Rebuilding in Tehrangeles

"Rebuilding in Tehrangeles" features Jasmine Lawi, a memoirist and author of Persian Tea. In the film, Jasmine describes her family’s arrival in Los Angeles from Tehran after the 1978-1979 Revolution and her childhood experiences of adapting to life in California while also maintaining a connection to her Iranian Jewish heritage and identity. Through the lens of Jasmine's family, the film introduces an intimate portrait of the communal efforts of Persian Jews in Los Angeles to navigate the dilemmas and opportunities of life in the United States, focusing on the ways people adapt, preserve, and hybridize culture and identity across the generations.

As part of a lesson from Project Mosaics, this film provides students with a case study of one migrant community’s efforts to rebuild and establish itself in a state of diaspora. Students will watch this film to understand the experiences of Iranian Jews in Los Angeles while considering the concepts of cultural hybridity, arrival experiences, uprootedness, in-between-ness, and intra-Jewish diversity and tensions. After screening the film, students will engage in a whole class discussion with a focus on questions from the handout as they address the theme of cultural hybridity, the particularities of the Iranian Jewish post-revolutionary arrival story in Los Angeles, and the notion of uprootedness. Students may also choose to share general impressions, allowing them to work through confusion, newness, or insights and observations that were not anticipated by the provided questions.

In addition to screening the film, students will engage in a close reading of a secondary source and a discussion focused on an excerpt from a memoir by a Los Angeles-based Jewish writer. The lesson culminates with students mapping out and creating an infographic that calls attention to a neighborhood or district that is of cultural importance to one of the communities to which they belong.