My Iranian Canadian Reflection on Iran, Jews, and the Legacy of Cyrus

As an Iranian heritage woman who has lived in Canada since the age of ten, I've spent much of my life moving between two worlds.

One is rooted in one of the world's oldest civilizations, a culture shaped by poetry, philosophy, resilience, and traditions that stretch back thousands of years. The other is rooted in democratic freedoms that encourage people to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and participate openly in public life.

For a long time, moving between those worlds felt natural. Yet the events of recent years, particularly the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini (which turned into the Woman, Life, Freedom movement) and the increasingly polarized conversations in the media surrounding Iran and Israel, have led me to reflect more deeply on identity, history, and memory, as well as on some formative experiences that shaped how I understand the relationship between people and communities.

I arrived in Canada when I was ten years old after my family left Iran so that my mother could pursue doctoral studies in the liberal arts. Like many immigrant children, I adapted quickly. I learned new customs, made friends, discovered new cultural references, and gradually found my place in a country that would become home.

What surprised me most was not the adjustment itself, but how little many people seemed to know about Iran. Sometimes classmates weren't entirely sure where Iran was located. More often, what they knew came from newspaper headlines or television reports, and those stories usually centered on political tensions, international disputes, or the actions of a government that many Iranians themselves did not support.

Even as a child, I remember feeling a gap between the country I knew and the country many people imagined.

The Iran I carried with me was filled with family stories, poetry recited from memory, hospitality that blurred the line between guest and family, and a sense of history that seemed woven into everyday life. It felt ancient, layered, complicated, and deeply human. Yet much of that richness appeared absent from how Iran was discussed in the West.

At the same time, I found myself drawn to the stories Canadians told about freedom, democracy, and the sacrifices previous generations had made to secure those rights. Many of my classmates encountered those lessons through history classes. For me, they felt less like history and more like an ongoing human struggle. The themes that ran through those stories, the longing for dignity, the desire to speak freely, and the belief that ordinary people should have a voice in determining their future, felt deeply familiar.

As I grew older, I carried both identities with me: Iranian and Canadian. Looking back, one of the experiences that shaped me most during those early years in Canada came through an unexpected friendship.

My first close Jewish friend was a classmate whose family welcomed me with a warmth I had not anticipated. Every year during Hanukkah, her mother would bring gifts not only for her own children but for our entire group of friends. I honestly couldn't tell you now what most of those gifts were. What I remember is the feeling they created.

As a child, I found it surprising that someone would open a family and religious celebration so naturally to others who did not share that tradition. In my experience, holidays tended to stay within the boundaries of family or community. Her family seemed to view those boundaries differently, making room for everyone without drawing attention to the fact that they were doing so.

What stayed with me over the years, however, was not really the gift itself.

It was the assumption I had carried before receiving it.

I don't recall sitting around worried that my friend's family would dislike me because I was Iranian. The feeling was subtler than that. But even as a child, I understood that many people outside Iran often struggled to distinguish between ordinary Iranians and the regime that ruled Iran. I also knew that hostility toward Israel and Jews formed part of the political environment that surrounded us growing up. Whether one embraced those messages or rejected them, they existed in the background.

Politics has a way of teaching people to expect distance from those they have never met.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether the barrier existed almost entirely in my own imagination. I had somehow absorbed the assumption that history and politics might already be standing between us before we'd even had the chance to know one another.

But my friend's family knew I was Iranian, and it simply did not seem important to them.

What I encountered was kindness, warmth, and curiosity offered so naturally that I almost missed how significant it was. There was no sense that I had to explain myself, defend my background, or account for the actions of a government that neither I nor my family had chosen.

At the time, I probably would not have been able to explain why that felt so meaningful. Today, I understand it better.

That experience challenged something deeper than a stereotype. It challenged the assumption that inherited narratives are inevitable. It showed me, long before I had the language for it, that relationships often have a unique ability to dismantle fears and assumptions that arguments rarely touch. Once people know one another as human beings, it becomes much harder to reduce each other to symbols, headlines, or political identities.

I wasn't having an intellectual debate about prejudice, identity, or politics. I was simply a kid making a friend, yet somehow that friendship challenged assumptions I didn't even realize I was carrying.

The lesson stayed with me.

As an adult, I have built friendships, professional relationships, and community partnerships with Jewish colleagues, neighbors, and friends without ever feeling the barriers that politics often insists should exist. Looking back, I think part of that openness began with a simple childhood realization: people are rarely as simple as the stories told about them.

At the time, I had no language for any of this. I certainly wasn't thinking about pluralism or history, and I definitely wasn't thinking about Cyrus the Great. I was simply learning through experience that people do not become less themselves by making room for others.

Life moved on.

University, work, friendships, responsibilities, and adulthood gradually pulled me deeper into Canadian life. Iran remained part of me, but more quietly than before. There were years when I rarely stopped to think about my relationship with the country I had left behind. The roots were still there; I simply wasn't touching them as often.

By 2022, I had built a life, a career, and a community in Canada, and while Iran remained part of my identity, it occupied a quieter place in my daily thoughts than it once had. Then, in September of that year, Mahsa Amini was killed, sparking what would become the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

What followed affected me in ways I was not prepared for.

Like millions of Iranians around the world, I watched young women challenge compulsory hijab laws at extraordinary personal risk. I watched students confront authority, families demand accountability, and ordinary people refuse to surrender their dignity despite knowing the consequences they might face.

As those events unfolded, something shifted inside me.

The distance I had built between myself and Iran suddenly disappeared. Questions I had not asked in years came rushing back. What did it mean to be Iranian? What values had shaped me? Which parts of my identity had survived despite time, distance, and political upheaval?

