of combat.
But for Jews who fled Iran in the decade after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the military campaign represents a long-awaited reckoning with the brutal regime that forced them into exile. An estimated 60,000 Iranian Jews emigrated, and tens of thousands settled in the U.S., with the largest communities in Los Angeles, south Florida, northern Texas, and the Long Island suburb of Great Neck, New York, where Farsi is heard as often as English along Middle Neck Road and Israeli flags hang in the windows of shops and Persian restaurants.
“You can’t just have peace for nothing. It clearly just doesn’t land on the table. You have to work at it, and sometimes you have to fight for it,” said Jasmine Rokhsar, a Persian Jewish Great Neck resident. “I think Iranians understand that well. I think Iranian Jews understand that better.”
Rokhsar left Iran as a kindergartner in 1978 and has vague memories of playing in a park she would like to visit, as well as a restaurant she’s been told was her favorite. She dreams of visiting Iran with her children, whom she said were raised to be as proud of their Iranian identity as their Jewish identity — despite having never been able to visit her home country.
Her daughter, Sophie Rokhsar, a 23-year-old student at the Cardozo School of Law, said growing up, Iran always felt like a “mythical place” that her relatives would tell stories about. Now, the possibility of one day visiting the country — and seeing the apartment where her grandparents lived — feels more real.
Moji Pourmoradi, a Persian Jew who lives in Great Neck and came to the U.S. as a young child in 1968, said the operation awakened a longing to visit her birth country she didn’t fully realize she had been carrying.
“My cousin said it best. We were out Saturday night, and he said, ‘I feel like I’m a prisoner that was set free, and I didn’t even know I was a prisoner,’” Pourmoradi said. “I don’t think that we realized what it means that we weren’t allowed to go back, we couldn’t go back, and now we might possibly someday be able to. It’s a level of freedom that we didn’t know we wanted and needed.”
In Los Angeles — nicknamed “Tehrangeles,” where anywhere between 22,500 to 50,000 Jews help constitute the largest Iranian community outside Iran — the community shares similar views, according to Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh, who works as vice president for Jewish engagement and director of the Maas Center for Jewish Journeys at American Jewish University in LA.
Rabizadeh’s parents left Iran for the U.S. to attend university in the mid-1970s, and after the Islamic Revolution, they could never go back. Farsi was Rabizadeh’s first language, but she has never been able to visit the country she’s heard so much about.
She added that she believes the situation in Iran should be treated as a bipartisan issue.
“Whether Trump is good or bad, he’s doing something really good for humanity right now,” said Rabizadeh. “And I wish we could come out of our Democrat versus Republican boxes and just see the bigger picture.”
Sophie Rokhsar expressed a similar sentiment. For her, the arguments she’s seen against the U.S. intervention circulating online feel disconnected from her reality.
“Most of those people have no idea what it feels like to have to leave your country and have no idea if they’re ever going to go back home,” Sophie said. “Everybody in my community has been waiting for this. So it’s a little frustrating when someone who’s just coming to the conversation has such a strong opinion.”
What comes next
Some Iranian American Jews have expressed their hope that the next leader of Iran may be former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who lives in Maryland and has positioned himself as a potential transitional leader. He is outspokenly pro-Israel.
His father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ruled Iran as shah until he was overthrown in 1979. The shah’s rule was marked by sweeping modernization policies and close ties to the U.S. and Israel — as well as political repression, censorship, and the use of secret police to silence dissent. Yet an older generation of Iranians remembers Pahlavi’s rule as a time when Jews in Iran flourished.
“When we lived there with the Shah, it was perfect,” said Mahin Moezinia, who left Iran when she was in her 30s. She said many Jewish Iranians in her generation are “absolutely” excited about the prospect of his son at the helm of a new Iran. “He is a very good guy, I love him,” she said.
Younger generations are slightly more cautious.
“He’s the one unifying figure that everybody recognizes abroad and in Iran,” Jasmine Rokhsar said. “He says all the right things. He seems to be connected to people who can get us where we need to go. The negative is that he’s never been tested.”
But the elation many in the community are feeling is tinged with fear for what a volatile war situation could mean for Iran. “Until I can get on that damn plane,” said Rokhsar, laughing, “until the regime change does happen and the government is stable, I’m skeptical.”
“I think everyone is still very cautious,” said Pourmoradi. “I hope that the vacuum is filled with people of integrity.”
The post For Iranian American Jews, Trump’s talk of regime change stirs hopes of return appeared first on The Forward.
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New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
The post New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America appeared first on The Forward.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”