Listen to award-winning journalist, author, and activist Homa Sarshar as she reflects on her early life in pre-revolutionary Iran and her decades of work documenting the Iranian community in Los Angeles.

Megan Vahdat: I’m Megan Vahdat, and this is “Persian Perspectives Today,” a podcast that explores the viewpoints of Iranian leaders in arts, science, education and politics in the UCLA community and beyond. Today, I’m joined by Homa Sarshar, an award-winning journalist, author and one of the most influential voices of the Iranian diaspora. Over her five decade-long career, Homa Sarshar has written six books, edited nine major volumes and conducted more than 3000 interviews across print, radio and television. Her book, “Shaban Jafari,” became the number one best-selling Persian title in Iran and abroad in 2003. She helped co-found one of the earliest daily AM radio broadcasts for the Iranian immigrant community and went on to become a leading radio host and producer in the U.S. Her work preserving Iranian heritage includes major oral history and documentary projects, several of which have been acquired by the Library of Congress. Beyond her media career, she is widely recognized for her decades of women’s rights activism, community leadership and cultural preservation. Thank you so much for joining us today, Mrs. Sarshar.

Homa Sarshar: Thank you very much for inviting me, and I’m very glad to see a young Iranian journalist or student of journalism in front of me. This makes my heart warm to see younger Iranians, a younger generation that is interested in journalism and we need more Iranians in this field.

MV: Thank you so much. It’s such an honor to have such an incredible figure in journalism here and to showcase your voice with our Iranian community, especially because for many of us at UCLA, our perceptions of Iran are shaped by what we see on the news: the desperate struggles of women for freedom to be seen, to dress how they choose and to enjoy even the most basic liberties denied to them today.

And we now know the realities of religious persecution and the silencing of the press, but your early life unfolded in a very different pre-revolutionary Iran. You were one of the first Iranian Jewish women journalists at the time, writing for “Kayhan” and appearing on the television screens of so many Iranians. Can you share a little bit about your earliest memories of your childhood in Iran before the revolution? Did you experience any hatred or bigotry as a young child?

HS: We had a great time, a great childhood with the family, with neighbors very close, nobody would ask, “What is your religion?” Nobody would care what your religion was. In our street, where we were living, we had Muslims, we had Zoroastrians, we had Christian Armenians, Syrians and Jews living together very peacefully and accepting each other, although the tradition would have inclined us to be separate from them, but it was not the case.

Maybe the first time that I felt kind of being different or kind of being a minority was at the university, actually, at the University of Tehran. I was studying French literature and at the university, by the time that I reached the university, it was like the predicate before the revolution. So the movement, the Islamic movement, and the students were becoming more Muslim, and they even built a mosque inside the university, which was actually supposed to be secular but they started that because there were a lot of requests from the clergy to have a mosque in the university. And we saw, in the middle of the day, at 12, noon, students go to mosque for prayers, noon prayers. Also, it started slowly, we saw girls, student girls wearing, like a small shawl, but not a hijab. But it was, now that I look back and I feel that it was the beginning of what’s happened.

MV: The underpinnings of a change …

HS: The change we would know, and it started with some unrest at the universities and stuff like this. At the same time that I was at the university, I also started working in a new magazine that was supposed to be out a couple of months when I was hired. It was not out yet. It was a very brand new women’s newspaper magazine, and it was called Zan-e-Ruz, “Woman of the Day.” And this was a magazine that made history by having the most readers and also being very inclined to the Western culture and Western look at women. And it was also the start of a movement by women activists to demand for the right and to want the right of voting, the right of getting a divorce without …

MV: And this is happening against the backdrop of an Iran that is changing so much spiritually, the other direction.

HS: Yes, it was two different campaigns, different campaigns, going very parallel to each other, and you had to just choose one. I was very adamant to be on the progressive side, and we were, me and my colleagues at the time that I became a journalist, I was hired as a translator from French to Persian. And also, I got my bachelor’s degree in French literature. And at the time, and still, I think still, is going, the copyright law was not practiced in Iran because, and in no third, fourth country, because they thought that if they put this law in practice, then we won’t have access to Western books, Western literature, Western life. So we would easily buy a French magazine and start to translate the article and put it in Persian in our magazines, the Zan-e-Ruz magazine. I started with that, and after a year or so, my editor in chief asked me to go do some interviews. And I told him that I don’t know how to do it. He said, “So you learn it. You go and ask questions and you learn it.” So I became a journalist, not by education, but by practice, and I loved it.

