“I never thought there’s antisemitism. It's something from the past, for my grandparents, for my mom a little, but it's not something in my generation, or my kids’ generation. It's done . . . apparently, not.”
Einat Admony is a chef, cookbook author, comedian, and social media star who grew up in Bnei Brak, Israel. With parents from Iran and Yemen, Einat spent her childhood in the kitchens of Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi neighbors. Learn about her family's deep-rooted Jewish heritage in Iran and the broader Middle East. Along with her mother Ziona’s journey from Iran to Israel in 1948, Einat discusses the antisemitism she’s dealt with online and on the streets in the past year.
Hear her stories of Jewish-Muslim coexistence in Iran and memories of spices and perfumes that inspire Einat’s dishes. Her cookbooks Balaboosta and Shuk, along with her Manhattan restaurant Balaboosta, reflect a blend of tradition and innovation.
“You could not have Judaism today, if it were not for the Jews of Iran,” says Houman Sarshar, an independent scholar and director of publications at the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History in Los Angeles. Sarshar highlights the historical relationship between Iran and Israel, noting that Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel post-1948.
The conversation also touches on the challenges faced by Jews in Iran, their cultural integration, and the impact of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
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Show notes:
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Song credits:
Pond5:
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“Desert Caravans”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI), Composer: Tiemur Zarobov (BMI), IPI#1098108837
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“Suspense Middle East” Publisher: Victor Romanov, Composer: Victor Romanov; Item ID: 196056047
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Episode Transcript:
EINAT ADMONY: I've been in Israel a few months ago. It's like you always feel loved, you always feel supported. It's still home. It's always going to be my home.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century.
Welcome to the second season of The Forgotten Exodus, brought to you by American Jewish Committee. This series explores that pivotal moment in history and the little-known Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations. As Jews around the world confront violent antisemitism and Israelis face daily attacks by terrorists on multiple fronts, our second season explores how Jews have lived throughout the region for generations despite hardship, hostility, and hatred, then sought safety and new possibilities in their ancestral homeland.
I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore untold family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience from this transformative and tumultuous period of history for the Jewish people and the Middle East.
The world has ignored these voices. We will not.
This is The Forgotten Exodus. Today's episode: Leaving Iran.
MANYA: Whether she’s deviling eggs soaked in beet juice, simmering Oxtail in shawarma spices, or sprinkling za’atar on pastry dough, chef Einat Admony is honoring her family’s Middle Eastern heritage. Both the places where they have lived for generations, as well as the place they have and will always call home: Israel.
EINAT/Clip: Start with brushing the puff pastry with olive oil and za’atar. Have some feta all around and shredded mozzarella. Take the other sheet and just cut it to one inch strips. Now we're going to twist. Need to be careful. Now we're just gonna brush the top with the mix of oil and za’atar. Get it some shiny and glazy. This is ready for the oven. Bake at 400 until it's golden. That's it super easy, just sprinkle some za’atar and eat.
MANYA: For the chef, author, reality TV star, and comedian, food reflects the Zionist roots that have been a constant for Einat, the self-made balaboosta, who is largely credited with introducing Israeli cuisine to the U.S. That love for Israel goes back generations, long before the modern state existed, when her maternal ancestors lived in the land, that until 1935 was known as Persia, but is now known as Iran.
Her own mother Ziona, the third of seven siblings, was even named for the destination where Einat’s grandparents aspired to one day raise their family. Returning home to the land of Zion from which Jews had been exiled centuries earlier was always the goal. When you ask her why, Einat laughs in disbelief.
EINAT: Why? Why? That's homeland. I think a lot of Jewish people for hundreds of years was, that's in every prayer, it's in every Shabbat dinner evening.
MANYA: The hatred directed toward Israel by Iran’s regime in the form of the deadly attacks on Israel by Iran-backed terrorist groups and the Islamic Republic of Iran itself make it hard to believe that Iran was once a place where Jews and the Zionist movement thrived. But in fact, Iran’s history includes periods when the wide-open roads between Iran and Israel ran two ways and the countries not only lived in harmony but worked in close partnership.
Iran was the second Muslim-majority country after Turkey to recognize the modern state of Israel after its formation in 1948, and the two established diplomatic ties. Regular flights ran between Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport and Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport.
