
Roya Hakakian delivers testimony at Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Dear Senators, ladies and gentlemen, On the program today, I’m identified as a writer and a journalist. But in some ways, immigrant and naturalized US
Dear Senators, ladies and gentlemen, On the program today, I’m identified as a writer and a journalist. But in some ways, immigrant and naturalized US
For Iran’s protesters, the fight for women’s freedom of choice is now synonymous with a desire to end the rule of the ayatollahs.
After the attack, Roya Hakakian, an Iranian American writer who in 2019 was warned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that she had been targeted by Iran, took to Twitter on Saturday to assail what she said was a lack of swift condemnation from U.S. government officials.
What is a revolution, compared to matters as vast as those? The revolution at hand is, at first, a rumor. The neighbors take to dimming their lights and shouting “Allahu akbar!” at a certain time every evening, in order to participate in a larger Tehran protest against the Shah. In the Hakakian household, “Allahu akbar” makes everyone a little nervous. Then again, not shouting “Allahu akbar” likewise makes everyone a little nervous. Young Roya takes her place within the Jewish Iranian Students Organization. The Jewish students, a solid number of them, are the intrepid enemies of oppression across the board. They are the champions of Palestinian freedom. Ardently they burn for the Iranian revolutionary cause.
As the Russian army leaves a trail of atrocity in Ukraine, a trial held here this month offers a powerful template for prosecuting war crimes. The Swedish case—involving a former Iranian official accused of participation in the mass murder of political prisoners in the late 1980s—is based on the principle of universal jurisdiction. According to this doctrine, the national courts of any state that has adopted this principle may prosecute someone suspected of grave crimes, no matter where they occurred and irrespective of the nationality of the suspect.
The archive was, in fact, a repository of headstones photographed for the faraway relatives who can no longer visit their dead. The details of the image were scant, and yet, with eyes blurred by tears, I studied them. Dried leaves and dead grass lined the edges of the slab—cracked in some places, chipped in others. More than fifty years since it was first laid, this stone had endured, the last trace of the Hakakians in the land that had rejected them.
This past Saturday, as I watched images of FBI agents pacing the perimeter of the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Tex., after a terrifying hostage
The most patriotic act I have ever witnessed anyone perform was what my father did on 9/11. He was watching the morning news, as was
On Sept. 11, 2001, I watched through tears as ash fell over the city that had so unceremoniously taken me in as a refugee 15
The two people who knocked on our door in late August 2019 stuck out in the neighborhood like sore thumbs. In rural Connecticut, where tank
Last week, the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women. The commission defines itself as “the
Community certainly doesn’t mean what is used to mean. As our world becomes more globalized, communities that define themselves based on geographical, tribal or racial kinship
On December 27, 2017, a thirty-two-year-old woman climbed atop a utility box on a busy Tehran block called the Revolution Street. People usually do not clamber on
On 12 December 2020 an execution took place in Iran that was like no other, even for a country that has the second highest known number of state-sponsored
For the past 42 years, Iran’s clerical leadership has defended the regime’s harsh Islamic dress code by claiming that mandatory wearing of the hijab is
A few days after I arrived as a refugee in America in 1985, when I was 18, relatives already living here came to take me
Last fall, Iranian authorities arrested Alireza Alinejad, a 45-year-old father of two, who has not broken any laws, not even according to the officials who
In an interview for the April issue of Vogue Arabia, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said, “To me, the hijab means power, liberation, beauty and resistance.” As two
The revolution that swept through Iran 40 years ago ruptured all diplomatic ties between Iran and the United States. This we know all too well.
Among the world’s endangered minorities, Iranian Jews are an anomaly. Like their counterparts, their conditions categorically refute all the efforts their nation makes at seeming
As the Trump White House entertains Riyadh’s dubious explanation for the death of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed at the Saudi consulate
I arrived in the United States as a refugee in May 1985. I was 19. I came with only a backpack and little English. Making
In recent weeks, Iran has again been in the throes of an uprising. Signs of the regime change America had long hoped to see are
The Iran-Saudi Arabia Rivalry Has a Silver Lining.” The escalating rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia has alarmed foreign policy experts who believe that it
If a debate, and the sentiments it subsequently evokes, can ever undo a nation’s character, the debate over “the wall,” the banning of immigrants from
Of all the interventions the United States has attempted in the last decade to contain Iran, one of the most successful is perhaps the least
Not since 1979, when leading American feminist Kate Millett joined thousands of women in protest of Iran’s revolutionary officials’ plan to reinstitute mandatory veiling, have
It’s lucky that my mother and I were admitted as refugees to America before the topic of immigration became so contentious. If the current laws
When my jubilant relatives in Tehran told me of street celebrations over the nuclear deal, I was reminded of the Yiddish folktale about the wretched
“How Iran Kept Its Jews.” It was with a murder that the most critical moment in the modern history of Iranian Jewry took shape. And
“Never again,” the world vowed in the middle of the last century. But here we are—again. Our ‘never’ is proving heartbreakingly finite. In between our
On a pleasant afternoon in early September of 1987, I was among a group of Iranians gathered under the overpass on the southeast corner of 42nd Street and First Avenue in New York City to protest President Ali Khamenei’s visit to the United Nations for the annual meeting of the General Assembly. Those were the good old days when the opposition spoke out, when their fury with the regime surpassed self-pity, nostalgia, and empty patriotism.
