When I visited Orange County in California about 5 years ago for a company wide meeting the local office rented a cheapo van and we went tooling around the various nightspots a few times like the yokels we were. It was surprising to me to see large groups of young people with Middle Eastern features dominating the crowds at many nightclub type venues and judging by their rides and clothing they were obviously from a quite wealthy economic strata.
I was told they were Persians and to (if possible) steer clear of them as they sort of dominated the venues where they congregated and were cliquish did not want you talking to any of the ladies around them. So we didn’t and chose other clubs.
In reading this I was surprised that my assumption that they were Islamic may have been way off base. Are these wealthy Persian communities you see in higher end urban areas mainly Jewish or are there wealthy Islamic Persian communities in these areas as well?
I grew up in Los Angeles. It’s hard to generalize, but most of the people I knew who self identified as “Persian” were jewish. Most of the people who self identified as Iranian were not (typically Christians in my experience but sometimes Muslim). This is not universally true by any means, but generally was the case. I knew many many people in each group. The cliquishness is overstated.
Not in my experience. My mom’s second husband - she’s up to a third now - was from Tehran. They met at SoCal in the 70s. He came from oil money and was getting his masters in engineering there. All the Iranians I ever met with Muslim but very few were practicing.
As Dave Sim once wrote, “Most rich people are rich first and everything else second.”
*A 2012 national telephone survey of a sample of 400 Iranian-Americans, commissioned by the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans and conducted by Zogby Research Services, asked the respondents what their religions were. The responses broke down as follows: Muslim: 31%, atheist/realist/humanist: 11%, agnostic: 8%, Baha’i: 7%, Jewish: 5%, Protestant: 5%, Roman Catholic: 2%, Zoroastrian: 2%, “Other”: 15%, and “No response”: 15%.[10] *
Emphasis added.
That’s for all of the US, but it’s hard to imagine that all (or most) Iranians in LA are Jewish. Rich or otherwise.
I don’t think you can extrapolate from all of the US down to Los Angeles because it’s likely that LA has an inordinate Jewish Iranian population.
I haven’t seen any hard, recent numbers regarding the total population of Iranians in Los Angeles; it ranges wildly from 70,000 to 500,000, and the higher numbers sometimes include all of Southern California, all of California or even the whole US. The consensus on how many Jewish Iranians live in Los Angeles County seems more steady at 30-50,000.
So, according to some data, it is possible that most Iranians in Los Angeles are Jewish, and if not, at least a portion that renders the 5% national average fairly irrelevant if focussing on LA.
To address the gist of the OP- as the article you linked to states, Persians make up about 20% of the entire population of Beverly Hills, so I think that’s a good indicator of the answer, for the LA area at least.
My personal experience has been the same, but what the OP saw was in Orange County, not L.A. (through the rest of the OP generalizes). There’s little reason to conflate the two areas, especially regarding an issue like this.
That’s true, but I was responding mostly to John Mace who was talking specifically about LA, so that’s why I framed it in LA. Plus, the link in the OP that sparked his question was all about LA and Beverly Hills, so it seemed natural to go in that direction.
Jewish people from Iran (and neighboring areas, I could not draw you a border) are, I believe, referred to as Sephardic, as contrastic with Jewish people from European areas, who are Ashkenazik.
They’re (also) still Iranian (or Persian if you prefer) if they live there or come from there.
And I should have noted that it’s hard to imagine that, at 5%, pretty much every Jewish Iranian would have to be living in LA. And that even then, it would not account for the large number of Iranians living in LA.
Sephardim was the name given the Jews expelled from Spain (Seffarad) who settled in then-Ottoman lands and their vicinity, but came to be used to refer to most of those in the MENA region, who adopted the Sephardi ritual forms and shared a more “Middle Eastern”/Mediterranean cultural influence (as opposed to the more Germano-Slavic influences on the Ashkenazim) – but there were large Jewish communities who lived in the Persian lands since even before the dispersion anyway.
Beverly Hills is roughly 1/4 Persian, the vast majority of whom are Persian Jews. Orange County Persians are probably more in line with the national average (~5%).
I interpreted your post to mean that you discounted the idea that most Iranians in LA are Jewish because the national average is only 5%. But I assume from your response I was wrong? In other words, when you said “it’s hard to imagine,” you didn’t mean it dismissively, you meant it more like “I can’t believe it’s not butter?”