SARSHAR: We cannot overlook the fact that since October 29, 539 BCE the Jewish community of Iran remains to this day the largest community of Jews anywhere in the Middle East outside the state of Israel. To this day. You could not have Judaism today, if it were not for the Jews of Iran.
MANYA: Houman Sarshar is an independent scholar and director of publications at the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History in Los Angeles. He has edited a number of books, including Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews.
SARSHAR: The history of the Jews in Iran begins about 2,700 years ago, when the first community of known Jews was taken to Iran. They are commonly believed to be one of the 10 Lost Tribes. And then when we fast forward to when Nebuchadnezzar came and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and took Jews into captivity. Some years after that at 539 BCE on October 29, 539 BCE, to be exact, Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, liberated Babylon and gave Jews the permission to go back to Israel and rebuild the Second Temple.
MANYA: Cyrus the Great – a Persian emperor particularly renowned among contemporary scholars for the respect he showed toward peoples' customs and religions in the lands that he conquered. According to the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew Bible, Cyrus even paid for the restoration of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem.
SARSHAR: This is known as the Second Temple period in Jewish history, and under the Achaemenid dynasty, Jews participated in every level of society. And a few centuries forward, around the 5th Century, we know the Jews continue to live with many freedoms, because that is the era when the Babylonian Talmud was originally produced in Iran by Rav Ashi. So, you know, there was a thriving rabbanut (rabbanite) in Iran who had the freedom and the luxury and the time to be able to produce such an important document as the Talmud, which has become the cornerstone of all jurisprudence that we know, Western law, and everything.
MANYA: The advent and arrival of Islam in Iran in the 7th Century CE changed circumstances somewhat. As was the case across the Middle East, all non-Muslims became dhimmis – residents who paid a special tax and lived under certain restrictions. The situation for Jews worsened in the 16th Century when the Safavid dynasty made the Shiite creed the dominant form of Islam in Iran. Fatwas made life for all non-Shiites quite difficult.
SARSHAR: And for reasons that are still open to discussion, all of these restrictions were most vehemently imposed on the Jews of Iran. And because of these restrictions, all non-Shiites were considered religiously impure. And this religious impurity, kind of like the concept of the untouchable sect in India, they were considered pollutive.
MANYA: Jews could not look Muslims in the eye. They were placed in ghettos called mahaleh where they could not leave on rainy days for fear the water that splattered on them could contaminate the water supply. They wore yellow stars and special shoes to distinguish them from the rest of the population. They were not allowed to purchase property from Muslims or build homes with walls that were higher than those of their Muslim neighbors.
SARSHAR: They could not, for example, participate in the trade of edible goods because, you know, fruits and vegetables and meats carried this pollution. So Muslims could no longer consume the foods that were touched by Jews. And as a result, this created a certain path forward in history for the Jews of Iran.
They went into antique trades. They went into carpet trades. They went into work of textiles. They became musicians. And for the following 500 years, these restrictions kind of guided the way the Jews of Iran lived in that country, even though they had been there for thousands of years previously.
MANYA: Houman said the 1895 arrival of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Paris-based network of schools for Jewish children throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including within the mahalehs in Persia, was the first step in a series of improvements for Jews there.
SARSHAR: Previous to that, Jews were not allowed to get any kind of an education whatsoever. The only teachers were the Muslim clergy, and they refused to teach anything to Jewish students. So this allowed for the Jewish community to finally start to get a Western-style education, which was very important at that time, given all of the dynamics that were going on in society with modernity.
MANYA: As educational opportunities increased in the middle of the 19th Century, so did opportunities for the courtiers and elite to travel and see the Western world as it industrialized and modernized, expanding international trade and sharing wealth more widely.
SARSHAR: Often they would be sent by their families to go and try to see if they can, you know, find a way to expand the family's businesses and lives as merchants, and they would come back shocked. I mean, Iran was a place where you know of mostly mud brick homes and dirt roads and people riding around on donkeys. And imagine this is all you've known. You never see women walking around the street. The only women you have ever seen with your own eyes in your life are your mom, your sister, your daughter or your wife, and occasionally, sex workers. And that's it. So all of a sudden, you know, you travel a couple of months by boat and train, and you get to Paris, and it's impossible to try to even conceive of the experience.
It must have been something like the Hegelian experience of the sublime. What can the world look like? And where is it that I live in, and why isn't my country the same as this?