MV: And that’s interesting, because we at UCLA have a very different college system, where we go into college and we don’t necessarily know which career we’re going to pursue. We have to take courses that are outside of our major and interests. But from what I understand in Iran, as a high school student, you take an entrance exam for the field that you want to pursue.

HS: We called it the “konkur.” And at the time that I passed the konkur to enter the university, I was accepted because there were 80,000 people, 80,000 students that wanted to go study at a university that would accept only 10,000. It was a competition, and your choice was very limited. At that time, there was no journalism department at Tehran University. So we went to literature. I chose French literature because I knew if I chose the French literature department, I would be accepted, because there were not too many French-speaking applicants at the time.

My guess was correct, because I was accepted there, and I finished the literature department, and then I got an offer to go and do the translation, because I knew two languages. And by the time that I started to do that, and the day that my editor in chief asked me to go for an interview, I fell in love with journalism, and the rest is history, because I have been doing this for almost 50 years now, 55 years.

MV: As you entered journalism, was it common for women to pursue ambitious, career-oriented paths, or was there more of an emphasis, like we see in modern Iranian culture, to assume the stereotypical role of a mother and a homemaker?

HS: There was a situation in the country, or an era in the country where doors had been open to women who wanted to have a career. We had women who worked in the lower class, like maids in the house, housekeepers. Some of the middle class, they would go and be like a secretary in the doctor’s office or in a government institution, but not specifically in areas like journalism or art or this kind ofThese kinds of fields, avenues. But it was a start. It was a start for women to go to different fields also, and in the media. And then we had Iranian radio and television, women in radio and television, and there were also a lot, they were recruiting a lot of women for TV as a host of the programs or producers, and this kind of job that was not that much women-oriented before.

But these are all the result of the decade of flourishing Iran, and we were just, we were happy that we had all these opportunities and at the same time we passed a law that allowed women to vote. And we had our happiness I can say, or the relief that we could also vote, and everything was going perfectly and maybe a little bit too quickly. This is what, when people are just looking back to what happened in Iran and what was the reason for an Islamic revolution to happen, is that the development and the experiences and the openness for accepting everything, for the community, for women, for minorities, and everything happened very quickly. Normally, history should take its pace, and if you go slowly or go too quickly, something would happen.

MV: It’s so hard to imagine that in your lifetime, there was a period of such advancement for the rights of women. You mentioned the ability to get a divorce, the ability to vote during that time. A time of advocacy, a time where you, as an Iranian Jewish woman, usurped a major cultural role and garnered so much respect for the significance of your career.

And so soon, there is a change in governmental order, there is a change in religious ideology to more of a, perhaps, an extreme. Did you as a young child foresee that change? You mentioned that in college that you started to see the early signs of it. But as a young child, could you ever have anticipated the trajectory of the country?

HS: Never, never. As I said, we had a very happy childhood. In my generation, we were just playing with each other. We’re going to each other’s house. We were, just, we were friends, and we were neighbors, very close to each other, and as I told you, I was brought up with no sense of belonging to minority, or no sense of any antisemitism, as they said these days, or anti-Jewish sentiment. I have heard from my grandfather or grandma or my father-in-law that when they grew up, not in Tehran, per se, but in other cities of Iran, they would they would feel something, and they would hear something, some notice about that they were a minority and they were just, there is no word for it in English. I don’t know how to translate it, they were considered as “najis” or dirty. But not my generation, not my generation.

MV: And I’m also curious, because a large job of a journalist, especially one who focuses on politics, is to keep the government in check, and media suppression is now a large topic of contestation, not only in Iran, but globally. How did you feel reporting in a pre-revolutionary Iran? Were you free? Were there subjects you had to avoid even then?

HS: Even then, there was also censorship, but it was not that much, and some of my colleagues were also sent to jail because they were just protesting and they were just writing stuff that they were not supposed to write.

MV: And what were those?

HS: And those were, if you criticize or writing critics about the Shah and about his government, that was not allowed. So everybody knew that, everybody knew the red line. Most of the people wouldn’t pass that red line and would stay inside it. But still there were, there were a group of journalists and writers and intellectuals, poets or artists, they were opposed to the regime, to the king and the kingdom. But not to the point that they’re doing now, because if you look at the statistics that these days are out, in no country, except in China and Russia, maybe, are there more media people, journalists, writers and intellectuals who are victims of a totalitarian regime, as in Iran.

