The Nightingale of Iran

Sisters Danielle and Galeet Dardashti grew up in a Jewish American family band: The Dardashti Family. They sang international folk music in 12 languages – English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Greek, Spanish, French, Japanese and more – but never any songs in Persian. This seems odd to them since both their father and grandfather were famous Iranian singers during the “Golden Age” for Jews in Iran, before the Islamic Revolutio...

Danielle and Galeet's grandfather Younes Dardashti grew up an orphan in Tehran's Jewish ghetto. He was gifted with a gorgeous voice, but had a difficult childhood. He lived with an abusive uncle who forbade him from singing. In his late teens, he left his uncle's house, got a job with the Iranian Railroad and, years later, he married Houri Aziz-Zadeh. In the 1940s, life changed rapidly for the Jews of Iran - a new Shah gra...

Danielle and Galeet’s father, Farid Dardashti, was born in Tehran in 1942, the oldest of Houri and Younes Dardashti’s five children, all of whom had natural musical talent. Farid’s gorgeous voice kept earning him invitations to perform, but his parents didn’t want him to pursue music. To make them proud, he applied to study architecture in America. While waiting for his visa and acceptance to college, he got offered his ow...

On his way from Iran to America, where he planned to study architecture in college, Danielle and Galeet’s father Farid spent the summer in Israel. While walking down a Tel Aviv street one day, a man recognized him from Iranian TV and invited him to sing at an event that week. The night Farid sang, a family of visiting Americans heard him, and it changed the course of his entire life. Once he arrived in the United States, a...

Houri Dardashti, Danielle and Galeet’s grandmother, had long dreamed of moving to Israel from Iran. But life was improving for Jews in Iran, and her husband Younes had become a famous radio star there. So it seemed to her that the dream of moving to Israel wasn’t going to happen. But after Farid left Iran for college in America, one by one his siblings started leaving Iran for Israel. And eventually, Houri and Younes moved...

When people asked “Where are you from?” Danielle was never sure if they wanted to know the places she’d lived or whether they just thought she looked foreign. She didn’t know many families like hers in mainstream Jewish America. These days, there’s growing awareness about the diversity of the Jewish experience.

Co-creators / Co-executive producers - Danielle Dardashti and Galeet Dardashti

The Nightingale of Iran - nighti...

Thank you for listening to The Nightingale of Iran! All six episodes are out now. 

For those of you who have finished listening to our series, today we are sharing something a little different. This is an episode of History Daily, a podcast with new episodes every weekday. Each episode of History Daily focuses on a particular day in history and the human stories behind what happened. We’ve picked an episode about the day in...

One of the first events to celebrate the release of The Nightingale of Iran was with Danielle and Galeet's home town crowd, at Bet Am Shalom Synagogue in New York on March 19, 2024. The conversation was moderated by Philissa Cramer, the editor in chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The event was organized by: Lisa Goldberg, Laura Solomon, Felicia Lebewohl Rosen, Liz Haas Edersheim, and Danielle Thomas. For more Nightin...