MANYA: By the early 20th Century, the Persian people concluded the answer to that question was in the rule of law. The reason the European nations provided such opportunity for the community at-large had to do with the fact that the law of the land was not arbitrary or enforced by religion or royalty. It was embedded in a constitution – a set of laws that define the structure of a government and the rights of its citizens – a Western tenet that reduced the power of the clergy and created a parliament called the Majles.
SARSHAR: They were starting to read travel journals. They were starting to understand the perspective that Westerners had on Iranians, and those perspectives were often awful. You know, the Western world believed, for example –the country was corrupt to the bone in every respect.
So all of these things gradually led to a call for a constitution, the major pivot of which was the establishment of a legislature of law that would start to create a community where everyone can feel like they're equal in the eyes of the law and have something to gain by trying to improve the country as a whole.
Iran became the first constitutional monarchy in the Middle East in 1906 when that revolution happened, it was a momentous event. And really, things really, really did, in fact, start to change.
MANYA: In 1925, Reza Shah Pahlavi – an arch nationalist who wanted to propel Iran forward into the industrial age – took over the crown of Iran. He welcomed any Iranian citizen to participate in that agenda.
SARSHAR: By now, we had a good two generations of Jews who had been French-educated by the Allianz Society. They had all gone to France at some point in their lives, so they were able to participate in this industrialization of the country, given the language skills that they had and some of the connections they had built in the Western world.
MANYA: Both World Wars in Europe took a massive toll on Iran. Despite declaring neutrality, Iran was occupied by European nations that took over the nation’s agriculture, treating Iran as a pantry to feed the armies. Droughts and disease worsened the toll.
SARSHAR: One of the lesser-known factoids about history is that during World War I, the nation that lost the most individuals as a result of the war was Iran. Above and beyond all European nations who were at war, because of a famine that had started in Iran. The same dynamic started to happen in World War II.
MANYA: With nationalist fever sweeping Europe and Iran, the Allies feared the arch-nationalist Shah would go the way of Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany. They also feared the Shah would collaborate with Hitler’s Germany to provide oil for the German oil machine and cease being the pantry the Allies needed it to be. In 1941, the Western powers convinced him to abdicate the throne to his son Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. And when the war ended, Iran was able to enjoy the same economic benefits as the rest of the world at peace time. Most importantly, it was able to profit from its own oil reserves, significantly boosting Iran's national income.
SARSHAR: In 1941, it was really the beginning of what is commonly referred to by the scholars of Jewish Iranian history as the Golden Age of Iranian Jewry. From 1941 until the revolution in 1978, the Jewish community of Iran saw a meteoric rise to power and social wealth. Industries such as pharmaceuticals, banking, insurance, real estate development, and other major industries, the aluminum plastics industries in Iran, all were either directly owned by the Jews of Iran or managed under their management.
And during this period, really, we can say that for the first time, after 2,500 years, the Jews of Iran really started to experience the kinds of freedoms that they had not seen since the Achaemenid dynasty. And it is during this time that, you know, we see, really, that life started to change for the Jews of Iran, even though some of the age-old social dynamics were still there.
The institutionalized antisemitism had not been completely wiped out. But for the most part, things had changed because Iranian society in general was also being Westernized, light speed. And many educated people had realized that antisemitism was really looked down upon, you know, that kind of prejudice was really no longer acceptable in the world at large. So many, many sections of the community really had shifted, genuinely shifted. And some, even though maybe their feelings had not changed, knew that their antisemitism was something that they needed to keep private.
MANYA: At that time, Iran also became a refuge for Jews fleeing Europe and other parts of the Middle East. On June 1, 1941, a brutal pogrom in Iraq known as the Farhud, incited by Nazi propaganda, targeted Jews celebrating the holiday of Shavuot. Nearly 200 Jews were murdered in the streets. The violence became a turning point for Iraqi Jews. Thousands fled, many stopping in Iran, which became a way station for those headed to Palestine.
In 1942, thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland who had fled across the border into the Soviet Union during the German invasion traveled on trains and ships to Iran. Among the refugees – 1,000 orphaned children.
