On 17 September 2026, the Munich Research Centre for Jewish-Arabic Cultures in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Munich hosted a reading and discussion with the Iranian-American writer, poet and journalist ROYA HAKAKIAN. The evening was opened by Sapir von Abel, Curator of Education at the Jewish Museum Munich, followed by Prof. Ronny Vollandt, Director of the Munich Research Centre for Jewish-Arabic Cultures and Professor of Judaic Studies at LMU Munich, and Tabea Chaharlangi, a student at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, who introduced the audience to Hakakian’s oeuvre. The discussion was moderated by Dr. Sarah Kiyanrad, a scholar of Iranian Studies, poet and translator.
Reading from her memoir Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, Hakakian reflected on her childhood in Tehran, migration, memory, and her later development as a writer in the United States. Her recollections repeatedly returned to the closeness and interconnection of Jewish and non-Jewish lives, but also to boundaries that remained present within this framework.
The discussion moved between different periods of Hakakian’s biography: her family’s decision to flee Iran after the Revolution, the experience of migration and the continuing attachment of Iranian émigrés to the country they had left, as well as communicating her experience to the American audience. Hakakian also addressed the ruptures in personal and intellectual relationships after 7 October 2023, the 2026 Iran massacre, and the sense of isolation that followed.
These themes also relate to questions addressed in the Research Centre’s work on Jewish life in the Middle East. While migration, rupture and loss formed an important part of Hakakian’s narrative, her reflections placed them within a longer history of everyday proximity and shared social and cultural experience in a religiously diverse society. At the same time, they made visible the distinctions and asymmetries that persisted within these shared social worlds.