In Iran, the number of journalists and media people that have been executed, that have been hanged, that have been jailed, has surpassed the numbers of other countries. These are the three worst countries, actually I can also put Saudi Arabia by this, four of these countries that are still treating journalists and media people very, very harshly.

MV: Can you share a little bit about your first experiences with antisemitism at the turn of the revolution and how that impacted you?

HS: Well, I was fired, how about that? And the reason I was fired was because I was a woman and a Jew. In a matter of a week, I was fired from Kayhan. I forgot to tell you that I went from Zan-e-Ruz magazine, the women’s magazine, to a daily newspaper called Kayhan, which was the most prominent one in Iran. And I was working in the Department of Family Affairs, and I would write articles on that and columns on that in the newspaper. Meanwhile, I was also invited to have a show on NIR TV, National Iranian Radio and Television, which ended up being a two-day per week show. And the name was Home, Char Deevari which means “home.” Then at the wake of the revolution, maybe three to three months before that, I got fired from my newspaper, Kayhan newspaper, and also from NIR TV. My show was stopped, and the reason that they gave me was because I was Jewish and a woman. They were firing all the minorities, including Jews, Christians, Bahais, mostly Zoroastrians, and they would keep only Muslims. Mostly men, and there were also women, Muslim women working and for whatever they said, quote, unquote, to prevent the revolution. And they were very wrong, very wrong, because none of these practices that they did would help the revolution to not to happen. So that was the most heartbreaking, antisemitic, or anti-Jewish or anti-woman sentiment that I felt at that time.

They didn’t have any reason for it. They said, “We have an order.” The order coming from where? Nobody would talk about it, nobody would say anything. I assumed that they were doing this to make the clergy happy, who were not happy with women working and being in the society, they were not happy with minorities working. So they wanted to do that to appease them, to give them a reason not to do the revolution, not to go forward with their demonstration and all this, but it didn’t help, and the revolution happened. So my husband was also fired from his position at the Department of Water and Power in Iran.

So in a matter of a month, both of us were fired from our position and from our work and our job. So we felt something was coming. At the school, my son’s school closed as well as other schools. They closed the schools because they wanted to just make it a little bit more quiet or prevent any other demonstration or unrest in the city and in the country. And we used that because we sensed something was coming. They said it would be a short closing of the schools, for a month or so. So we used that to get out of the country, and to wait to see what happened. And when the revolution happened, we were not in the country, we were out. We were lucky that we could feel what was going on.

MV: You could sense what a lot of Iranians, unfortunately, who still had the last underpinning of hope could not. How is that news conveyed to you that you were fired? You were told explicitly, you are Jewish. You cannot work here due to an order?

HS: It was not the verbatim of what my editor told me, my editor told me that a Jewish woman is not allowed to translate articles about Khomeini because this article becomes “najis,” it means “impure,” so just by touching or by translating the article. He was so, I mean, they were so irrational on what they were telling us and the reaction that they had, everything was irrational. There was a mass hysteria. And when mass hysteria happens, all the social researchers and social people would say that when a mass hysteria happens in the country, it’s very, very hard to prevent it. So normally, when this happens, the revolution will follow. So I saw how my friends changed, I saw how my colleagues changed, and I saw that they were just giving up a government or a leadership that had some nuances of problems that could be solved peacefully, could be solved gradually. They underestimated that. And they said, “The Shah must go, the Shah must go, and we’re going to choose this leader, Khomeini.”

And I was the one that was talking to my colleagues, because for 60 days, there were strikes in the media and newspapers and everything. We would sit down and not work, and we were just chatting with each other, what’s going on. Some of my friends, some of my colleagues, they said, “Listen, we get rid of the Shah and then getting rid of the clergy is much easier.” So the next step after Khomeini comes in Iran was to put the clergy and the religious people and the fanatic people aside, because he said that he’s going to go back to Ghom, which he didn’t.

Because I was a very non religious person, a very, very secular person myself, I didn’t like the old kind of religion. I was not a practicing Jew. And I knew wherever you have a fanaticism in your religion or in your belief, this is not good. So I said, “I am not going to change this actual government with a religious government, with a religious leader, I can live under the Shah. and be happy, do my work, have some criticism, and have some point to get across. But I don’t want to leave one day under a religious government.” This is why we left the country before the revolution.

