August 21, 2026
Alex Grinberg on Arabic, Persian, and Understanding Iran from the Inside (Arabic)
Senior Fellow Alex Grinberg joined host Baligh Saladin on East to West: Voices from the Middle East(شرق إلى الغرب | أصوات من الشرق الأوسط), the Arabic-language podcast of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, for an interview that begins not with policy but with biography. The episode, "From Moscow to the Arab World and Iran," asks a simple question with a long answer: why would a young man born in Moscow set out to learn Arabic?
Grinberg traces the path from a fascination with languages and Arabic literature to Persian, and from there into Israeli military intelligence and a career analyzing Iran. He describes the turning point that moved him from studying jihadist movements to trying to understand the Islamic Republic on its own terms — and what it means to approach a country through its language and culture rather than through its headlines.
The conversation then turns to Iranian society itself: the distance between the Iranian people and the regime that governs them, the place religion actually occupies in Iran today, the cultural life that rarely surfaces in news coverage, and the ways Iranians diverge from the image widely held of them elsewhere in the region.
Watch the full interview on YouTube (Arabic).
Alex Grinberg is a Senior Fellow at the Turan Research Center.