All week he knew something was going to happen. The news did not show it, but Edwin Zaghi – who has family in Israel – knew a development was building between Israel and Iran.

Zaghi fled Iran in 1979, and his oldest son currently serves in the Israeli Defence Forces. He kept a radio on before Shabbat – the 25-hour period every weekend starting Friday evening for the Jewish community where electronics are stowed away.

Friday night of Feb. 27 his phone glowed with alerts about rockets being fired into Israel. Something had happened.

At 3 a.m., Zaghi woke up to news of an attack on Iranian leadership. It was not even on his radar. Yet.

There were rumors at Synagogue and talk at home Saturday afternoon. But it was not until that night, Feb. 28, when he realized the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, was killed.

Zaghi’s mind vibrated between disbelief and laughter. The man who had been in the back of his mind much of his life was gone.

“I have never seen him react to news that way,” his daughter Eliana said.

The country that took everything from him is in chaos. And one of the men responsible for setting it all in motion is dead. 

There is relief in that, but also fear in what comes next. Edwin is one of thousands of Jewish Iranians who fled the Revolution with nothing and rebuilt their lives in America – with the past one phone alert away.

He has spent his entire life processing that weight through humor. But this moment was bigger than a joke. For the Iranian Jewish community, the emotions surrounding the death of Khamenei are not easy to name. For Zaghi, the emotions of relief and fear are complicated and still settling.

Ali Khamenei had held the title as Ayatollah for Iran since 1989. Before that, he served in the Revolutionary Council under his predecessor, Ruhollah Khomenei, during the immediate rise of the Iranian Regime in 1979.

“My dad used to have this bit where used [to say] ‘thank God for Khomeini because if not for Khomeini, my kids wouldn’t be here,” Edwin said.

Zaghi, 50, laughs about it because it is easier than the alternative. “It’s purely a defensive tactic,” he said.

For Zaghi, humor is not avoidance. It is armor.

“You gotta laugh at it a little bit, or at least try to,” Zaghi said. “Oftentimes complaining about things literally gets you nowhere.”

As the news from the Middle East reaches the U.S., history is resurfacing for Zaghi.

In 1979, three-year-old Edwin, his parents, and his younger brother, were in Holland on a work trip when the Iranian Regime took power and declared Iran would move to become an Islamic Republic.

Edwin’s father Hooshang held an important role in Iran – engineer for the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), the country’s primary revenue source at the time.

Hooshang Zaghi received this letter from his employer weeks after the Iranian Regime took power ordering him home “soonest possible.” He never did.

It was unsafe to return home, and the Zaghis ended up living in Holland for six months before receiving a visa to enter the US.

Edwin’s family settled in Los Angeles next to other Jewish Iranians and Holocaust survivors. The surrounding community eased the sudden transition.

“It [did] soften the blow a little bit to be able to go into a community that experienced the same thing,” Zaghi said.

The Zaghis were not alone. In the years following the Revolution, Iranian immigration to the US swelled from roughly 33,000 in the 1970s to nearly 100,000 in the 1980s (EBSCO).

The Zaghi family passport, circa 1979. The picture on the left is Hooshang Zaghi. The picture on the right – from left: younger brother Alex, Edwin, center, and mother Soraya.

The family arrived in the U.S. poor. Five years later, after a separation that had already fractured the family, his parents divorced. Whatever stability they had managed to rebuild was gone. Hooshang worked at a toy store near L.A, and never fully shed the instinct that came with the exile.

“My father was always nervous that something crazy could happen around the corner,” Zaghi said. “[He] just never felt settled or comfortable enough to say the status quo will continue. It’s always, ‘something may happen. We have to be prepared for that.’”

That anxiety manifested itself practically: work.

“Any time I was not in school, I used to go with my dad and work,” Zaghi said, “It was never like, ‘let me do this thing for fun over the summer’ … the hustle was expected,”

Zaghi used to tell his daughter, Eliana, that he had worked as a “poop scooper for elephants” as a child.

“She doesn’t realize that I’m actually joking with her,” Zaghi said.