MV: I think it’s hard for us to imagine the scale of the antisemitism, even for you who was not a practicing Jew, you describe yourself as secular, to experience and you mentioned earlier this concept of najis. Can you explain that in a little bit more detail to our non-Iranian audiences, who may not be familiar with that term and its connotation?

HS: Yeah, it’s people from other religions, like even Armenians, Christians and Jews were considered by Muslim as najis, which is a word whose meaning is ‘dirty’ or ‘untouchable.’ The meaning of it is ‘untouchable,’ like the untouchables that are in India. So they would assume that if they touch a person that is either Bahais, Jew or Christian, they would become dirty, and they would need to go take a shower or wash themselves and their hands to take this out of their skin. Because the way that they were talking about it was something that you would feel. Because it was not only by talking about it, but if you drink a glass of tea in their house or in their vicinity, they would just go and wash it and put it aside and not mix it with their own. Exactly and as well as just not believing their existence even as a minority. So life would have been very tough. I could have imagined some people, they would say, “Oh, it’s not a joke. We haven’t had any history, or we haven’t had a historical memory of a revolution in Iran,” because the first revolution, the Constitutional Revolution, was far beyond my generation. Nobody would remember what happened, but that turned the country for the better. But this one, this second one that comes and it was just initiated by a religious leader, and people were following him without knowing what’s going on, what’s going to happen? I said in one of my articles, I wrote it, 35 years ago, I said “People became deaf and blind for in mass numbers.” So this is when, when you don’t want to believe in reality, you don’t want to know what the difference is between a secular government and a non secular religious government and what happens to you?

So sometimes now that people are under a lot of pressure and they’re under a lot of persecution, and this time it’s not only the minorities, but Muslim people living in Iran under the regime, under the Islamic Republic of Iran, they are under a lot more pressure and persecution too. A lot of them have been executed, a lot of them have been hanged. So this is an equal opportunity for everybody else. Actually, I’m being sarcastic.

MV: Unfortunately so … And it was experiences like those that allowed you to predict the trajectory of the country and that prompted you, before the revolution really occurred, to immigrate to the United States. And when you left Iran, did you feel a relief that you now were afforded spiritual freedoms in the U.S., more freedoms as a woman, or was it overshadowed by the pain of leaving your home?

HS: Second on the latter one, I was overshadowed by the pain. I fell into a very deep depression. I felt that I left my country, because when we left, it was a couple of months before the revolution, and we’re still hopeful to go back. So we had our just baggage for a month or two, and we just locked our apartment door and we came out of the country, so I couldn’t accept it until I went back to Iran. Six months after the revolution, I went back to Iran, and I just wanted to see what happened. My husband went back before me, and he came and he said, “There’s no hope, nothing is good.” And I went to just say goodbye, and that was the last time that I was there, maybe three months after the revolution. And it happened at the time that they kept hostages at the American embassy during the crisis. And after that, everything became worse. Everything went down the hill, and I accepted that a revolution happened. I talked to everybody, I wrote about it. We didn’t have any idea how huge and how out of our imagination, a revolution can be.

MV: But at the time that you left, it was very early on in the political changes. You mentioned seeing the underpinnings of that when you and your husband were essentially removed from your jobs because of your identity. So when you came, there were a lot of Iranians here in LA? We have such a large community now, it’s hard to imagine a different version of LA. Can you share a little bit about what that was like when we arrived here?

HS: When we arrived here we heard that there was a community of almost 1000 people, 1000 Iranian, and they were mostly people who immigrated for a better life, or they were just parents of students who were at the university. Most of the students were at UCLA, actually. The first wave of that came here, most of us sent our kids to UCLA, and the number had been adding up as Iranians were arriving in a wave. Actually, they came through different waves. But at the time that we were here, there was nothing Iranian in the city, nothing. No stores, no supermarkets, no, no doctor were Iranian. I don’t know, nobody was Iranian. There were just the families and their kids living here, and they were very different than us, because they had immigrated to the United States way back, maybe 10 years ago, 10 years before we came, or 15 years before I came. And they were settled, and I believe they were also happy to become American, to be “Americanized.” I can say that they were not happy living in Iran. And they were not only Jews or minorities. There were also Muslims who came here. But at the time that we arrived, the whole landscape of the city of Los Angeles changed slowly, slowly, so now this is the home of the most prominent Iranians in the United States, either here or in New York or in Northern California.

