Persian Jews have injected new life, intensity and commitment to the community, and Jimmy Delshad, the mayor of Beverly Hills, is its most prominent representative
In early April, a month after the inauguration of Jimmy (Jamshid) Delshad as mayor of Beverly Hills, one branch of the Nazarian clan gathers for Shabbat dinner, on a Friday night. The table on the backyard patio, in addition to Sabbath candles, challah and wine, nearly buckles under platters of flat bread, kebab, peppery herbs and vegetables and chelow (pronounced cello), a gold-encrusted basmati rice dish redolent with saffron.
This is only the starter for about 20 members of the clan there to partake in the spirit and delicacies of a traditional Persian Jewish Sabbath. There are, in fact, two main courses: One involves permutations of khorescht, a traditional Persian stew. The other is an ongoing discussion, now in its fourth weekly round, of the implications of Delshad's installation, which made him the highest-ranking Iranian-born politician in U.S. history.
There is much here to chew on. And not just by the Nazarians, who supported Delshad during the campaign preceding the March election, but by many of the non-Iranian residents of this three-fifths Jewish town.
Since the fall of the Shah in 1979, Beverly Hills has evolved into a powerful Mecca for Persian Jewry, whose presence in their former homeland predated the establishment, in 1935, of the Kingdom of Iran, and, in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran. These newcomers, who comprise 35,000 of the more than 600,000 Iranians estimated to live in the U.S., have inexorably and irrevocably altered this highly manicured landscape. Writing in The National Review shortly after Delshad's election, popular Hollywood commentator David Kahane declared the victory to be "the greatest ethnic turnover since Harlem went from white to black in the 1930s..."
The Jewish identity of these Iranians was not at all apparent to him. "What the fall of the shah started," he wrote, "the rise of the mullahs will eventually finish, and 90210 [referring to Beverly Hills by its well-known zip code], will be just another precinct in Tehran, with the same taste in interior furnishings."
Perhaps to avoid precisely such misapprehensions, these Jewish newcomers prefer the term "Persian Jew" to "Iranian Jew," especially since George Bush Jr. relegated Iran to the "Evil Axis." These Persians are educated, adaptable, ambitious and, often, a great deal more wealthy upon arrival or shortly thereafter than not only most immigrant populations, past and present, but also the progeny of preceding generations of Americans.
While America has long regarded the immigrants drawn to its shores with ambivalence, this community has been a particularly tough bone for this ritziest of small cities - since 1906 renowned throughout the world as the self-styled "home of the stars" - to digest.
According to the 2007 edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica, Persian-American Jews now number roughly 35,000 throughout the country. Some 25,000 live in Southern California; 8,000 live in New York and Long Island; and the rest are scattered in other major American cities. Numbering 8,000 in Beverly Hills, Persian-American Jews now make up a quarter of the town's residents and nearly half its Jewish community.
Moreover, in the relatively brief time since their arrival, they have injected new life, intensity and commitment to the business not only of becoming American, but also to the meaning of living as Jews.
Jewish institutions and communal observers attest that, through their commitment to Jewish education, high synagogue attendance and support for Israel, the Persians have given a powerful shot in the arm not only to the Jewish community of Beverly Hills, but to the wider, if somewhat more anemic, community beyond its gates.
But they bring a very different style of Jewishness to the table than what the larger, more established, "kreplach and gefilte fish" set, as one prominent rabbi describes the veteran Ashkenazi community, may be more comfortable with. With dark complexions and oval eyes that, for some Ashkenazim, evoke images of Jews revered in the vaguely remembered Book of Esther, the newcomers look very different from their neighbors. They speak a different language that sounds uncomfortably close to the parts of the Middle East many Americans regard as hostile or incomprehensible. And, overall, their perceived cultural proclivities and stylistic affectations - a discernible measure of insularity; unusually cohesive and extended families; an eye for opportunity and a sometimes wanton embrace of the materiality and acquisitiveness for which this town is infamous - make many of their more blue-blood co-religionists see red.
Delshad, one of three Jewish-Persian candidates and six candidates in total who ran for two seats in city council elections last March, is the only Persian on the 5-man council. "This is clearly the next level," declares Sharona R. Nazarian, a Persian-born, U.S.-raised and educated psychologist in her 30s, who is active in local Jewish, municipal and philanthropic affairs, and is a stalwart supporter of Delshad. "When immigrants start to acculturate into politics, it opens up a whole other realm of possibility."