As Zionist leaders worked to negotiate the young Jews’ immigration to Palestine, the Jewish Agency established the “Tehran Home for Jewish Children” – a complex of tents on the grounds of a former Iranian Air Force barracks outside Tehran. More than 800 orphans, escorted by adults, most of them also refugees, moved from Tehran to kibbutzim in Palestine the following year.
Later, in 1948, when most Arab League states forbade the emigration of their Jews after the creation of Israel, the Zionist underground continued to smuggle Jews to Iran at about a rate of 1,000 a month, before they were flown to Israel.
SARSHAR: The Zionist movement was fairly strong in Iran. It was a very lively movement. The Balfour Declaration was celebrated in all of the Allianz schools in Iran, and very soon thereafter, the first Zionist organization of Iran was established. And truly many of its founding fathers were some of the leading industrialists and intellectuals in Iranian society, in the Jewish Iranian community for the years to come.
It was not unlike the kind of Zionism we see today in the United States, for example. You know, the wealthy families of the Jewish communities in New York and Los Angeles, all are very passionate about Israel, but you don't see very many of them selling their homes and packing up and moving to Israel because they just don't want to do it. They feel like they're very comfortable here. And what matters is that a state of Israel should exist, and they are political advocates of that state and of that policy and of its continued existence, but not necessarily diehard participants in the experiment itself.
Iranians, after the establishment of the State of Israel, were being encouraged to move to Israel, and the Israeli government was having a lot of difficulty with that, because a lot of Iranians were seeing that life had become better for them, and they weren't as willing to leave, despite the fact that the Kourosh Project provided airplanes to get Jews out of Iran. My own great-grandmother was one of those passengers. She is buried in Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. She was one of the early citizens of Israel who went to live out the Zionist dream.
MANYA: Both sides of Einat’s family – her mother and father’s ancestors – were among those early Israeli citizens. Einat’s father was born in Tel Aviv. His parents and grandparents had come from Yemen in the late 19th Century. Einat’s mother Ziona was 10 years old when in 1948, the family left Kerman, a city in southeastern Iran known for its carpet weaving and woolen shawls. They arrived in Israel with their suitcases ready to fulfill their dream. But living the dream in the new Jewish nation was not easy. After all, the day after Israel declared its independence, Arab nations attacked the Jewish state, launching the first of a series of Arab-Israeli Wars.
EINAT: The story of my mom, it's a very interesting story.
The family didn't have much money. There wasn't like, rich family that left, very different story. No, both of my parents come from very, I would say, very poor family. My grandpa was, like, dealing with textile. He was like, traveling from town to town with fabric. And that's what they did.
They put them in what’s called ma’aborot, which was like a very kind of small villages, tin houses. My mom always said there were seven kids, so all of them in one room. In the winter it’s freezing; in the summer, it's super hot. But it was also close to the border, so the one window they have, they always had to cover it so at night, the enemy cannot see the light inside that room and shoot there.
Also in the ma’aabarot, nobody speaks the same language. So, it was Moroccan and Iraqi and nobody speak the same dialect or the same language. So, they cannot even communicate quite yet.
MANYA: Most of Ziona’s six siblings did not go to school. To make it possible for Ziona, her parents placed her in a foster home with an Iraqi family in Ramat Gan, east of Tel Aviv.
EINAT: My mom’s family decided that for her, she should get education, because most of the siblings didn't went to school or anything, So they put her in a foster home. In an Iraqi home, and she didn't speak a word there. So my mom, as a 10 years old, became a kid for foster parents that live in a center in Ramat Gan, where I basically grew up. And she got education, which was great. She learned also Iraqi, which is Arabic. So she speaks fluent Arabic, but she had not an easy life in coming to Israel from a different country.
MANYA: Ziona has shared many of these stories with her daughter in the kitchen and dining room as they prepare and enjoy dishes that remind them of home. When she visited her daughter at her home in upstate New York at the end of the summer, Einat collected as many stories as she could over cutting boards, steaming pots, and sizzling pans.
EINAT: There's a lot of story coming up, some old story that I know, some new stories. And it's really nice, because my mom is 84, 85. So, it's really nice to capture all of it, all of it. There is a lot of interesting stuff that happened during the first 10 years when she came to Israel.
That’s the main, I think, I always talk about, like, how I grew up and how much food was a very substantial part of our life, if not the biggest part. You know, it's like, family can fight and this, but when it's come to the dinner, it's just change everything, the dynamic. For us, it was a big, significant part of everything. So obviously, most of these stories and memories come in while we’re cooking or eating.
