fbpx
Category

Gina Nahai

What it’s like to be an Iranian Jew

Time was, you could claim to be a patriotic Iranian, a supporter of Israel and a lover of the United States all at once and be believed by most Iranians.

Marriage: What’s in a promise?

The week after my parents’ wedding, at the swanky Officers’ Club in downtown Tehran, another Jewish couple were married in the same ballroom, by the same rabbi, and before many of the same invitees.

The Jew, the Copt and the Yazidi

I’ll get to those three in a minute but first, let me tell you what a Muslim friend said to me a couple of months ago.

From Tehran to Tel Aviv

So there we were, two Israelis, an Iranian Jew and an Iranian Muslim, all writers, sitting on a stage at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman building.

Coming to terms with ‘need’ this Yom Kippur

It’s not that I’m greedy and want too much, there’s just a whole lot out there that I need, for myself and my family and even for the dog, Gus, that my kids brought home last year because they needed a dog, so they rescued him from the animal shelter in Van Nuys, for $650, and when I asked why they had to pay so much money for a rescue dog, they said this one was especially cute and the shelter auctioned him and we had to outbid everyone else because we felt Gus needed to be ours.

Hallowed ground

In the student lounge behind the North Campus cafeteria at UCLA, the Romanian woman with frosted hair and one too many boyfriends smoked red Marlboros and spun tall tales about how her mother had walked, barefoot and pregnant, across a frozen continent and away from Nicolae Ceausescu’s killers to freedom in America.

What lies beneath

I don’t mean to alarm the global scientific community, but I feel I have an obligation, in these nascent days of 2014, to share a potentially disturbing finding I came upon at the end of last year.

Counting almonds

Turns out, I have a natural handicap when it comes to eating like normal people. My daughter discovered this when she was in elementary school and forever engaged in a war of attrition over food.

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.