These are the three spots that have housed the most Iranian immigrants. There’s a very successful group of Iranians in the young generation who are doing very well. And now you can, you can leave without even speaking English, and go and do whatever it takes. There are doctors, there are engineers, there are lawyers, we have everything now. And we have our own Tehran in Los Angeles, and you know that they call Westwood Tehran-geles. So that shows that …

MV: We have kept our culture alive.

HS: Alive, and also we exist, and we have made ourselves known.

MV: But what stood out to me is you were mentioning you came to the U.S. with this hope that there could be a time where you go back to Iran. I think a lot of Iranians had that same experience of thinking “We can go back,” and that this is only a temporary move. But later on the Iranian hostage crisis occurs. You mentioned the attack on the embassy, and you had a strange experience where in Iran you were mistreated for being an Iranian Jew, you come to the U.S. thinking that you will have the freedoms and acceptance of everybody around you, and then the Iranian hostage crisis unfolds. Did you experience any anti-Iranian sentiment in the U.S.?

HS: Oh, yeah. And I have an article in the classic article that said, “What is going on? We have been a minority back in Iran, and we have become another minority here in the United States. It was a very, very harsh situation. It was a very bad situation. Our kids at school, they were just, they were bullied. They were treated very badly by other students. We were treated badly.

MV: What specifically did you hear?

HS: I mostly heard, “Go back to your home, go back to Iran,” and they wouldn’t even know the name of the country,

MV: How to pronounce it …

HS: “Why don’t you go back to Iran, to your country? Why are you here? What are you doing here? It’s not your home, it’s not your country.” Yeah, it took time. It took patience from our sides, and it took understanding that we are strangers here. We called ourselves guests. We would say we are guests in a host country. And we just slowly but patiently, we just put our steps forward, and we just brought the host community to us, and we just connected well, and we connected correctly.

MV: It must have been difficult to have experienced bigotry related to your identity in Iran and the U.S., and now you have worked so hard to combat that and to highlight through your radio shows, the depth of Iranian culture that transcends politics and the stereotypes about our people. You’ve compiled oral histories, been a proud advocate for Iranian art, authored books, and have helped write, direct and produce 22 documentaries on exiled Iranian writers, poets and artists. Some of these documentaries have been acquired by the Library of Congress. Why was showing that side of Iranian culture so important to you?

HS: It’s because it’s just important because in the future, when they talk about Iranian immigration and Iranians coming to the United States, they would want to know, researchers or people that are interested, they want to know what happened to this community, how this community came to United States and survived and grew and became “Americanized,” but still kept their their identity, and they kept their literature. They kept their art, and they offered this valuable gift that they had to the larger community, which is the host country, which is the United States. So I didn’t want this to be undermined, I didn’t want this to be forgotten.

So that’s why I did the oral history of the immigration people, who immigrated here, do exactly the same thing that you’re doing now with me. So that was the aim of the oral history that we did, and also different conferences, different events, different exhibitions that we put together. So all these came to a point that our host country recognized us. When you hear now that one of the most prominent immigrants that came to the United States are Iranians, it makes you proud.

MV: It does.

HS: I feel happy and I feel proud that whatever we did resulted in a better and a good result.

MV: And we as Iranians derive so much pride from our shared cultural heritage, and it’s something that unifies us, but in recent years, our community has become especially divided among religious, political and social barriers. In your view, what can we do to bridge these divisions that stand as such a stark contrast to the incredible work you’ve been doing promoting our shared heritage and culture?

HS: Because I believe it is not only in the United States, but the world is gearing toward fanaticism, gearing to a world that wants to separate people from each other, and that is reigned by leaders that are autocratics. Our leaders these days are very aggressive, very narrow-minded, I believe. They don’t feel that you can reign and you can lead a country with peace, with acceptance, with compassion for others that are not like you. And in every country of the world that you see now, there is unrest and there is hatred and there is demonstration, and people are fighting each other for their beliefs, for the color of their skin, for the way that they’re living. And this is not good. I wouldn’t even imagine my wildest dream that one day I would witness what is going on in the United States these days. I wouldn’t believe that, but it happens. And sometimes it’s said these are like a curve that goes up and comes down. It’s like a wave, when the whole world becomes very right wing, and then they become very left wing, and they go, and this is the story of humankind. But I think that if leaders, if the governors, or, I mean the government and the countries, the leaders of the country, feel more compassion, feel more acceptance, feel more tolerance for other people, for other countries, for other nations, this won’t happen. I don’t know if I’m going to witness this, the next wave coming, that it is a better wave than what is going on right now. I will be alive or not, but I wish for that, and I hope that this happens.

