The problem with Jewish assimilation isn’t what we think.

We obsess over how to make the next generation more Jewish. Maybe, like the Persian Jewish community in America, we should focus on building communities that children never want to leave.

Nessah in Los Angeles is the largest Persian Jewish synagogue in the United States. (photo: Scalar)

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I grew up in Los Angeles, spent more than a decade living in Israel, and now spend time between Tel Aviv and Los Angeles.

In other words, I believed I understood the Jewish world reasonably well. I am Ashkenazi, and for most of my life, my understanding of Jewish culture was shaped by Ashkenazi traditions, Israeli society, and the particular habits and assumptions of the Jewish communities I knew.

Then I began spending time with Persian Jews in Los Angeles, and I discovered something I hadn’t quite expected: There was an entire Jewish world practically in my backyard that operated according to a different set of social and cultural rules.

Over the past several months, I have immersed myself in this community, attending Jewish social gatherings, meeting new people, making friends, and dating within it. And the more time I have spent around Persian Jews, the more fascinated I have become by the differences between their culture and my own.

Some of those differences I deeply admire. Others have challenged me, frustrated me, and forced me to reconsider assumptions I didn’t even realize I had. But they have taught me something important about Jewish identity, family, marriage and, perhaps most significantly, what it actually takes for a Jewish community to survive.

The first thing I noticed was that Persian Jews don’t seem to have to work nearly as hard to remain connected to Jewish life.

This observation struck me particularly hard because I had spent so many years in Israel, where Jewishness is part of the atmosphere. In Tel Aviv, you don’t have to organize your life around Jewish identity for Jewish identity to organize much of your life. The calendar is Jewish, the language is Hebrew, the national conversation is Jewish, and the people surrounding you overwhelmingly share a Jewish frame of reference. Judaism doesn’t require a special occasion to make itself felt.

Returning to America reminded me how different the diaspora experience can be. Here, Jewish life often requires deliberate effort. We attend Jewish events to meet other Jews, join Jewish organizations to maintain our connections, and create programs to encourage young Jews to embrace their heritage. American Jewish institutions spend enormous amounts of money trying to solve a problem that, in Israel, the surrounding society largely solves for you.

Yet among many Persian Jews in Los Angeles, I discovered something that reminded me of Israel. Their Jewish community is not simply a collection of synagogues, organizations, and occasional events. It is a dense network of families, friendships, professional relationships, marriages, and shared cultural expectations that makes Jewish life the natural center of their social universe.

At Jewish gatherings, I became increasingly aware of how connected people were to one another. Someone knew another person’s cousin. Families had known one another for decades. People had grown up together, attended the same celebrations, and remained part of overlapping social circles well into adulthood. The community felt less like a collection of individuals who happened to share peoplehood and more like an enormous extended family.

As an Ashkenazi Jew, I found this both appealing and revealing. Much of the American Jewish world I know is preoccupied with the challenge of getting Jews to participate in Jewish life. The Persian Jewish community reminded me that the most powerful form of Jewish engagement may be the one that doesn’t feel like engagement at all. It simply feels like living.

The second thing I noticed, and maybe the most personally challenging, was the extraordinary importance of family.

I have met Persian Jews in their 30s whose relationships with their parents and siblings are more involved than anything I was accustomed to seeing among Ashkenazi adults of the same age. Parents remain central figures in their children’s daily lives. Siblings are constantly in contact. Family gatherings are not occasional obligations squeezed between work and social commitments; they are often among the most important commitments on the calendar.

I encountered these differences most intimately through dating. Getting to know someone from the community offered me a perspective that attending social gatherings never could. I began to understand how deeply involved a person’s parents and siblings could remain in their adult life, including decisions about relationships, schedules, money, and the future.

Sometimes, I admired it enormously. There was something touching about the assumption that family members should remain active participants in one another’s lives rather than gradually drifting into separate worlds. But at other times, I struggled with it. I wasn’t accustomed to the degree to which siblings could occupy someone’s attention during a date, or how much weight family members’ preferences could carry in decisions I would have considered deeply personal.

It challenged one of my own fundamental assumptions about adulthood. In the world I grew up in, independence is usually regarded as an achievement. You move out, establish your own routines, make your own decisions, and become responsible for your own happiness. Being too dependent on your parents or siblings is often interpreted as a failure to mature.

But spending time around Persian Jewish families made me question whether we Ashkenazi Jews, particularly those shaped by American individualism, have sometimes confused independence with distance.

Is it really such an achievement to see your parents only occasionally? Is a sibling who calls every day necessarily less mature than one who checks in every few weeks? Have we become so determined to establish our independence that we’ve weakened some of the relationships that give life its greatest meaning?

I still believe adults need to make their own decisions, particularly when choosing a spouse and building a family. Love and loyalty should not give parents or siblings unlimited authority over another person’s life. Yet I also recognize that my own instinct for independence is not necessarily the universal standard of emotional maturity. And I have come to appreciate that there is something rather beautiful about a culture in which family remains an everyday presence.

The third lesson was about assimilation, and how the Persian Jewish community has managed to resist something that so many other American Jewish communities have come to accept as inevitable.

One of the most fascinating things I have discovered about Persian Jews in Los Angeles is how many have managed to become thoroughly American without becoming culturally indistinguishable from everyone else. They work in American businesses, attend American universities, participate in American society, and enjoy the opportunities this country provides. Yet socially, culturally, and romantically, many continue to live within a distinctly Jewish world.

