When Israeli pop superstar Rita Jahanforuz told her friends she wanted to record an album in Farsi, they thought she must have gone mad.
The 50-year-old Iranian-born, Jewish singer, who is usually known just by her first name, recalled: "'They all said, 'You want to record an album in the language of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Who will listen to it?' I didn't know why I had to do it, I just did. It's like someone lit a match. What's happening now is beyond what I ever imagined."
What's happening now is the rarest of musical occurrences – an album that is a big hit simultaneously in both Israel and Iran. My Joys – composed of popular Iranian ballads sung in Farsi – went gold in Israel within three weeks of its release. Sales figures from Iran are harder to come by, though reports indicate it has flown off the shelves of those music shops that covertly sold the CD with a blank cover.
Determined Iranian fans are using sophisticated software to bypass the Islamic regime's tight internet controls and download the album and playing it at weddings and underground nightclubs across Tehran.
Admiring anything Israeli, let alone a sexy female singer, is risky in Iran. Women are forbidden from performing in public. Female musicians that do perform give clandestine concerts in the basements of private homes.
"Music from Israel is interesting because it comes from the epitome of evil – people are curious," said Liora Hendelmann-Baavur, expert in Iranian popular culture at Tel Aviv University.
Officials in Tehran were not impressed. While the Washington Post has hailed her as an "anti-war spokesperson", Fars, a news agency affiliated with Iran's government, accused Rita of being Israel's "latest plot in a soft war".
Rita finds this idea hilarious. In response, she flicked through her iPhone, searching for an email she considered much more significant than the opinion of the military guard. "I'm from Iran. I don't know you but I would like to express my feelings about you … I love you, I love you, I love you. God bless you and your country," she said, reading out the email.
She then exclaimed triumphantly: "These are the real people! They understand that I am trying to show Iran's real culture, it's true beautiful self, which has become lost to the outside world because of its government."
There are 250,000 Iranian Jews living in Israel, of which Rita is probably the most famous and well-loved. She was named the country's "top female singer of the past 60 years" during anniversary celebrations in 2010. She clings to her Iranian roots but is proudly Israeli.
Her family moved to Israel in 1970 when she was eight but Rita remembers her childhood in Iran with fond nostalgia. Her earliest memories are of her mother singing and dancing through the house, songs she has revisited on this album. A tribute to this early inspiration, the diva invited her 72-year-old mother to sing the album's final track.
Rita remembers seeing her father sitting, glued to the radio, smoking cigarette after cigarette. When she asked what was wrong, she remembers her mother telling her that there was a war in Israel – the six-day war of 1967. "I couldn't understand the idea of war. I could grasp one person or a couple of people being angry with each other but how could a whole country of people be angry at exactly the same time with a whole other country of people?" she asked.
"In the end, what matters is not the few people at the top, it is us, the people. The reaction to this album has convinced me that love is the only reasonable action in the world."
• This article was amended on 14 July 2012. The original version wrongly put the date of the six-day war in 1969 instead of 1967.
