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Features

50 Iranian-Americans You Should Know: Azita Raji

February 22, 2017
Roland Elliott Brown
3 min read
Azita Raji is sworn in as ambassador to Sweden
Azita Raji is sworn in as ambassador to Sweden
50 Iranian-Americans You Should Know: Azita Raji

Iranians have been making significant contributions to business, science, culture and entertainment in the United States since the early 20th century. Today, there are almost one million people of Iranian origin living in the United States. In this series, IranWire profiles the Iranian-Americans you should know, highlighting their achievements and careers, and asking what it means to be part of one of America’s most educated and successful communities.

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Azita Raji is the former US ambassador to Sweden. She is the first Iranian-American to serve as an ambassador, and the first woman to occupy the role in Sweden. Raji also worked as a fundraiser for President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

Raji was born in Tehran in 1961 and studied in Iran and Europe. She attended an international high school in Switzerland, where she took up competitive downhill skiing.

Raji’s family fled Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Speaking before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee before her confirmation as ambassador to Sweden in 2015, she said,

I appear before you as a woman whose family endured the life-altering upheaval of the Iranian Revolution, and found new hope and new life in the United States of America... I have never taken for granted the freedom to speak my mind, the protection of the rule of law, and the opportunities to benefit from the similarities and differences that create the transformative mosaic that is America.

Shortly after arriving in the US from Switzerland, Raji studied architecture and French at Columbia University and later earned her Master of Business Administration at Columbia.

“I found the United States to be a vibrant country that valued hard work and inclusiveness,” Raji told IranWire in a brief email exchange. “I wanted to succeed and to give back to a country that values opportunity and diversity.”

Upon graduation, Raji worked as an investment banker and held senior positions at several major firms including J.P. Morgan.

In 2008, she joined the national advisory board of the Democratic National Committee to support President Barack Obama.

In 2012, she worked as chair of the Swing State Victory Fund for Obama’s campaign, using her experience as an investment banker and philanthropist to support his reelection.

Obama’s rise to office, she later wrote in Newsweek, testified America’s moral evolution. “It is easy to forget,” she wrote,

that just 45 years before Barack Obama's inauguration, racial segragation was a way of life and violence against non-whites was endemic in some regions. I took pride in representing a country that overcame bigotry and threw off its legacy of repression and discrimination to elect a man who embodied tolerance, compassion, and dignity, a man who credited us with effecting this colossal cultural change, and who invited us to continue to work with him to, in the words of Dr Martin Luther King, bend that great moral arc toward justice.

In 2014, Obama appointed Raji ambassador to Sweden, although she was delayed in taking office when Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz and his supporters sought to block all Obama appointments over dissatisfaction with the Obama administration’s negations over Iran’s nuclear program.

Raji took office in Stockholm in March 2016. During her time in Sweden, she worked with Swedish ministers to promote gender equality and signed an agreement facilitating more convenient US customs clearance for Swedes.

When Donald Trump was sworn in as president on January 20, 2017, he ordered all Obama-appointed ambassadors, including Raji, to leave office.

Since then, Raji has repeatedly challenged the Trump administration’s presentation of Sweden’s openness to refugees as an anti-model for the United States.

“The United States is built by immigrants,” she told IranWire. “Their courage, hopes, creativity, and ambition have led to our prosperity and strength in innovation. Diversity makes us stronger.”

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