Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh was born and raised in Los Angeles, but her childhood revolved around Iran. Her parents taught her Farsi, the language they used to wistfully discuss their native country. “Just wait till you try the watermelon in Iran,” Rabizadeh’s mother used to say whenever she ate a piece of the fruit.

But Rabizadeh has never visited Iran, because her Jewish family — like countless others — fled the Islamic Republic after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ousted the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979 and implemented a theocratic Muslim regime. Rabizadeh grew up hearing her family members talk critically about American foreign policy, always seeking a harder line against Iran, starting with the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

“It was just very much, like, ‘These Americans just don’t understand anything about the Middle East,’” Rabizadeh, the vice president of engagement at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, said. That thinking reemerged in 2015, when then-President Barack Obama announced a nuclear deal with Iran: “‘You don’t make a deal with Iran.’ That was the majority of the voices I heard. ‘You don’t make a deal with Iran. Iran is not to be trusted. Obama doesn’t understand anything.’”

Now, President Donald Trump is the one at the negotiating table with Tehran, seven years after he pulled out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. His administration’s endgame in the negotiations is unclear, with Trump stating on Wednesday that he hadn’t yet decided if Iran would be allowed to continue enriching uranium under a new deal. 

The ongoing nuclear talks are blowing up WhatsApp groups within the Persian Jewish community in the United States, with Iranian refugees and their American-born children trying to decode Trump’s approach to the talks and figuring out what to make of all of it. In conversations with Jewish Insider, several Jewish activists and leaders who were born in Iran or whose families fled the regime described confusion at Trump’s posturing on the issue, holding out hope for a strong deal — and trepidation that he might settle for something weak. 

“There’s a real concern that the U.S. government wants a deal so badly that it will agree to deal terms will be beneficial to Iran, not unlike the JCPOA in 2015,” said Sam Yebri, an attorney and activist in Los Angeles who came to America with his family as a 1-year-old in the early 1980s. “It doesn’t seem like much has changed in terms of the objectives or the negotiating posture of our government.” 

To Jews whose families fled Iran out of concern for their lives, the prospect of Trump now negotiating with the rogue regime that wanted them dead is confounding, particularly since he took such a tough approach to Iran in his first term. 

“I think that the Jews from the Middle East, by and large, voted for Trump,” said Rabizadeh. “The main reason was because of their support for Israel and hoping that that goes hand in hand, as Persian Jews, with his being hard on Iran, and that’s what he promised. He promised he was going to be tough on Iran. And he keeps saying that, and then floundering.” 

Siamak Kordestani, who left Iran as a child in 1989, said he hasn’t yet seen people in the Persian Jewish community who supported Trump now change their mind about him. 

“I haven’t heard anything from one direction or the other. I think it’s still very early,” Kordestani, the West Coast director of the pro-Israel European Leadership Network, told JI. “I think there’s an expectation that [a new deal] would be stronger, because what’s the point of having canceled that one if you’re not going to do something stronger than it, right? So, yes, people are paying attention.”

Roya Hakakian, an author who left Iran with her family as a teenager, said some in the Iranian Jewish community view the talks as a pretext for military action against Iran.

“Some of them still hold out hope that these negotiations are part of a posturing position that would ultimately not work out, and then bring about an even harsher policy towards Iran,” Hakakian said. “The Iranian Jewish community continues to believe in Trump by and large.”

Iranian Jewish human rights advocate Marjan Keypour Greenblatt said many people viewed Trump as more hawkish than former Vice President Kamala Harris in last year’s election. But more appropriate now, she said, would be to look at Trump’s recent actions in the context of his first term, rather than comparing him to Harris or even to Obama. 

“Comparing Trump to himself — all along, Trump has spoken from both sides of his mouth. He has continued to use a language of threat and a language of reward almost simultaneously,” Greenblatt said. 

The Trump administration has communicated mixed messaging on whether a deal would allow Iran to continue enriching uranium at some level or to have a civil nuclear program with enriched material imported from abroad. Among some Persian Jews, these conflicting signals are confusing, but they hope that means the Iranian regime will be confused, too. 

“The unpredictability of this president and the lack of consistency, in a way, is putting them on their back heel,” said Sharon Nazarian, a philanthropist in Los Angeles who left Tehran with her family “on one of the last few flights that were still flying between Tehran and Ben Gurion [Airport].” Like many other Iranians, her family thought they would be back home soon. Instead, they have been in California since 1979.

The ongoing negotiations were “so shocking for both Israelis and Iranian Jews,” said Nazarian. “When that was announced, it felt a bit of a stab in the back, and it was definitely a step, for many of us, in the wrong direction, because to hold direct negotiations with this regime gives them a level of respect and acknowledgement that they don’t deserve.” (Trump first described the negotiations as direct, but the Omanis have largely played the role of mediator.) 

One of the strongest arguments against the 2015 Iran deal by Persian Jews and allies was that it did not address Iran’s support for terrorists and its malign activities across the Middle East — issues that may be left off the negotiating table again in 2025. 

Sam Kermanian, a Los Angeles investor who served as president of the Iranian American Jewish Federation for more than a decade, quipped that he would support a deal — but only if it fundamentally transformed the Islamic Republic. 

“We should demand that they behave like civilized governments and stop threatening anybody else. I don’t think that can be done, because it’s fundamentally opposed to the ideology on which this regime is built,” Kermanian told JI. “But if by some sort of a miracle, the writer of ‘The Art of the Deal’ [Trump] can achieve this sort of deal with them, then great. We’ve achieved what we wanted without having to resort to any sort of violence.”