"I think it is a great achievement and honor not only for Jimmy but for the entire Jewish community," adds 60-year-old Jacob Rashti, Sharona's father, a mechanical engineer with degrees from the University of Texas.
Delshad, 19 when he arrived in the U.S. with two of his brothers in 1959, who despite his ethnic origin, during the late 1990s served two terms as the president of the Ashkenazi congregation Sinai Temple, (see box on page 28) actually placed second in the race. This was sufficient, however, to return the 66-year-old businessman for a second term, since under Beverly Hills's unique municipal bylaws, he was handed the mayor's gavel by virtue of his seniority.
Delshad's election, however, is more than just a confirmation of the emergence of a large community of Jews into the public view. It puts the Persian Jews of greater Los Angeles into a spotlight that they and their forbears carefully avoided over 2,700 often-hazardous years in Iran, from which most of them are no more than one generation removed. Not all local Persian Jews - many of whom still have blood links to the 20,000-strong remnant in the homeland of what was a community of 100,000 in 1979, before the fall of the Shah - are comfortable with the sudden, albeit largely welcomed, burst of visibility that attended the election.
In an interview conducted shortly after his induction, Delshad told The Report that Americans, for instance, still often fail to distinguish between the Holocaust-denying president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his fellow rulers in Iran and the Persian-Americans who either fled that regime or settled here because they had been educated in the United States and admired the country and the opportunities it presented. In fact, the Nazarians say, many Americans confuse Persians with Arabs, often categorizing all Middle Easterners as suspect. Others fail to distinguish among Persian Muslims, Armenians, members of the Bahai faith and Jews, each with distinctive characteristics, histories, sympathies and challenges.
Matters became especially touchy, Delshad recounts, when, during the March election, City Hall distributed election ballots with translations in Farsi, the Iranian national language. The switchboard lit up with residents, Persian and non-Persian, all outraged. The Persians were affronted by the implication that those of them willing to vote couldn't understand English. Non-Persians were appalled by so intimidating a display of a foreign language - and especially one that appeared distinctly Arabic. The decision to print the ballots in Farsi was taken unilaterally by city clerk Byron Pope, based, he claims, on municipal bylaws that mandate a translation when more than 5 percent of the population speaks a language other than English. Delshad told The Report that he intends to have the city council review this bylaw.
"I was somewhat surprised at some of the emotion that emerged during the campaign," observes Los Angeles Jewish Federation Council President John Fishel. During his 15-year tenure in Los Angeles, Fishel says he has made many personal inroads into a community he describes as "fascinating." But he says has also discerned "a very strong desire among some Jewish Persians, even today, to remain segregated. That dynamic tension is felt in their own community even within the third generation. Efforts to assimilate them into the wider Jewish community weren't always successful."
Like so many immigrants, they escaped from oppression and discrimination in their community of origin - only to face them again, in different forms, in their adopted countries.
In Iran, Jews were viewed as outsiders, and under some Islamic regimes, as profoundly unclean. During the reign of the Pahlavi regime, Jews in Iran prospered and grew wealthy and well educated. But before then, and since, their Muslim neighbors have sometimes stigmatized them as virtual untouchables.
Sharona, for instance, recalls her shock upon learning that in Iran, when it rained, Persian Jews were expected to remain indoors: Rain was believed to transmit the contaminant nature of Jews and infect others. "The word they used," she says, "was najes, which translates as filthy, disgusting."
This is the same word, in fact, used in 2004 by Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani to describe Israel when he declared, as reported by the Paris-based Iranian journalist Safa Haeri in the on-line Asia Times, that Iran was "not willing to claim the money [Israel] owes us from before the [Islamic] Revolution [of 1979], because we consider that money to also be najes."
In America, Delshad tells The Report, "I had to convince people I had no interest in taking over Beverly Hills, or in trying to change it." But not everyone has been convinced. Ethnic slurs and racial insults remain common, Sharona Nazarian insists, while her cousins, in their 20s and early 30s, nod in affirmation. "We've all had to deal with this," she says.
The integration within the veteran Jewish community, was also not easy, and Delshad's election has also exposed other seismic shifts within the local plate tectonics. Mounting stresses are increasingly discernable along the fault lines separating Persian Jews from the town's 12,000 more established, largely Ashkenazi, Jewish residents.
For a long time, says Rabbi David Wolpe, senior rabbi at Sinai Temple, where Persians make up 45 percent of the congregation, the wider Jewish community responded with intolerance, ignorance, envy and even xenophobia. Veteran congregants complained about the sudden proliferation of Farsi in the pews. They expressed concerns over possible liturgical challenges and the adoption of religious practices imported from Iran. Some lamented the reluctance of Persians to pay dues. Others complained that the Persians were taking over.
