Drive west along Wilshire Boulevard into Beverly Hills and you enter a city that has, over four decades, quietly become one of the great capitals of the Iranian diaspora. The Persians in Beverly Hills did not arrive as the tired and the poor. They came as a displaced elite, fleeing a revolution that had erased their world overnight, and they rebuilt it inside the most famous postcode in America. Today roughly a sixth of the city traces its roots to Iran, and the cadence of Farsi is as much a part of Rodeo Drive as the boutiques.
The Place
Beverly Hills covers a little under six square miles, hemmed in on all sides by the city of Los Angeles. It is a separate municipality with its own police force, its own school district and its own civic pride, and it has long traded on a single idea: that this is where the world’s money comes to be seen.
Rodeo Drive runs through the commercial heart of it, three blocks of marble and plate glass between Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards. North of there the streets climb gently towards the hills, lined with houses that grow larger and more ornate the higher you go.
The famous shield-shaped Beverly Hills sign sits in the gardens at the foot of Rodeo Drive, near the pink mass of the Beverly Wilshire hotel. It is a place built for arrival, and arrival is exactly what the Iranian community did.
How It Became Persian
The Revolution
For most of the twentieth century there was no Iranian Beverly Hills to speak of. A handful of wealthy families and students had drifted to Los Angeles from the 1960s, drawn by the universities and the sun, but they were a curiosity rather than a community.
That changed in 1979. The Islamic Revolution toppled the Shah and replaced his secular, Westward-looking monarchy with a clerical state. For Iran’s affluent professional class, its Jews, its Baha’is and its secular Muslims, the country they had known simply ceased to exist.
What followed was one of the largest flights of wealth and education out of any single nation in modern memory. Doctors, engineers, merchants and financiers packed what they could and left, and a great many of them set their sights on Los Angeles.
The Arrival
The first Iranian money had actually landed a little earlier. In the early 1970s the four Mahboubi brothers, who had grown rich at home on a near monopoly of the chewing gum trade, moved to Los Angeles and poured their fortune into Rodeo Drive real estate.
When the revolution came, those early footholds became anchors. Persian Jewish families in particular gravitated to Beverly Hills, drawn by the excellent schools, the established Jewish community and a reputation for wealth that matched the lives they had left behind in Tehran. By some estimates around 30,000 Iranian Jews settled in Beverly Hills and the streets immediately around it.
They were not the only ones. The exodus carried secular Muslims, Baha’is and Armenians from Iran into the wider region as well, though it was the Jewish Iranian community that put down its deepest roots inside Beverly Hills itself.
The Peak
A second great wave arrived after the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, as tens of thousands more sought stability and opportunity. By the 1990s the Iranian presence had become impossible to overlook.
The Iranian American Parents Association formed in 1994, eventually drawing members from all five Beverly Hills public schools. So many pupils were of Iranian descent that the high school took to closing on Nowruz, the Persian New Year, scheduling a staff development day rather than teaching to a half-empty building.
Persian builders reshaped the housing stock too, raising large, columned villas that locals nicknamed in not always kind terms. By 2004 the city had set up a design commission partly to review the more ambitious projects, a quiet sign of how thoroughly the newcomers had remade the place.
Today
The political arrival came in 2007, when Jimmy Delshad, born Jamshid in Shiraz and arrived in America as a teenager in 1959, was sworn in as mayor. He was the first Iranian-American to lead a US city of any size, and he served a second term in 2010.
The story has only deepened since. In April 2025 Sharona Nazarian was sworn in as mayor, the first Iranian-American woman to hold the office. The community that once arrived as refugees now sits at the head of the council table.
The Landmarks
Nessah Synagogue, 142 South Rexford Drive. Founded in 1980 by Rabbi David Shofet, son of Yedidia Shofet who had served as chief rabbi of Iran, Nessah is the largest traditional Persian Jewish congregation in the United States. Its name means eternal in Hebrew, and its purpose was to carry on in California what Iran’s 2,500-year-old Jewish community had been forced to leave behind. The congregation worshipped at the Saban Theatre and in Santa Monica before settling into its grand Beverly Hills home in 2002.
Saban Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Boulevard. An Art Deco landmark that opened in 1930 as the Fox-Wilshire, it became an early waystation for Beverly Hills Persian Jews, who gathered here for services before Nessah found its permanent home. It now hosts Temple of the Arts alongside concerts and film shoots.
Rodeo Drive. The street where the Mahboubi brothers first planted Iranian capital in the early 1970s remains a Persian story as much as a fashion one. Persian families have owned and developed property along this corridor for half a century, and the wealth that fled Tehran helped build the very image of luxury that draws tourists here today.
Beverly Hills High School, 241 South Moreno Drive. The city’s public high school sits at the centre of the community’s life. Generations of Iranian-American pupils have passed through it, so many that the school’s calendar bends around Nowruz, and the parents’ association it helped inspire knits the families together.
Sinai Temple and Beth Jacob Congregation. The older Jewish institutions of the area absorbed the Persian newcomers and were changed by them. Iranians came to make up a large share of Sinai Temple’s membership, and Beth Jacob in Beverly Hills gave the first Persian Jewish arrivals a place to pray before they founded their own congregations.