They socialize primarily with other Jews. They date and marry other Jews. Their families maintain close relationships with other Jewish families. And most remarkably, many continue speaking Farsi, even decades after their families immigrated to the United States. In a city where immigrant languages frequently disappear within a generation or two, the persistence of Farsi within the community is particularly striking.

This last point is personal for me. My father’s parents immigrated to America from Hungary, yet neither my father nor his brothers speak a lick of Hungarian. Somewhere between my grandparents’ arrival in America and their children’s upbringing, the language simply disappeared from our family. And with that disappearance came the loss of a certain connection to the country, culture, and everyday experiences of the generations who preceded them.

I never considered this especially unusual. In fact, I regarded it as the ordinary story of American immigration. The first generation arrives speaking the language of the old country. The second generation grows up speaking English and understands a little of its parents’ native tongue. By the third generation, the ancestral language has often become little more than a collection of expressions, family memories, and words that nobody quite knows how to pronounce.

But spending time around Persian Jews has made me question just how inevitable this process really is. Here is a community whose members have lived in America for decades, whose children and grandchildren have grown up surrounded by American culture, and yet whose connection to their language and customs remains remarkably strong.

Persian identity has not simply been preserved as something to commemorate at occasional cultural celebrations. It continues to shape friendships, romantic relationships, family life, and ordinary conversation.

What interests me even more is that this preservation appears to be as much social as it is cultural. Many Persian Jews don’t simply maintain their traditions while otherwise integrating into a completely unrelated social environment. They have preserved an entire ecosystem of relationships that reinforces those traditions every day.

And this raises an uncomfortable question for Ashkenazi American Jews like myself. How much of what we have lost was genuinely inevitable, and how much did we simply allow to disappear? My father and his brothers did not grow up speaking Hungarian, and I certainly don’t regard that as some great personal failing. But the contrast with Persian families who have maintained their ancestral language makes me wonder what else gets lost when an immigrant community becomes so thoroughly absorbed into Western life that its distinct cultural identity gradually fades.

There is, of course, an important distinction between losing Hungarian and losing Judaism. Ashkenazi Jews can remain deeply Jewish without speaking the languages of the countries their ancestors once inhabited, just as Persian Jews can remain deeply Jewish without speaking Farsi. But language is only one visible expression of a much larger phenomenon: the extent to which a community considers its inherited identity something worth actively preserving rather than something that will naturally fade as successive generations become more Western.

What I have learned is that assimilation is not merely something that happens to a community. It is also something a community can, at least to a significant degree, choose to resist.

And the Persian Jewish experience demonstrates that resisting assimilation does not necessarily mean rejecting America, refusing modernity, or withdrawing from the wider world. It can mean building such strong social, cultural, and familial bonds that becoming American does not require abandoning everything that made your family different in the first place.

The Persian Jews I have encountered did not have to choose between becoming American and remaining Persian and Jewish. They found a way to do both. And in doing so, they have preserved something that many other immigrant communities, including my own family in certain respects, gradually surrendered.

But the most consequential lesson I learned had less to do with Persian culture itself than with the way community shapes identity.

In my experience, many Ashkenazi American Jews tend to treat Jewish identity as something that should be individually meaningful. We ask what Judaism means to us, how we connect with it, which traditions resonate with our personal values, and what kinds of Jewish experiences we find spiritually or intellectually fulfilling.

These are worthwhile questions. Yet they also reflect a distinctly modern, individualistic understanding of belonging, one in which Jewish life must continually justify its relevance to the individual.

Among many Persian Jews I encountered, Jewish identity seemed to require less individual explanation. You belonged because your family belonged, your friends belonged, and the generations before you had belonged. Jewishness was not merely a personal preference, a political position, or a religious philosophy. It was an inheritance and an obligation.

I found myself thinking about how differently these two approaches shape the next generation.

A Jewish child who grows up attending occasional Hebrew school classes, celebrating major holidays, and participating in organized Jewish activities can certainly develop a strong Jewish identity. But a child who grows up surrounded by Jewish relatives, Jewish friendships, Jewish marriages, Jewish celebrations, and a community that assumes the importance of a Jewish future absorbs something more encompassing.

That child learns that Jewishness is not simply one identity among many. It is the organizing principle of an entire social world. This is precisely where the Persian Jewish community has something important to teach the broader American Jewish establishment.

For decades, we have invested extraordinary resources in Jewish education, engagement, outreach, and identity-building programs. Much of this work is valuable, but spending time around Persian Jews made me wonder whether we sometimes attempt to solve through programming what other communities preserve through relationships.

You can organize a hundred Jewish events, but if the people who attend them never develop lasting friendships, marriages, and families, what exactly have you built? You can teach children about Jewish history, but if they grow up without experiencing Jewish belonging as an ordinary part of everyday life, how much of that education will they carry into adulthood?

The Persian Jewish community helped me see that Jewish continuity is not primarily the product of successful messaging. It is the product of a living culture in which each generation has compelling reasons to remain connected to the next.

The Persian Jewish community showed me one way that a diaspora community can create a powerful sense of Jewish belonging without having a Jewish country surrounding it.

I came into the Persian Jewish community as an outsider who was curious about a different expression of Jewish life. I came away with a deeper appreciation not only for Persian Jews but for the extraordinary diversity of the Jewish People and the different ways we have managed to preserve ourselves across centuries and continents.

And my greatest realization was an uncomfortable one for someone who has spent so much time thinking about how to strengthen Jewish identity: We may have become too focused on convincing Jews that Jewish life is worth choosing, and not focused enough on building Jewish communities that people would never want to leave.

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