Attempting to maintain peace, Wolpe would tell his congregants, "All I see is Jews." But as tensions mounted, Wolpe could no longer ignore them. Four years ago, in a sermon that congregants still talk about, he thundered against the racism directed against the Persians by some Ashkenazim and he validated Persian concerns that their families do not suffer the fragmentation suffered by Jewish-American families. And at the same time, he admonished the Persians for speaking Farsi at shul, and thus excluding others.
"You are not allowed to be part of this synagogue if you want to remain insular," he declared. "If you don't want your children to one day marry our children, you have no place here."
Through extensive talks and even day-long retreats, the community decided that Sinai Temple would remain an Ashkenazi synagogue in terms of clergy, rites, music, and other traditions, and Persian congregants would no longer speak Farsi in the synagogue. Non-Persians, meanwhile, agreed to stop denigrating Persians, especially in front of their children, who would be expected to interact and socialize in and out of school, especially among those families who attend the Akiba Academy day school.
Since then the communities have made, says Wolpe, "remarkable" progress. "I think there's a good feeling about the way the two communities have come together. The cultures clearly have differences, but whereas once they were an irritant, people now see these differences as an opportunity. I have many non-Persians who are beginning to understand Persian culture... and Persians who are anxious to integrate into American Judaism, while at the same time not sacrificing that which was part of their unique legacy."
But despite these noteworthy accommodations and common efforts and achievements, each group continues to regard the other with ambivalence - and sometimes with outright alarm. The Persians are often reluctant, says Fishel, to adopt American values and family structures whole cloth.
The Persian community, confirms Jack Nazarian, a 53-year-old real estate developer not directly related to Sharona, "wants familial proximity so they can transmit centuries-earned values to their young. They want a stable, more conservative community. They are not into breaking the barriers."
"It's no secret," said one long-time Jewish resident and business-owner, who like several non-Persians interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity "that many of us [in Beverly Hills] feel we have become aliens in our own back yards. The fact that these people are Jewish merely doubles our horror and embarrassment."
Counters developer Jack Nazarian, "As any demographic group grows in a particular neighborhood the people reduced in percentage typically express unease. These are just people who want to live near each other. They're not an army!"
Not a few Persian Jews, however, have chosen to bypass the process of integration, creating no fewer than 10 synagogues of their own. One of the most prominent is the Nessah Cultural Center in Beverly Hills, which attracts 700 people on a typical Shabbat.
Indeed, Persian Jews in Los Angeles, according to the new Encyclopedia Judaica, have established over 40 organizations, six magazines and a TV station and have become increasingly active in more established Jewish organizations, including Hadassah, B'nai B'rith, AIPAC and, of course, the Jewish Federation Council.
Persian children, meanwhile, represent key constituencies within the more prominent, and frequently expensive, Jewish schools. Many well-off Persians send their children to the elementary and middle schools on the Stephen S. Wise campus in Bel Air, the Conservative Sephardic Temple Tifereth Talmud Torah and to Valley Beth Shalom in the San Fernando Valley. Large numbers also attend the Stephen S. Wise-affiliated Milken Community High School, the modern Orthodox Shalhevet High School, and, among the most observant, the Yeshiva University of Los Angeles. At ritzy Beverly Hills High School, Persian Jews comprise about 20 percent of the student body.
Integration at these schools remains an ongoing process and challenge. While no parents or school officials would speak with The Report about the process, it is well-known that while some children do mix socially, the children, like their parents, maintain largely separate social worlds outside of school.
The separation often continues through college. Sometimes dissuaded by their elders from leaving home to attend college, many Persian-Jewish students continue to express a historic preference for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California (USC). UCLA Hillel director Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller told The Report that Persians now comprise nearly a third of the university's 3,000-strong Jewish component, and constitute the largest group of Jews in the university's prestigious medical school. "As immigrants," he observes, "they tend to be more competitive than American-born Jewish students. The Asians are outstanding in this regard, and the [American-born] Persians are in the same league."
Seidler-Feller notes that UCLA Hillel helped facilitate the integration of the first generation of post-Shah Persian-Jewish students, in the 1980s, by encouraging them to create a parallel "Persian Hillel." He says he is particularly gratified that the children of those students recently created a new "Persian American Jewish Organization."
He believes this reflects their newfound willingness "to navigate between their Persian and American heritages, and to celebrate their multiplicity of identity."
