Voicing the diaspora: styling the Arab–American binary through the micro-symbolic textures of macro-ideological meaning in The Inheritance of E xile

Theoretically framed by cultural and transnational citizenship, this narrative inquiry study engages with the lived experiences and teaching practice of an Arab migrant social studies teacher named Mr. Ahmad (pseudonym). More specifically, we examined Mr. Ahmad’s understanding of his positions and sense of place as an Arab migrant in the United States and his active involvement in transnational politics and teaching endeavors across the borders to navigate his immigration status and racially minoritized position as an Arab migrant in the United States. This study further elucidates how Mr. Ahmad’s transnational engagement, along with his racialized experiences, served as a foundation for his teaching philosophy and pedagogy centering on cultivating students’ critical consciousness and action toward social justice and equity. By shedding lights on Mr. Ahmad’s narratives and agencies in claiming and exercising his belongingness and teaching and how they are informed by his distinctive racial and migratory backgrounds and complex life stories as an Arab migrant, this study will contribute to offering a more nuanced, multifaceted, and authentic portrayal of Arab and Arab American communities that transcends the existing, simplistic, essentialist, deficit-oriented, and Orientalist narratives against Arab and Arab American communities. The study will also contribute to an important yet significantly under-researched area of Arab and Arab American teachers, offering valuable and vital insights into future research and teacher education.

The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship

The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship

Silencing Dissent: How Biased Civil Rights Policies Stifle Dialogue on Israel

ObjectiveTo assess the feasibility of implementing a culturally responsive version of Gottman's Seven Principles relationship education program in a community‐based setting for married Arab American adults.BackgroundTo provide high‐quality couple and relationship education, it is necessary to acknowledge the population's needs and cultural backgrounds. One ethnic minority group that needs special attention is the Arab American community, which shares protective factors in terms of family support, religious beliefs, resiliency, and collectivist culture.MethodWe adapted Gottman's Seven Principles Program and conducted a qualitative feasibility study to examine recruitment capability, program acceptability, demand, and participant response among 16 Arab American married adults.ResultsThe results emphasize the vital role that thoughtful cultural and linguistic program adaptation played in increasing the acceptability and engagement of Arab American participants. However, results identified the ongoing stigma in Arab American communities against overtly seeking help for marital issues.ConclusionThis feasibility study provides helpful methodological and practical guidance to inform the design of larger scale randomized trials examining the efficacy of culturally responsive marriage education programs.ImplicationsThis study outlined actionable strategies, adaptations, venues, and communication channels to reduce barriers and optimize the delivery of marriage education to Arab American couples and families.

Background Hookah smoking has increased in popularity, and acceptance in many countries in the world such as Arab American communities. Aim of the study To assess the frequency of hookah smoking and to recognize the knowledge and cultural identity of Arab Americans. Materials and methods This cross-sectional questionnaire based on a descriptive study was conducted among 100 Arab American population (convenience sampling when the link distributed via social media, and community centers) during January 2024 to May 2025. Results A study included a total of 100 Arab American participants were included in this research. There was a significant difference regarding age (p ≤ 0.001), the majority were between 31 and 40 years old (54%), Males represented a higher proportion of the participants (67%) compared to females (33%) (p ≤ 0.001). Regarding smoking status, 36% were current smokers, 45% reported never smoking, and 19% were ex-smokers (p = 0.003). About 51% believed that hookah use was equally hazardous as cigars, whereas 49% believed it was less harmful (p = 0.777). Importantly, all participants (100%) agreed that hookah smoking affects multiple body systems, including the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, and is associated with cancer and transmission of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 virus. Conclusions This study highlights adult dominance in hookah use, pervasive misconceptions, and cultural drivers among Arab American communities.

BackgroundInfluenza vaccination among minoritized groups remains below federal benchmarks in the United States (US). We used data from the 2004–2016 California Health Interview Surveys (CHIS) to characterize influenza vaccination patterns among Arab Americans in California.MethodsInfluenza vaccination was self-reported by Arab American adults (N = 1163) and non-Hispanic Whites (NHW, N = 166,955). Differences in influenza vaccination prevalence and odds were compared using chi-squared tests and survey-weighted logistic regression, respectively.ResultsAcross all years, 30.3% of Arab Americans self-reported receiving an influenza vaccine (vs. 40.5% for NHW, p < 0.05). After sequential adjustment by sociodemographic, health behavior, and acculturation variables no differences in odds of self-reported influenza vaccination were observed between Arab Americans and NHW (odds ratio: 1.02, 95% confidence interval: 0.76–1.38). Male and unemployed Arab Americans had higher odds of reporting influenza vaccination than female and employed Arab Americans.ConclusionsFuture work should consider specific barriers to influenza vaccination in Arab American communities.