A lot of time she used to talk about, and still talking about the smells, the smells of the flowers, the smells of the zafar (perfume). She still have the nostalgia from that time and talking very highly about what Iran used to be, and how great, and the relationship between the Muslims and the Jews back then.
My grandpa’s best friend was crying when he left, and he said: ‘Please don't go. Stay with us.’ And he said: ‘I want to go to homeland.’ So, they have a really great relationship.
She’s always talking, actually, about how they come for Shabbat dinner, the friends if they put the cigarettes outside of the door in Shabbat because they were observant. So cigarettes, lighter, everything, they keep it outside, in the garden, not coming inside the house. So a lot of mutual respect for the religion to each other. And I love that stories. It just showed what's happened when people take it extreme.
MANYA: Einat’s cookbooks and restaurant menus are filled with recipes from her own childhood and her parents’ upbringing. To satisfy the appetite of her father, a former Israeli athlete, her house always had hummus and every weekend, the family made a hilbeh sauce -- a traditional Yemenite fenugreek dip made with cardamom, caraway seeds and chili flakes.
Other recipes reflect her mother’s Persian roots. And then there are recipes that, at first blush, seem to come out of left field, but are inspired by the Iraqi Jewish foster family that raised her mother, and the Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi neighbors that passed through the dining room and kitchen where Einat was raised in Bnei Brak.
Now a Haredi town east of Tel Aviv, it was then a diverse population of Jews from, well, everywhere. Einat still remembers standing on a stool next to the Moroccan neighbor in her building learning how to roll couscous.
EINAT: One neighbor that was my second mom, her name was Tova, and she was Moroccan, so it was like, I have another Moroccan mom. But all the building was all Holocaust survivors. None of them had kids, and they were all speaking in Yiddish, mostly.
So I grew up with a lot of mix. I wouldn't say, you know, in my time, it's not like our neighborhood. I grew up in Bnei Brak, and our neighborhood was very, it was before Bnei Brak became so religious like today. It was still religious, if you go really in, but we’re close to Ramat Gan, and I have to say that it's, I would say, I didn't grow up with, it's very mixed, very mixed.
Wouldn't say I grew up just with Moroccan or Mizrahi, I say that it's very, very mixed. And my mom same. I think a lot of her friend is like, It's my mom would speak some Yiddish. She would do Kugel on Shabbat next to the jachnun and all the Mizrahi food. You know, this is the multi-pot and one things I love in Israel. You can see in one table so many different cultures. And that's something that would have happened in my house a lot.
MANYA: That amalgam of Jewish cultures is reflected in her cookbooks Balaboosta and Shuk. It also shows up in her menu at the brick-and-mortar Balaboosta, a quaint Middle Eastern trattoria on Mulberry Street in Manhattan.
The name Balaboosta is borrowed from Yiddish meaning “a perfect housewife” – a twist on ba’al habayit, Hebrew for master of the house, or boss. But Einat insists that the term is no longer exclusively Ashkenazi, nor does it refer exclusively to a woman’s domestic role.
EINAT: An old friend, chef, asked me when I went to open Balaboosta, and I said, ‘I don't have a name.’ She said: ‘What do you call a badass woman in Hebrew?’ I'm like, ‘balaboosta.’ She said, ‘It's a perfect name. We done.’ Took five minutes to find this name, and I love it.
It’s really connected because for me it's so so much different things. You know, I always talk about the 20th century balaboosta. The balaboosta that outside going to work, the balaboosta that asking a man for a date. The balaboosta that it's not just like she's the housewife and the homekeeper. It's much more than that. Today, she's a multitask badass.
It's much more spiritual than what it is. I think it's the one that can bond the people together and bring them together and make peace between two parties clashing. So for me, it's much more than somebody that can cook and clean. So, much, much more than that.
MANYA: Einat’s parents became more religious when she was 12, which of course had the opposite effect on their daughter: she rebelled. When her time came to do her mandatory service in the Israel Defense Force, she was determined not to serve in a role typically assigned to women. She requested a post as a firing instructor. But after reviewing the high school transcript shaped by her rebellious adolescence, the IDF assigned her to the Nevatim Air Base where she served as a chauffeur for fighter pilots.