Access to high-ranking universities and a shared urge to excel has created a preponderance of doctors, engineers, high-level businessmen and other professionals. Eighty-five percent of Persian Jews are self-employed, with those who did not arrive in Los Angeles with advanced degrees often busying themselves in the city's downtown jewelry and textile districts. Others started businesses in the Westwood commercial district bordering UCLA and known as Little Tehran, with still others active in sales, technology and administrative support services.
The result of all this effort is an unusually wealthy community, certainly one of the most prosperous and successful immigrant groups ever to come to America. This is, in fact, sometimes a point of contention, both within the Jewish community. Persian Jews have what some members of Sharona Nazarian's family tell me is a not an entirely undeserved reputation for material extravagance. This, believes Yehuda Younessian, a cousin to the Nazarian family, has generated widespread envy.
Many older Persians, some of them among the wealthiest Jews in Southern California, avoid ostentation. This is believed to be a holdover from their lives in Iran, where Jews tried not to inspire envy. Younger Persians, however, do not often share their elders' reticence.
"We drive big cars, we build big homes," Younessian tells The Report. "There is a lot of pressure in the community - even an obligation - to perform [materially and financially]."
"This stuff," observes Houman Sarshar, who edited the book, "Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews" (Jewish Publication Society of America, 2002), "has a lot to do with the dynamics of a community that for the first time in a very long time feels the permission to indulge in their success. There is a sense," he says, "that they don't need to be held back by previous restraints."
This also applies to the community's support for Israel. "The Persian Jews are extraordinary," says Ehud Danoch, Israel's consul general in Los Angeles. "They don't just talk the talk, they walk the walk." Wolpe says that during the second intifada, his synagogue raised $4.5 million in a single morning, $3 million from Persian congregants. Danoch recounts that during the Second Lebanon War, the Iranian Jewish Federation, an affiliate of the Jewish Federation Council, held a fundraiser that brought in close to $5 million.
It may take a while, yet, before the acceptance that seems to have taken hold at Sinai and other Jewish institutions like the federation, is replicated in Beverly Hills. The differences in culture, as Wolpe says, still exist. And some of them remain grating.
One of these is the recent proliferation of what many call Persian Palaces. These are garishly ornate "McMansions," which some regard as architectural obscenities - oversized, two-story box mansions built to accommodate the social lives of extended families, but not necessarily the tastes of the veteran community.
The garishly ornate "McMansions" are usually erected over the ruins of demolished Spanish Colonial or other traditionally designed homes, often on lots far too small to sustain them. Massive two-story, flat-front, marble-laded manors, adorned with Romanesque columns, bronze statuary and wrought-iron gates, these slapdash, big-box constructs are supposedly built to accommodate extended families, many of which congregate for late Sabbath dinners and, over the course of the weekend, frequent and spirited partying. A particularly expansive concentration of such homes can be seen on Loma Vista Drive, unofficially known to residents as "Persian Hill."
The city of Beverly Hills certainly benefits from property tax increases levied when a more modest home is razed and a multi-million dollar manse takes its place. But veteran residents have complained bitterly about what they characterize as unwarranted changes in the neighborhood's character. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times actually likened some of these new homes to push-up bras - "in your face, boastful, obtrusive, even vaguely obscene."
These homes also reinforce the impression that their owners have grabbed their slice of the American Dream... and then some. Beverly Hills, with its gated estates, pink hotels and swank shopping emporiums, has never been synonymous with restraint. But in 2005, the town passed ordinances designed to rein in some of the more egregious architectural excesses associated with these buildings. Delshad had a hand in these, and is proud to have served, he says, as a "bridge between the communities."
Other bridges have yet to be built. The most important, believes Wolpe, will provide a middle ground between the Persian-Jewish determination to retain family cohesion and cultural traditions, and those American Ashkenazim as yet unable to fathom the extent of the much needed shot in the arm this community has provided.
"America does not have a good track record with preserving the cultural identity of immigrants," says Wolpe. "The tide tends to wash down most cultural differences. I don't know, in two or three generations, if you'll be able to tell the difference between a Jew who came from Poland and which one came from Iran. I have no doubt, though, that future generations will be influenced by each other and, I hope, elevated."
Back at the Nazarians, prospects for the future do not seem at all foreboding.
"Our ties to the culture are going to dilute," suggests Sharona's brother, Shervin Rashti, 30. But Sharona herself anticipates less dilution and more reinforcement - of the shared ties and values of both communities. "While it is important for my children to value family and their Jewish traditions," she says, "I am very confident and hopeful that our communities, Persian and mainstream, will be able to incorporate the positive attributes for one another."
