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Arab World Palestine Reporting

‘They Don’t Want People to Know We Exist’: Palestinians across the West Bank describe what life has been like since October 7

Posted on November 10, 2023 by Alex Shams

Originally published in New York Magazine on Nov. 10, 2023. Over the last month, Israel launched an assault across the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack, in

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Iran Reporting

‘We Have to Know When to Hope and When to Be Hopeless’: How six Iranians feel about the Woman Life Freedom movement, one year later

Posted on September 16, 2023 by Alex Shams

First published in New York Magazine on Sept. 16, 2023. As told to Alex Shams. One year has passed since protests first broke out across Iran following the killing of

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About me

Alex Shams is an Iranian-American writer and a PhD student of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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Recent posts

  • “Why Did So Many People Think This War Was a Good Idea?”
  • Looking A Tyrant In the Eye: Iran’s Long Struggle for Freedom and Justice
  • Iran After Khamenei
  • Iran’s Protesters Are Caught Between State Repression and Foreign Intervention
  • Quiet Solidarity: The Underground Networks that Defied Israel’s War on Iran
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About

Born and raised in an Iranian-American family in Los Angeles, Alex Shams has long been fascinated by the stories that places can tell us. Growing up, he learned Persian and Spanish; in college, he learned Arabic and studied abroad at the American University of Cairo before moving to Beirut after graduation. After receiving his master’s in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard, he moved to Bethlehem, Palestine, where he was a journalist at Ma’an News Agency, the largest independent Palestinian news organization. He received his PhD. from the University of Chicago in Sociocultural Anthropology. His dissertation, entitled “Constructing Islamic Modernity: Power, Religion, and Masculinity in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” was based on three years of ethnographic research in Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan as well as archival research in the British Library and Ba’ath Party Archives.

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