EINAT: Back then most women would be secretaries giving coffee to some assholes. I was trying not to do that, and somehow I got very lucky, and I was in the same division, I was in the Air Force. I had amazing time for two years. I start the military a very different person, and left a very different person.
I used to hang with a lot of bad people before, really bad people. And when I get to the military, I was a driver of pilots, it's the top of the top of the top in the hierarchy in the military in all IDF. So now I'm hanging with people that have the biggest ambition ever, and I'm learning new stuff, and everything opened up, even my language changed completely. Everything. I was want to travel more than I ever want before, and I have like, crazy dreams.
MANYA: To make sure the elite pilots were well-fed, the IDF bused in a group of Yemenite grandmothers to provide ochel bayit, or home-cooked meals. Einat befriended the kitchen staff and helped out from time to time. Then in January 1991, she was tapped to cook a meal that probably launched her career. The IDF chiefs of staff had convened at Nevatim base to discuss the U.S. plan to bomb Iraq during the Gulf War and what Israel would do if Saddam Hussein retaliated with an attack on the Jewish state. But they needed to plot that strategy on full stomachs. A couple of pilots served as her sous chefs. That night, the Israeli generals dined on Chinese chicken with garlic, honey, and soy. And a rice salad.
EINAT: It was definitely the turning point, the military. I would say there is some values of relationship and working ethics that I wouldn't see anywhere else, and that's coming, I think because the military. They're waking up in the morning, the friendship, they're no snitching or none of this. It's to stand up for each other. There is so many other values that I grabbed from that. So when I start my culinary career, and I was in a fine dining kitchen, it was very helpful, very helpful.
MANYA: After spending five years in a van driving around Germany – an extended celebration of freedom after IDF service -- it was time to get serious about a career. A culinary career made as good a sense as any. Einat worked as a waitress in Eilat and enrolled in culinary school. At the end, she marched into the kitchen of Keren, one of the first restaurants in Israel to offer haute cuisine.
She got an internship, then a job. The former restaurant, run by Israeli Chef and television host Haim Cohen, is credited for reinventing Israeli cuisine.
Now, as a restaurant owner and TV personality herself, Einat is largely credited for introducing Israeli cuisine to the U.S. But before she became the self-made Balaboosta of fine Israeli dining, Einat was America’s Falafel Queen, made famous by two victories on the Food Network’s show Chopped and her first restaurant – now a fast food chain called Ta’im Falafel.
But her fame and influence when it comes to Israeli cooking has exposed her to a fair bit of criticism. She has become a target on social media by those who accuse Israelis of appropriating Palestinian foods – an argument she calls petty and ridiculous. So ridiculous, she has found the best platform to address it is on the stage of her new hobby: stand-up comedy. Cooking has always been her Zen. But so is dark humor.
EINAT: I like comedy more than anything, not more than food, but close enough.
EINAT/Clip: Yeah, this year was great here on Instagram, lot of hate comments, though. A lot about food appropriation, me making Arabic dishes. So let me clarify something here. I check my DNA through ancestry.com and I am 97% Middle Eastern, so I fucking bleed hummus.
EINAT: It's very petty. Food, supposed always to share. Food supposed to moving forward.
It’s tiring and life is much more complex than to even argue and have a debate about stupid things. I’m done.
OK, yes, we're indigenous.I have connection to the land. My parents, my grandparents and great grandparents have connection to that land. Okay, I get it. Now we need to solve what's going on, because there was Palestinian that lived there before, and how we can, for me, how we change the ideology, which I don't see how we can, but how we can change the ideology, convince them that they want peace. And they want…I don’t know.
MANYA: Needless to say, in the year that has followed the attacks of October 7, stand-up comedy has not been the balm it once was. The attacks that unfolded that day by Iran-backed terrorists that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 250 more was simply too devastating.
EINAT: I was broken there, my husband was with me, I was every day on a bed crying, and then going to work, and it was like I couldn't hear music, because every music thinking about Nova and my friends and then I couldn't see babies with a mom. Everything was a trigger. It was bad.
We had a disaster of October 7 and then October 8 to see the world reaction was another. It's not just enough that we going through so much grief and need to kind of contain all that emotion and crazy and anger and rage and now we need to see the world's. Like, ok. I never thought there is antisemitism. It's something from the past, for my grandparents, for my mom a little, but it's not something in my generation, or my kids’ generation. It's done, apparently, not.
