Sohrab Ahmari

Sohrab Ahmari is the op-ed editor of the New York Post, a contributing editor of the Catholic Herald and a columnist for First Things. Previously, he served as a columnist and editor with The Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London and as senior writer at Commentary magazine.

In addition to those publications, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent and America, among many others. He has testified before the British Parliament and appears regularly on broadcast media on both sides of the Atlantic, including the BBC, Sky News, France 24, Deutsche Welle, EWTN and Fox News.

Ahmari is the author of The New Philistines (2016), a critique of how identity politics are corrupting the arts, From Fire, by Water (2019), a spiritual memoir about his conversion to Roman Catholicism, and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos (2021)

Early life and education Ahmari was born in Tehran, Iran. In his 2012 book, Arab Spring Dreams, he writes that he was interrogated by security officials about his parents and faced disciplinary action as a child for accidentally bringing a videocassette of Star Wars into school at a time when Western films were officially banned in the country. In 1998, at the age of 13, Ahmari moved with his family to the United States.

Ahmari earned a J.D. degree from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston. Between college and law school, Ahmari completed a two-year commitment to Teach for America in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas.

While in law school, inspired in part by the protests following the disputed June 2009 Iranian presidential election, he began working as a freelance journalist, contributing pieces to publications such as The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Commentary among others