US Jewish journalist tells of relative freedom on trip to Iran

An American-Jewish journalist just back from an unprecedented week-long reporting trip to Islamist Iran has described a relatively free hand in choosing who to interview and what questions to ask, despite being assigned a government minder.

In a longform multimedia piece published Wednesday in the Jewish Daily Forward, the newspaper’s deputy managing editor Larry Cohler-Esses details the process of obtaining a visa to the Islamic Republic — with the help of a member of the Iranian Jewish community who wrote a letter on his behalf — and his subsequent conversations in Iran with ayatollahs, government officials and regular Iranians on Jews in general and Israel in particular.

Here’s more on Cohler-Esses’s unprecedented trip — as the first journalist from a US Jewish newspaper to be granted a visa since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. And here’s his Forward piece.