Persian Square, Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles. A short drive west of the city limits, the stretch of Westwood Boulevard between Wilshire and Santa Monica is officially named Persian Square by the City of Los Angeles, marked at Wilkins Avenue. It is worth being precise: this is in Los Angeles, not Beverly Hills, but it is the commercial soul of the community that lives in both. Farsi signage points to grocers, bakeries, bookshops and salons.
Shamshiri Grill, 1712 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles. Open since 1981 and one of the oldest restaurants in what locals call Little Persia, Shamshiri has fed the diaspora for more than four decades. Like Attari Sandwich Shop nearby, it is the kind of place where Beverly Hills Iranians come to eat the food of home and to talk through whatever news is arriving from Tehran.
Where They Came From
The Persians of Beverly Hills came, overwhelmingly, from Iran, and within Iran from its capital. Tehran in the 1970s was a city of cosmopolitan ambition, its upper and professional classes educated, often Western-facing and deeply woven into the country’s commercial life.
The Jewish community of Iran was ancient, tracing itself back more than two and a half millennia to the time of Cyrus the Great. Concentrated in Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan, it had thrived under the Shah, and it formed the core of those who would settle in Beverly Hills.
Alongside them came secular Muslim families, members of the persecuted Baha’i faith and Armenian Christians from Iran, each carrying a different relationship to the homeland but a shared sense of exile. What united them was less religion than a way of life that the revolution had made impossible.
They arrived, in many cases, with capital and credentials intact, and that distinguishes this diaspora sharply from most. The Persians who reached Beverly Hills were not starting from nothing. They were continuing, in a new country, lives that had been interrupted rather than begun.
Beverly Hills Today
By most measures around 16 per cent of Beverly Hills residents claim Iranian ancestry, one of the highest concentrations of any city in the United States. Some local accounts put the Persian share of the population closer to a fifth, and the figure has only climbed across the generations.
The community is now thoroughly American and thoroughly Persian at once. Children and grandchildren of the original arrivals run businesses, sit on the council and shape the city’s culture, while still gathering for Nowruz, marrying within familiar circles and praying at Nessah.
Figures like Sam Nazarian, who built a hospitality empire out of Los Angeles, and the broader Nazarian family illustrate how far the second generation has travelled from the suitcases of 1979. The wealth that fled the revolution has compounded into something woven into the fabric of the city.
Beverly Hills has, in other words, become one of those rare places where a diaspora did not merely survive but flourished, and then quietly took the reins. The Tehran that vanished in 1979 lives on, in a sense, behind the palm trees of a California city that learned to speak a little Farsi.
If your family’s story passed through Beverly Hills, or any of the places Iranians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Tehran to the boutiques of Rodeo Drive, to wherever you are now.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Beverly Hills sometimes called Tehrangeles or Tehran 90210?
The nickname Tehrangeles describes the cluster of Los Angeles neighbourhoods, including Beverly Hills, Westwood and Brentwood, that became home to the Iranian diaspora after 1979. Tehran 90210 is a playful local riff on the same idea, pairing the Iranian capital with the city’s famous postcode.
How large is the Iranian community in Beverly Hills?
Roughly 16 per cent of Beverly Hills residents report Iranian ancestry, among the highest shares of any US city. Some community estimates place the Persian portion of the population nearer 20 per cent, reflecting how central the group has become to civic life.
Who was the first Iranian-American mayor of Beverly Hills?
Jimmy Delshad, born in Shiraz and a Beverly Hills resident since arriving in America in 1959, became mayor in 2007 and again in 2010. He was the first Iranian-American to lead a US city. In 2025 Sharona Nazarian became the first Iranian-American woman to hold the office.
What is the difference between Persian and Iranian?
Iranian refers to citizenship of the nation of Iran, while Persian refers to the dominant ethnicity, language and culture of that country. Many in Beverly Hills favour the word Persian, partly for its cultural depth and partly to distance themselves from the politics of the current Iranian state. Both terms are used here, as the community uses them.
Is Persian Square in Beverly Hills?
No. Persian Square, the officially designated commercial heart of the community, sits on Westwood Boulevard within the city of Los Angeles, just west of the Beverly Hills line. It serves the Iranian population of both cities, but it is technically in Los Angeles rather than Beverly Hills itself.
Are most Iranians in Beverly Hills Jewish?
The community inside Beverly Hills is predominantly Persian Jewish, drawn by the established Jewish institutions and schools. The wider Tehrangeles diaspora is more mixed, including secular Muslims, Baha’is and Armenian Christians from Iran, but it was Iranian Jews who put down the deepest roots within the city itself.
The Persian story in California stretches well beyond Beverly Hills. For the broader picture, read about the Persians in Tehrangeles, Los Angeles, the orderly suburban chapter of the Persians in Irvine, California, and the East Coast counterpart in the Persians in Great Neck, New York. The Jewish diaspora that surrounds them appears in the Israelis in Pico-Robertson, Los Angeles and the Jews of Fairfax, Los Angeles, while a parallel exodus from the same region shaped the Armenians in Glendale, California. For more on the community’s institutions, see Tehrangeles and Nessah Synagogue.