“His childhood definitely wasn’t the easiest,” Eliana said. “But the way that he has built himself up is very, very inspiring.”

Iran’s image in America, when Edwin was growing up, was not flattering. One of professional wrestling’s most popular villains in the 1980s was the Iron Sheik – an Iranian character built entirely around being the enemy. Hulk Hogan was the hero, and the Sheik was what America pictured when it thought of Iran.”

Growing up in L.A., we were the poor Iranians,” Zaghi said. “Now it’s all rich Iranians, right? Iranians have [had] fantastic, incredible success in the United States.”

The generation that fled persecution built something from nothing, and their children built more.

Zaghi is one of them – and for him, failure was not an option.

Trying hard in school led to good grades, which led to dental school in New Jersey, residency in Washington D.C., and his own pediatric dentistry practice in Columbia, Maryland – where he has worked since 2008.

“The more I put in effort. There was reward, not always immediately,” he said.

Edwin Zaghi’s Certificate of Naturalization, issued January 25, 1999 in Pomona, California.

These days, Zaghi treats patients dressed in dark blue scrubs and bright pink tooth fairy sneakers. A Disney Princess cap covers an almost-completely bald head, and brown round glasses frame his face above a gray beard.

He tells his patients not to be afraid of the dentist before they even sit in the chair.

“Once [the patients] hear that, they feel, ‘Oh, this guy thinks I could do it,’ Then it sets itself on a feedback loop…people don’t want to disappoint an authority figure or disappoint themselves [with] someone who has faith in them.”

That kind of optimism, that “you can do it” mindset, is how Zaghi has lived all of his life and dealt with the trauma of being uprooted from his country.

“I’d rather live with the fact that [my trauma] wasn’t that much because it helps me out a lot more.”

Growing up without much instilled in Zaghi’s family a need to hold onto any money earned, putting vacations and summer camp out of reach.

“It was very ingrained in us,” he said, “especially when my father came over, he had this survival mentality – you always have to be saving.”

As a parent, this mindset has battled with Edwin’s exciting, last-minute tendencies to travel with his family.

“You don’t want to be someone that dies with a lot in your pocket. You give up memories in exchange for that.”

“He’s learned so much on how to enjoy life and how to take advantage of everything he has,” Eliana said.

Edwin jokingly labels himself a “two-time refugee.” He left Iran when the Iranian Regime took over and was in Israel during the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks – forcing him to flee once again.

“He literally had to escape a country two times, which is pretty crazy,” Eliana said.

Now, his oldest son, Arel, serves in the IDF. The conflict is no longer distant.

“My brother is out there,” Eliana said, “and I think he’s spending a lot more time worrying about him.”

As with everything else, Edwin tends to deal with worries like these through laughter – even if it’s dark.

“Dealing with things [through] humor shows that you always hope,” he said.

With escalating tensions in the Middle East, a son serving in Israel and a country he once called home now in upheaval, hope and humor carry more weight than they ever have.

“It’s a very optimistic way of viewing things because if you joke about it now, there’s a point you can joke about it in the future.”

He does not speak about this with bitterness, but rather like someone who still believes the story is not over.

“There used to be direct El Al flights between Israel and Iran,” Zaghi said, “I’d love for that to happen again.”

The scale of what the Iranian Regime set in motion is not lost on him – even if he reaches for a laugh first. His family’s lineage, untouched for centuries, snapped in a single moment.

“Eliana is the first person in my line that was born outside of Iran in over 2,000 years.”

He has thought about this a lot recently – what the Regime took, and what it accidentally gave him. 

One thing fleeing Iran gave Zaghi was a wife he never would have met had the revolution not upended everything. Miriam is from Akron, Ohio and is Ashkenazi Jewish, a lineage rooted not in the Middle East, but in Eastern Europe – a different tribe entirely.

“Very bad things lead to very, very good outcomes,” he said.

“Hopefully, with all this stuff, it eventually leads to laughter,” he added. Next passover, he said, he would love to go to Iran.