Locality, Identity and Community: Jewish Youth in Iran and the United States In this paper, I first present ethnographic data on the contemporary Jewish experience in Tehran, Iran focusing on the constitutive relationship of class, gender, and religiosity, especially among youth. Next, I discuss the formation of Iranian immigrant communities, including Middle Eastern Jewish enclaves in Los Angeles and New York, and illustrate differences in experiences of second-generation Jews and Muslims in adjusting to life in the United States. I then focus on how Iranian Jews, as Mizrahi Jews, originating from, and having lived for centuries on Middle Eastern soil, are creating a context for re-examination of hegemonic notions of American Jewish identity. Iranian Jews maintain particular ethnic, linguistic, social and religious traditions that exert a powerful influence over their practice of Jewish culture in the United States and are challenging the Ashkenazi standard of assimilation that is expected of all arriving Jewish populations regardless of nationality. A theoretical basis for this study is the dialectical relationship between personal and structural resources that drive, shape, and mediate responses of individuals as part of a religious minority in Iran or as recent immigrants in the United States. It is argued that their perceived experiences and reactions can only be understood within the context of how the society at large treats and views this population. Methodologically, I use qualitative ethnographic field study methods, particularly in-depth interviews with adolescents and college-age youth, and oral histories and participant observation to address issues related to Jewish-Iranians in their constructions of the meaning of self, family and community in contemporary Iran and in the United States. This study provides a more nuanced representation of young people's lives in Iran and illustrates the complex intersections of culture, religion and ethnicity among Iranian-American youth. It challenges stereotypic, simplistic and false images constantly circulating in popular and mainstream media about Iranians and Iranian-Americans.

The Quiet Encroachment of Young Urban Subalterns in the Islamic Republic of Iran This paper examines the politics of everyday life among poor street and working youth in the capital city of Tehran, Iran. Upon critically navigating through the prevailing theoretical paradigms that have thus far been used to study the politics of subaltern groups, namely resistance, passivity and quiet encroachment, I articulate an approach that centers on “youth quiet encroachment” and that more closely encapsulates the everyday experiences of poor working young people in the Islamic Republic. As I argue, previous perspectives have incorporated a discussion of poor youth into a wider analysis focused on class, thereby undermining the significance associated with age-specific modes of struggle in the developing world. I draw from participant observation and interview data with street and working youth in peri-urban and urban districts in Tehran to inquire into poor young people’s everyday forms of quiet advancement onto the urban public sphere. It is my contention that the unintended consequences of their practices problematize the prevailing ideology of youth that views them as maldeveloped, subversive, and lacking in moral and social values. In so doing, this paper not only sheds light on the character of civil society in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also demonstrates how these young people’s actions come to bear on dominant analyses of disadvantaged youth and the politics of the urban poor in the Middle East more generally.

Over the last sixty years, Egypt’s dual policies of free education and a guarantee of public sector employment for all university graduates have opened up opportunities for new economic roles for young women, opportunities which have been seized by middle class women in particular. Yet with the shrinking of the public sector since the 1980s, young Egyptians have increasingly looked to the private sector for employment despite the class and gender biases that persist in private sector hiring. In fact, since 1988, the decline of the public sector has been accompanied by declining rates of labor force participation among educated women. During this same period, women’s university attendance has continued to increase and the gender gap in enrollment has all but disappeared. Why then, are young women and their families continuing to invest in higher education when their employment prospects are so poor? I address this question through a set of 28 in-depth interviews conducted with middle class, female undergraduate students at public universities in Cairo. Specifically, I ask how these young women view their investment in a university degree in relation to their work and family expectations. I find that the students I interviewed, as youth of Egypt’s post-infitah middle class, looked to the multinational private sector as the source of meaningful work. Yet these young women’s commitment to the labor market over the long-term varied considerably, as did the degree to which they understood the difficulty of actually finding the types of jobs they wanted. All of them, however, regardless of their attachment to the idea of labor force participation, maintained the expectation of a future life grounded in the family. Their expectations for a marriage partner and their subsequent family life were in turn rooted in middle class Egyptian identity. Taken together, the students’ work and family aspirations were often vague and even conflicting, but both were based firmly on a social expectation of educational attainment. Using a Bourdieusian framework of education and class reproduction, I therefore argue that for these young women, the investment in higher education was not an investment in a particular work or family outcome, but rather in a middle class identity.