The fact that the Jewish community has shrunk to quarter of its original size speaks to the overall grim, mostly economic, realities of life not only for Jews or religious minorities, but for all Iranians who are not on the side of "them." ("They" and "them" are the insiders' reference to the regime.) The fact that the community, unlike most others in the region, did not vanish and continues to exist attests to a unique truth: Iranian Jews recognized that they had not been singled out to suffer in the aftermath of the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979. And, in many complex ways, they have sometimes fared better than, say, secular Iranians of Shiite descent, who stood in opposition to the regime.