From the Shahs to Los Angeles
Subtitle: three generations of Iranian Jewish women between religion and culture
By: Saba Soomekh
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Albany, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781438443836
Subjects: Jewish women; Social life and customs; Religious life; Iranian Americans; Politics and government
Description: Saba Soomekh offers a fascinating portrait of three generations of women in an ethnically distinctive and little-known American Jewish community, Jews of Iranian origin living in Los Angeles. Most of Iran's Jewish community immigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles in the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the government-sponsored discrimination that followed. Based on interviews with women raised during the constitutional monarchy of the earlier part of the twentieth century, those raised during the modernizing Pahlavi regime of mid-century, and those who have grown up in Los Angeles, the book presents an ethnographic portrait of what life was and is like for Iranian Jewish women. Featuring the voices of all generations, the book concentrates on religiosity and ritual observance, the relationship between men and women, and women's self-concept as Iranian Jewish women. Mother-daughter relationships, double standards for sons and daughters, marriage customs, the appeal of American forms of Jewish practices, social customs and pressures, and the alternate attraction to and critique of materialism and attention to outward appearance are discussed by the author and through the voices of her informants.--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Women of change; title: The generation of the constitutional monarchy; title: All the Shah's women; title: Life in Los Angeles; title: Jewish American and Persian.