As I found myself asking those questions, I kept returning to one figure: Cyrus the Great.

For many Iranians, Cyrus is not simply a historical ruler. He represents an idea about leadership and about the kind of society Iran can aspire to become.

More than 2,500 years ago, after conquering Babylon, Cyrus allowed exiled peoples, including the Jewish community, to return to their homelands and rebuild their institutions. What has always fascinated me about that story is not simply the historical event itself but what it suggests about how power can be exercised.

The older I get, the more I find myself drawn to the possibility that Cyrus understood something many societies still struggle with today: a nation does not become stronger by forcing people to abandon who they are. It becomes stronger when people are able to belong to something larger without surrendering the identities, traditions, and beliefs that make them unique.

Perhaps that sounds obvious. History suggests otherwise.

As I revisited Iranian history following the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, I found myself reflecting on something that rarely appears in contemporary conversations about Iran: the Jewish story within our own story.

For centuries, Jewish communities lived throughout Iran. They built businesses, schools, cultural institutions, and places of worship. They contributed to Iranian society as physicians, merchants, artists, scholars, and public servants. They spoke Farsi, participated in Iranian culture, and helped shape the country while remaining deeply and proudly Jewish.

The more I learned, the harder it became to accept the idea that hostility between Iranians and Jews is somehow ancient or inevitable.

History looked far more complicated than that. And much richer.

Which is also why antisemitism troubles me so deeply.

Not only because hatred harms those it targets, but because it asks us to reject the possibility of coexistence itself. It encourages people to fear difference rather than engage with it, reducing human beings to categories instead of allowing them to exist in all their complexity.

For someone who takes pride in the values associated with figures like Cyrus, that feels like more than a political problem. It feels like a challenge to something fundamental within the Iranian story I grew up admiring.

Throughout my life, one of my deepest frustrations has been watching people confuse a civilization with the regime that currently governs it.

Iran is not the Islamic Republic.

The Islamic Republic is part of Iran's story, but it is not the entirety of it.

The Iran that produced Cyrus, Hafez, Ferdowsi, and countless traditions of cultural and religious coexistence cannot be reduced to a government that has existed for only a small fraction of its history. That realization became even more meaningful to me because, over time, I came to believe that human relationships shape history far more than we often acknowledge.

We tend to focus on major events, political movements, elections, revolutions, and conflicts. Yet people's lives are frequently changed by much smaller moments: a conversation, a friendship, an act of generosity, or a simple decision to include someone who might otherwise remain outside the circle.

When I think about my own life, I often return to those Hanukkah gifts, not because of what they were but because of what they represented.

At the time, I could not have explained why they mattered.

Today, I think I can.

They represented connection offered without conditions.

Years later, when the opportunity emerged to build something together with leaders from both the Iranian and Jewish communities, I found myself immediately drawn to it. Looking back, I think I understand why.

Today, alongside three remarkable community leaders from the Iranian and Jewish communities, I am helping to build Pomegranate Fest in Toronto, an initiative dedicated to celebrating the rich heritage, history, and cultural connections between our communities through food, music, poetry, storytelling, and art.

The event itself has not unfolded exactly as we originally hoped. Weather had other plans, and like many community projects, it has required patience, adaptation, and a willingness to keep moving forward despite unexpected setbacks.

Yet in some ways, the festival was never only about a single day.

What excites me most is the process of bringing people together around a shared vision. It is the conversations that happen while planning. It is the relationships that form between people who might never otherwise have met. It is the opportunity to create space for curiosity where there was previously unfamiliarity, and connection where there was previously distance.

As our team has worked together, I have often found myself thinking back to that childhood memory. The kindness of a mother who probably had no idea she was leaving such an impression on a ten-year-old immigrant girl suddenly feels connected to the work we are trying to do today.

It occurred to me recently that, without consciously deciding to do so, I had made a promise to myself all those years earlier.

Not a promise in words. Nothing so deliberate. More a quiet commitment that took shape over time.

A commitment that if a small act of inclusion could change the way I saw another community, then perhaps I had a responsibility to help create those opportunities for others.

A commitment that if I had been given the gift of connection, I should try to pass it forward.

What my friend's mother offered all those years ago was much more than a Hanukkah present.

She offered a simple but powerful reminder that human beings can choose to meet one another before judging one another.

In some ways, I think Pomegranate Fest is simply an attempt to extend that same invitation.

When I think about the relationship between Iranians and Jews today, I think about history. I think about Cyrus. I think about two communities whose stories have intersected for centuries. But I also think about something much simpler: people meeting one another, building friendships, sharing stories, and discovering that the assumptions they inherited often begin to crumble once a real human relationship takes their place.

Sometimes I wonder whether my friend's mother remembers those gifts.

I suspect she probably doesn't.

To her, they may have been nothing more than a small act of kindness offered to a group of children.

But sometimes small acts have consequences we never see.

Looking back, I can see a line connecting those moments: a Hanukkah gift offered to a newcomer, a childhood friendship that quietly challenged assumptions I didn't know I carried, and eventually a commitment to creating spaces where others might experience that same sense of connection for themselves.

For all the history, politics, and conflict that dominate conversations about our communities today, that remains the lesson I return to most often.

Human beings meet one another one person at a time, and sometimes that is how history changes too.

Saeideh Fard is a Toronto-based Iranian-Canadian tech executive who currently serves as CFO at Introhive and sits on the Board of Governors at George Brown College. She draws on her cultural heritage to advocate for human rights, pluralism, and global gender equity. She is a founding member of The Collective, an initiative operating under the women’s rights non-profit The 49% to unite Muslim, Jewish, and secular women against terrorism and anti-Jewish hatred.

The views and perspectives expressed in this post belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of AVI.