MV: And a lot of that division within our community and the broader United States, is prompted by the polarization of our media. We want to hear the news that we agree with. And you’re a journalist who has prided yourself on being objective. Sometimes you allude to politics very broadly, but you’ve never specifically stated within a public arena who exactly you’re going to vote for. You’ve never encouraged your listeners to go one way or the other, although you have been opinionated on certain broader respects. Have you received any pushback for this? You’ve had a lot of guests from all different sides of the political spectrum. Is that something you’ve ever dealt with?

HS: Well, yeah, I have raised some eyebrows when I talk about my beliefs or my point of view or my opinion. But I don’t mind, because the eyebrows that go up are from the left or the right, or, I don’t know, from the middle. And I think in every belief or any community, you have pros and cons, and people either love you or hate you, so you are doing something, right, if there’s only people that hate you or the only people that love you, so this something should be wrong. So when you’re in the middle, when you think that you just keep balanced on what you say and what you write, I believe you can also accept people not loving you criticizing you, which is OK, quite OK, because I learned a lot more from my enemies than from my friends. And for that, I miss Walter Cronkite a lot, who was like my mentor. And I think that he was a great journalist, a great media person, and he was standing for right, the right of human beings, for the right of humans to be living in a better world, and whatever he did, he was the best. So I just look up to him very much, and I think that, I hope that this kind of journalist will be more common these days. Unfortunately we don’t see it. As you said, there is a lot of polarization. … I watch Fox, I watch CNN, I watch MSNBC, I watch ABC, I watch every channel. Because I think we should, if you want to decide on something, if you want to think about something, if you want to talk about something, you should know all aspects and all opinions together and then decide for yourself what is right and what is wrong. So if you are just a listener of CNN or MSNBC or Fox, you’re not in the right place.

MV: And through your journalism, you’ve helped amplify a lot of women in our community, especially to your upcoming book about Googoosh that’s coming out.. Can you tell us a little bit about that book in particular and its significance?

HS: It’s actually, it’s my newest book, coming up on Dec. 14, but it’s a translation. After, I don’t know, 55 years, I went back to my original career, which was translating. The writer of the book is Googoosh herself and Tara Dehlavi, a young Iranian woman writer who did a great job. And I loved the book. When I wrote the English one, I said, “This should be also translated in Farsi, in Persian.” And I took the responsibility of doing this, and I fell in love with the book myself for the English one, and I hope that I have done a good service to the book by translating it in Persian. The publisher is Simon Schuster, a very American publisher, that is a very well-known and respected publishing house, and the Persian one is published also by Blue Art company, and I think people in the United States, American people, should know about this diva that we have, because she is unique. She’s the only one that has been on the stage for almost 70 years of her 75 years of life. She has been on the stage since she was a two-year-old child, and she was a child singer and child performer, and she’s still going on. She still can give concerts, and she’s the pride of Iranian art, and people love her, everybody loves her. And she owed to her fan to write her memoirs. So she did it, and I translated it.

MV: Wonderful. I want to turn to the rights of women in Iran in the current political state. During the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi movement, we witnessed periods of hope followed by painful setbacks. You talked today about that kind of emotional roller coaster, the wave, as you described it, of political movements going up and down. You’ve seen it so many times in your career—Iranian women experiencing massive highs and then devastating lows. To finish off today’s interview, do you still have hope for a freer Iran? Do you think our generation will see a free Iran in our lifetimes and return home in the way you once wished you could?

HS: I’m sure it’s going to happen. I’m sure, and I have always said, I’ll always write about it, that Iranian women are the Achilles heel of this government, Islamic Republic government. Iranian women will bring this government down, for sure. I might not be witnessing this, but your generation will do for sure.

MV: What a privilege it’s been to have you on our show and to share your perspective with our larger UCLA community. Thank you so much.

HS: Thank you, azizam.

MV: This episode of Persian perspectives today was brought to you by the Daily Bruin podcast. You can listen to this episode and all other Daily Bruin podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. The audio and transcript of today’s interview are available at dailybruin.com

I’m Megan Vahdat, thank you for listening.