MANYA: The lack of sympathy around the world and among her culinary peers only amplified Einat’s grief. As a way to push for a cease-fire and end U.S. support for Israel, nearly 900 chefs, farmers and others in the food industry signed a pledge to boycott Israel-based food businesses and culinary events that promote Israel.
EINAT: I felt very, very alone, very alone. The first few months, I felt like, wow, not one call from anyone to check on me. It was pretty sad. At the same time, I'm in the best company ever Jewish community. There is nothing like that, nothing.
MANYA: Her team at Balaboosta also checked in on their Israeli boss. But they too were scared. Soon after she posted pictures of the hostages on the window of her restaurant, she confronted a group of teenagers who tried to tear them down.
EINAT: I stand in front of them and I said, ‘You better move fast’.
MANYA: It’s no secret that Iran helped plan Oct. 7. What is not as well known is how many Jews still live and thrive in Iran. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, there were nearly 100,000 Jews in Iran. Today, Israeli sources say the population numbers less than 10,000, while the regime and Iran’s Jewish leaders say it’s closer to 20,000. Regardless, Iran’s Jewish community remains the largest in the Middle East outside Israel.
To be sure, the constitution adopted in 1906 is still in place nominally, and it still includes Jews as a protected religious minority. Jews in Iran have synagogues, access to kosher meat, and permission to consume wine for Shabbat, despite a national ban on alcohol. There’s also a Jewish representative in Iran’s parliament or Majlis. But all women and girls regardless of religion are required to wear a veil, according to the Islamist dress code, and Jews are pressured to vote in elections at Jewish-specific ballot stations so the regime can monitor their participation.
Zionism is punishable by death and after Oct. 7, the regime warned its Jewish citizens to sever contact with family and friends in Israel or risk arrest.
They also can’t leave. Iranian law forbids an entire Jewish nuclear family from traveling abroad at the same time. At least one family member, usually the father, must remain behind to prevent emigration.
But Houman points out that many Iranian Jews, including himself, are deeply attached to Iranian culture. As a resident of Los Angeles, he reads Persian literature, cooks Persian herb stew for his children and speaks in Persian to his pets. He would return to Iran in an instant if given the opportunity to do so safely. For Jews living in Iran it may be no different. They’ve become accustomed to living under Islamist laws. They may not want to leave, even if they could.
SARSHAR: The concept of living and thriving in Iran, for anyone who is not related to the ruling clergy and the Revolutionary Guard, is a dream that feels unattainable by anyone in Iran, let alone the Jews. In a world where there is really no fairness for anyone, the fact that you're treated even less fairly almost fades.
MANYA: Scholars say since the Islamic Revolution, most Jews who have left Iran have landed in Los Angeles or Long Island, New York. Still, more Jews of Iranian descent live in Israel – possibly more than all other countries combined. The reason why? Because so many like Einat’s family made aliyah–up until the mid-20th Century.
It’s hard to say where another exodus might lead Iranian Jews to call home. Einat will be forever grateful that her family left when they still could and landed in a beautiful and beloved place. Though she lives in the U.S. now, she travels back to Israel at least twice a year.
EINAT: It’s a dream for every Jew, it's not just me. It's the safe zone for every Jew. It's the one place that, even if we have, it's not safe because there is people around us that want to kill us. It's still emotionally. You know, I’ve been in Israel a few months ago, it’s like, you always feel loved, you always feel supported. It’s incredible. And it's still home. It's always going to be my home.
MANYA: Persian Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who, in the last century, left Middle Eastern and North African countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations.
Many thanks to Einat for sharing her family’s story. You can enjoy some of her family’s favorite recipes in her cookbooks Balaboosta and Shuk. Her memoir Taste of Love was recently released in an audio and digital format.
Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn’t have the answers to my questions because they’d never asked. That’s why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to ask those questions. Find your stories.
Atara Lakritz is our producer. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer.
Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Nicole Mazur, Sean Savage, and Madeleine Stern, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name really, for making this series possible.
You can subscribe to The Forgotten Exodus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can learn more at AJC.org/theforgottenexodus.
The views and opinions of our guests don’t necessarily reflect the positions of AJC.
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