SF Gate:

San Francisco State University’s groundbreaking Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies will close its doors on June 30, 2025, after eight years. 

At a documentary screening in Richmond on Sunday, a heavy weight hung over the room heavily populated by local Iranian Americans. 

It was the day after the United States dropped bombs on Iran, the fear of which has persisted since the 1979 revolution and hostage crisis set off half a century of tense U.S.-Iran relations. The documentary screened, “The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life,” distills that history through the stories of immigrants who rebuilt their lives in the Bay Area.

Persis Karim, the film’s producer and director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University, described to SFGATE the frustration of fielding requests from a dozen national and local news outlets in the past week to speak on behalf of Iranian Americans during wartime. 

“It’s really tiring to have the news media only care about your community in a state of high alert and conflict,” Karim said. “One of the things about the center … it’s to reflect the longer narrative of Iranians who live and work and contribute to the United States.”

But the event, filled with moist eyes in the height of crisis and heartache, was also a farewell to the center. At one of the worst possible moments for Iranian Americans, it will close its doors on Monday. The news, announced in August, that the donor behind the center decided to redirect the large remainder of her $5 million endowment to scholarships for SF State STEM students, or those studying in the fields of science, technology, engineering or mathematics, took Karim by surprise. 

Israel’s initial attacks on June 13 set off a 12-day war that ultimately killed over 600 Iranians and 28 Israelis, injuring thousands in each country as relatives stateside watched in anxious horror. A ceasefire is now in place, but uncertainty remains. 

The latest saga unleashed another wave of anti-Iranian sentiment, this time driven by far-right figures encouraging their audiences to arm themselves in the face of alleged Iranian sleeper cells. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has arrested over 130 Iranian nationals and detained nearly 700 in the past week, citing national security, Fox News reported Thursday. It also dredged up memories of crackdowns on Iranian immigrants after the 1979 hostage crisis, which sparked consistent calls for military intervention in the Middle Eastern country. 

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