First, We Take City Hall
Sheli Teitelbaum
In retrospect, maybe Jimmy Jamshid Delshad should go by the name Johnny.
Sixty-six years ago, in the Persian city of Shiraz, his parents named him Jamshid. But when U.S. immigration officials asked him if he wanted to change his name when he became a citizen in his 20s, he decided to make Jamshid his middle name, and to adopt Jimmy as his first name, the nickname his father gave him, and, as he said in one of several telephone interviews, the one he thought he shared with Tarzan's son (unaware, apparently, that Tarzan's son was called John).
Names aside, Delshad has now been in the United States for most of five decades and despite his distinctive Persian accent, he says he likes to think of himself as being "as American as apple pie."
Delshad immigrated with his family several decades before the Shah of Iran fell in 1979. At the age of 19, he attended California State University, Northridge, and supported himself performing Persian music with his two brothers at bar mitzvah parties and weddings. After receiving a degree in electrical engineering, he worked for the computer company Ampex, which sponsored his application for citizenship. Learning the ropes at Ampex gave Delshad the savvy he needed to start his own computer company. Once that took off, Delshad lost little time segueing into Jewish communal, and later municipal, affairs.
His love affair with Beverly Hills, he told The Report, began early, after marrying Lonnie, nee Ilana Gerstein, the daughter of Chicagoans who emigrated to Palestine in 1946, built a two-story American-style bungalow in Kfar Vitkin, and returned to the U.S. in 1951. They settled in Beverlywood, an affluent neighborhood that would now be described as "Beverly Hills adjacent." They finally crossed over into Beverly Hills proper 20 years ago, in time for their own children to attend the acclaimed Beverly Hills High School. Delshad says he thought of Beverly Hills as "very exciting, yet very safe," and quite the ideal place to raise his family.
The town had already attracted a sizeable Persian-Jewish population by then, says Delshad. At the time, Persians accounted for about a quarter of the membership of Sinai Temple, which he joined, he insists, because of, and not despite, its Ashkenazi character. The main drawing card for many, he notes, was the synagogue's schools. "Persians have never been as Orthodox as they have sometimes been made out to be," he says. "They drive to temple, and feel much more at home in Conservative congregations."
Delshad also saw synagogue membership as a means to foster his and his community's integration into the wider Jewish community. He became the first Persian, for instance, to join the synagogue's Men's Club, and in 1999, served two consecutive terms as synagogue president. He helped spearhead the effort there to overcome the gaping rift between Persian and non-Persian congregants.
"I tried to educate both communities," he told The Report. He encouraged the Persians, for instance, to speak English at shul, while imploring others not to take offense when they did not. "The Persians were not trying to be exclusionary. They didn't want to seem to each other to be showing off in English."
Delshad used the communications and navigational skills he honed at Sinai to win a seat on the Beverly Hills City Council. At his swearing in ceremony to the City Council, for instance, he arranged to be sworn in by local resident Max Webb, who survived five years in Nazi death camps only to "make a fabulous life for himself here, and to become a mega-philanthropist." The offer to Webb, Delshad says was not just an effort to include the non-Persian Jewish community in his celebrations. "I intended this as a direct message to Iran," he says, referring to the Holocaust denial currently so prominent in Iran.
He continues to discuss his plans as mayor of this well-known city. "People the world over like to think of Beverly Hills as a center of luxury and glitz," he says. "But we share the same problems as every other city. We have to fill potholes in the road, we have to keep traffic moving, and we have to spend half our budget on police, security and firefighting. But even more importantly, there are a lot of people here who live in apartments and are not doing nearly as well as some of their neighbors. We have to address their needs, too."
In 1999, after stepping down as Sinai Temple President, Delshad visited Ariel, the so-called capital of the northern West Bank. Impressed with Ariel's wireless routers that connect schools, libraries and other institutions and the use of videocams for security purposes, Delshad, who used to tweak hard drives to increase capacity at Ampex, was, he says, "inspired" to promote efforts to transform Beverly Hills into a "smart city," too.
As one of his first acts as mayor, Delshad presented the keys of the city to Iran's queen in exile, Farah Pahlavi, now 70 and an icon both in Beverly Hills, where she lives, and elsewhere in the Iranian Diaspora. This presented an opportunity to rub shoulders with many non-Jewish Persians who, he insists, not only do not share the Iranian regime's enmity toward Jews, but also are inordinately proud that a fellow Iranian has become mayor of so prominent an American city.