Daniella Farah

Daniella is the Samuel W. and Goldye Marian Spain Postdoctoral Fellow for the Program in Jewish Studies at Rice. She specializes in the cultural and social histories of the Jews of the twentieth-century Middle East, with a specific focus on Iran and Turkey. Her dissertation, for which she conducted archival research in Israel, France, and the United States, examines Iran’s Jewish communities between the mid-1940s and the early 1980s through the prisms of education, the Jewish press, national belonging, and assimilation.

Daniella works in many language traditions, including Persian, Judeo-Persian, Hebrew, French, and English. In her doctoral dissertation, Daniella demonstrates how Jews integrated into the broader non-Jewish Iranian polity and made claims of belonging to the burgeoning nation-state.

Daniella is also a recipient of the 2021 New Voices in Jewish Studies Award at Columbia and Fordham Universities. Her article, “‘The school is the link between the Jewish community and the surrounding milieu’: Education and the Jews of Iran from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s,” was published in 2021 in the Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.