How a Jewish reporter got a visa for Tehran

Reporter Larry Cohler-Esses lived in Iran and taught English before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. However, he wasn’t allowed back into the country until just recently, making him the first reporter from a Jewish-American outlet allowed into the country since 1979, when the Shah was overturned and replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini.

His most recent trip is to report on attitudes toward Jews and Israel for The Forward, a New York paper serving Jewish readers. He was surprised by what he found. 

“There is no freedom of the press in Iran, for sure,” says Cohler-Esses, but he added that something may be happening following the election of a reformist president and, now, the pending lifting of sanctions: “Freedom of tongue, people are more willing to speak out and surprisingly willing to attach their names to their criticisms.”

On the streets, he found a fascination and curiosity with America, and an overwhelming sense that Iranian citizens were mostly concerned with the sanctions and “issues of survival and work, and a great hunger to reconnect with the world,” he says, but “if you talk to them about their interest in destroying or annihilating the state of Israel, they draw a blank.”

He was also given the opportunity to talk with three members of the religious hierarchy. And found that two of them didn’t want to destroy Israel, though there were objections to Israel’s policies. What he found, says Cohler-Esses was, “dissent and debate.”

The resulting article was also published in Hebrew in Israel, where the reaction was striking. “People were thunderstruck,” says Cohler-Esses. “The article basically says, ‘hey Iran is a country where people including government officials and senior members of the religious hierarchy, not to mention average citizens have varying opinions.” Perhaps it shouldn’t be shocking,  but it was, he says. “I think it’s a product of the demonization we’ve had of Iran, where we’ve started to think of it as a monolith and it’s not.”

This story was based on an interview on the PRI radio show To The Point, from KCRW in Los Angeles.