about

My mother is one of nine siblings of an Iranian Jewish family. In the first half of the 20th century they lived in an Esfahan ghetto. By the 1960s they had left Esfahan after being essentially excommunicated from the Jewish community after my aunt married a Muslim. By the 1970s they had a silk business in Tehran. By the 1980s most had fled the country on horseback, in the trunks of cars, on foot, having lost almost all their money.

I spent a summer in LA in the late 2000s digging through dusty leather suitcases stashed under my relatives’ mattresses and scanning every photo I found. On March 16 2011 I held a photo exhibit showcasing the photos. I wasn’t trying to make a point. They were just beautiful pictures of people I love. Years later these photos are in 25 billion Google results. They’ve made it onto PBS, BBC, Daily Mail, Iranian.com, Flavorwire, Radio Javan, and Sarah Silverman’s Twitter. In the time since, the zeitgeist has started turning against the idea that modern Iran is any worse than anywhere else, that the average Iranian is unhappy with their government, that Western liberal life is something worth striving for, that the Iranians who fled the country when the going got tough even have a right to speak on the subject. Since then I’ve lived across Africa, Europe, Asia and now Vietnam. Everywhere I go I find myself a bit jealous of people who still get to enjoy their own country. And every year or so riots break out in Iran, and I get calls from my family members wondering if the moment has finally arrived when the regime disappears and we can go back. It never does. 

Several years ago I was interviewed by Amy Malek, now Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies program chair at Oklahoma State University, about the Before the Chador project. In 2020 the International Journal of Cultural Studies published her article “Clickbait orientalism and vintage Iranian snapshots” which claims that the life of the people in the photos don’t represent the experience of the average Iranian back then, and the photos have been used by media outlets to get clicks and make modern Iran look backward. Re-reading it years later as I also read tweets criticizing pro-Shah Iranians in the aftermath of the unrest of early 2026, I feel compelled to put my thoughts on the record. 

I do so in full knowledge that I’m the product of a pro-Shah Iranian family that keeps close ties with family in Iran and visits regularly but is ultimately quite removed from the reality on the ground, which makes me a million times more removed than even them. At the same time, my family members are people who lived the times we’re discussing. They went from zero to affluent to running for their lives in under 15 years. Time distorts their memories of what they went through as well as how they felt about it – many pro-Shah Iranians will tell you they demonstrated against him at the time as idealistic college students and all regret it decades later understanding the lesser of two evils is normally as good as the Middle East gets. And they are influenced as much as anyone else, probably more so, by articles peddling photos of their youth with “Look How Cool Iran USED To Be” on the headline. But none of that invalidates the point. Ultimately their experiences, documented history and photographs like these make the case the entire discussion continues to sit on no matter how much others try to reframe it, which is that things were better before the revolution, were worse after the revolution and remain worse now, in some ways worse than ever. 

US sanctions are making things worse for the people. The US has good intentions in Iran only in as much as it benefits the US. Every country does not have to embrace nightclubs and bikinis to be allowed to exist. But the Shah era was not just about nightclubs and bikinis. In her article Ms Malek calls us an “affluent Iranian Jewish family” that didn’t represent the larger Iranian population, which is true (never mind the fact that the vast majority of people in similar photos from that time are Muslim). But our clan called a central Iran ghetto home a decade or two prior. The Shah’s reforms allowed us to prosper. And now that the tide has definitely turned against Jews in general, some may say Iran doesn’t need to cater to such a small part of its population. But Jews predate Muslims in the region. Anyone who champions the plight of the indigenous without championing the plight of Iranian Jews is a hypocrite. Anyone bringing up the Shah’s history of torture after even glancing at the current regime’s history of torture, likewise. And anyone who minimizes the success story of a poor family that made it has to ask themselves what the goal of a country should be. Some made their money with the royals. Most didn’t. Pro-Shah Iranians are the success story Iran has not had since. So when Ms Malek or anyone else says Western media is using these photos to twist up history, and some Iranian women wore chadors way before the 1980s and didn’t want to go sunbathing back then and don’t want to go sunbathing now, they’re avoiding the point. The real discussion here is not about nightclubs and bikinis and who puts a sheet on their head. It’s about a time when upward mobility was possible, a time that is not now. The Iranian regime is trying to force a version of the world long gone at its people’s cost but life always moves forward. I don’t know much about much but that’s plain to see even to me.