The invitation came in an email, written in the ingratiating tone of the Nigerian prince looking to wire his millions into my checking account, and delivered the same jolt of giddy disbelief: Officers of the Near East Affinity Group at the Central Intelligence Agency wanted me to address them on a variety of topics, including Persian poetry and literature. My day with them would be as long or as short as I wished it to be, and could include a tour of the C.I.A. museum, a luncheon and a visit to the gift shop.
On the streets and in taxicabs, political jokes abound. No one, especially the leadership, is spared, and no perspective is more telling or reliable than the anonymous satirist’s. A popular joke during the last presidential election invited Syrians also to vote: “After all, our president will be your finance minister, too!”
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett’s “Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms With the Islamic Republic of Iran” is a
“Daughter of the Storm: An Iranian Literary Revolution.” Adolescence is a universally grave hour. Mine was made graver by a revolution in 1979 in my
You have to watch Argo in the South as I did, in Burke County, N.C. to be exact, to feel that revisiting the hostage crisis between Iran and the
The targeting of Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old girl shot nearly two weeks ago by a Pakistani Taliban assassin, brought back memories of my teenage years
“Eating on the floor of a house under the ground! The food was an interesting barley paste, covered with very hot tomato soup. Another adventure
“IF a war were to break out between Iran and Israel, whose side would you be on?” someone asked me on Facebook a few weeks
In 1984, the year that, for those of us in Tehran, had every Orwellian quality, I befriended a Marxist activist who was on the run
An immigrant’s arrival in America has a distinct physical beginning marked by the landing of one’s plane. But there’s another arrival, the cultural one, that’s
On the night of Sept. 17, 1992, at 10:45, two darkly clad men burst in on a private dinner at a Berlin restaurant and stood
“Behold This Cliché: The Truth Shall Set You Free.””Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. in a letter from
Ever since the crowds flooded into Tahrir Square, I’ve begun talking to the living-room television. “Drop that hand!” I shouted at the raised fist of
What is most astonishing about the Iran of 2009 is how much, despite 30 years and the doubling of the population, it remains the Iran
On the day that the Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, charged with espionage by Tehran, was handed her eight-year sentence, I received several dozen messages asking
“Then They Came for the Bahai.” In mastering the knowlege that even bigotry is relative and comes in gradations, I was a premature pupil. I
DAWN had always arrived in Berlin’s Turm Strasse with the bustling of shopkeepers and the drowsy hiss of buses pulling into their stops. Always, except
THE news of the exhibition of Holocaust cartoons in Tehran took me back to a moment in my childhood. In 1974, his first year at
“Purim as Queen Esther’s ‘Coming Out.’” We don’t tend to think of holidays as occasions into which we grow, but that is, in part, what
January 12, 2022
Immigration & the US Myths, Wonder & Realities
World Affairs Council of Houston
November 6, 2021
A Beginner’s Guide to America
JCC of Greater New Haven
A Beginner’s Guide to America
October 26, 2021
Poet Laureate Presents: Meet Author Roya Hakakian
Wallingford Public Library
A Beginner’s Guide to America
October 20, 2021
From Iran to America: The Strengths and Struggles of Iranian Jewish Women
Museum of Jewish Heritage
October 13, 2021
A Beginer’s Guide to America for the Immigrant and the Curious
Texas A&M International University (Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade)
A Beginner’s Guide to America
October 6, 2021
Speaker Series Southeast
Connecticut World Affairs Council
A Beginner’s Guide to America
May 24, 2021
A Beginner’s Guid to America
World Affairs Council of Connecticut
A Beginner’s Guide to America
May 12, 2021
Virtual Book Conversation with Roya Hakakian
The Jewish News of Northern California
May 5, 2021
Roya Hakakian on her new book, “A Beginner’s Guide to America
American Purpose
A Beginner’s Guide to America
March 16, 2021
Acclaimed Iranian-American Author Shares Insights on the Immigrant Experience
Hudson Institute
February 25, 2021
A Panel Discussion on the Status of Women’s Rights in Iran
The Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues
February 17, 2021
February 27, 2018
Iran’s Unfinished Revolution: What Began in 1979 Continues Today
October 22, 2014
March 18, 2014
CU Model UN & Cultural Events Board Present: Roya Hakakian
University of Colorado Boulder
February 5, 2014
Author Roya Hakakian Talks About Growing Up Under Political Suppression
Keene State College Journey from the Land of No