Faculty and Grad Student Colloquium:
“The Long History of Iranian Jews in the 20th and 21st Centuries," with Lior Sternfeld, Penn State University
The talk will explore the journey Iranian Jews embarked on in the early 20th century, which led them from the margins of Iranian society to the core of the urban upper-middle class. We will then discuss the 1979 revolution from the Iranian Jewish perspective, leading us eventually to the post-revolutionary period and the dispersion of the majority of the community to the US and Israel.
Lior Sternfeld is an associate professor of history and Jewish Studies at Penn State. He is a social historian of the modern Middle East with a particular interest in the histories of the Jewish people and other minorities of the region. His publications include various articles and book chapters, and four books in English and Hebrew. Among his books: Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran (Stanford University Press, 2018), Jews of Iran: A Photographic Chronicle (Penn State University Press, 2022) and, together with Honaida Ghanim and Tamir Sorek, he established the journal Palestine/Israel Review, where he serves as Associate Editor. He is currently completing a research project on the Iranian-Jewish Diaspora in the U.S. and Israel.