After the Revolution to the War on Terror: Iranian Jewish American Literature in the United States

Abstract

The essay examines the sometimes synchronistic relationships in Iranian Jewish American literature between reading practices, aesthetics, and politics from the Iran hostage crisis to the War on Terror. As such, Mirakhor describes key features of this canon (its articulations of an imaginary homeland, struggles with assimilation, and belonging neither here nor there as Iranian Jews), as well as its relationship to the larger canons of Middle Eastern/Arab diasporic literatures and American literatures. Examining the works of writers such as Gina Nahai and Roya Hakakian, as well as the Bravo TV series The Shahs of Sunset, Mirakhor critiques the political and ideological dangers of neo-Orientalist and neoliberal rhetorical practices, as well as revealing some of the untethered possibilities in creating more multifaceted, nuanced articulations of “Iranian” and “Jewish” in the United States in the twenty-first century.