The events of September 11, 2001 reverberated through many Arab American communities across the country in ways that other Americans have not experienced. During the period directly following the attacks, people of Arab descent were harassed; churches and mosques were damaged, and in a few instances people were physically attacked, shot, or killed. In cities and towns with high concentrations of Arab Americans, public hostility and suspicion grew due to outside pressures. Utilizing interview data from a current national study of relations between Arab American communities and law enforcement, we explore issues of victimization, the perceived prevalence of hate and bias crimes among immigrants of Arab descent and law enforcement, and community-level feelings of vulnerability and fear in a post-September 11 environment. In addition, we examine the degree to which federal policies, media attention and law enforcement practices have led to a sense of community-wide victimization, which we label as a type of cultural trauma. Bearing the brunt of enforcement actions, Arab American communities are grappling with the insecurity and fear that has come from increased scrutiny in the name of security for others.

Tobacco use is a serious public health problem among Arab Americans with limited English proficiency. The main goal of this study was to develop a culturally-tailored and linguistically-sensitive Arabic-language smoking cessation program. A secondary goal was to evaluate the feasibility of recruiting Arab Americans through a faith-based community organization which serves as a neighborhood social center for the city of Richmond’s Arab Americans. Eight first-generation Arab American men aged 20 years and above completed the three-month program. There was general agreement of the following: (1) each stage of the five-stage cessation program could be improved; (2) several glaring errors could be easily corrected; and (3) minor variation among the various countries-of-origin of participants could lead to a few changes in the program with respect to the use of some colloquial terms. The results suggest that it is possible to reach smokers from Arab American communities with a tailored Arabic language smoking cessation program. The findings of this report will be used as the basis for a large-scale intervention study of a culturally and linguistically sensitive cessation program for Arab American ethnic groups.

With Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey from Lebanon, published in 1991, and Arabian Jazz, published in 1993, Elmaz Abinader and Diana Abu-Jaber have respectively contributed to the genre of the journey to the past, recurrently adopted in contemporary minority group writings and meant to restore that past for the assertion of a distinctive ethnic self. Through memoir and fiction, the two women writers explore the transformative power of narration and interfere to break the confining construction of Arabness which rests on a combination of socio-historical factors and contemporary political events. (1) In fact, in the case of Arab Americans, the Arab-Israeli and its impact upon the Jewish American population in particular and the US population at large has contributed to shaping general public opinion in a way that maintains and reinforces the already existing negative stereotypes of the Arab as the mysterious and inferior 'other,' constructed over a long practice of the Orientalist mode of representation. Together, the two sets of factors shape negatively the present experience of Arab Americans in the United States, making the restoration of the past an appealing alternative. But in addition to asserting their ethnicity in a hostile, image-ruled environment, Arab American women must also voice their femaleness. Their experience of self is strongly gendered on account of the serious limitations for women that the journey to the past leads them to (dis)/(un)cover. The articulation of the self through the traditionally empowering return to the past, in their case undertaken to negotiate the Arab and the American parts of the self, requires the use of a gendered memory guiding through the silences about the female past. Abinader and Abu-Jaber investigate the interconnectedness of the past and the present in the making of the Arab American female self and create a space of self-invention for Arab American women where they negotiate a new sense of self in the layers of a buried ethnic and female past. They use memory and the journey to the past of their female family members and fictional characters respectively, in order to examine the implications of their own ambivalent perceptions of self and to devise a constructive way of dealing with the present. The reclamation of the Arab past by Abinader and Abu-Jaber and its reconstruction from a female perspective is instrumental for the writers' own agency and the empowerment of their Arab American women characters. It is this struggle to define a mode of agency capable of responding to the historical and political exigencies of the identity 'Arab American' which, according to the Arab American critic Lisa Suhair Majaj, resonates through contemporary Arab American literature (Arab 280). Far from using memory for a nostalgic recollection likely to fix the past in an idealized depiction and identity in an essentialized conception, the two Arab American women writers engage in a constructive invocation of the past. Identity is no longer viewed as exclusively dependent on ethnic history but as dependent on the way that history relates to the American present and gives meaning to a blend of Arab, American, and female components of a continuously negotiable conception of oneself. Yet, the position of Arab American women is complicated by the little support they receive from mainstream American feminists who tend to foreground the gender experience. In their exclusive preoccupation with subverting the dominant patriarchal discourse, mainstream American feminists fail to regard differences of female experiences dictated by race and ethnicity and endorse an alternative hegemonic discourse. For instance, Evelyn Shakir denounces the racist assumptions of American feminists who had generally followed (and sometimes led) the crowd who believe that all Arab women are victims of genital mutilation and forced marriage, and that all Arab men are oil sheiks, terrorists, or religious fanatics (104). …

Arab Americans are one of the largest ethnic minority groups in the United States. The mental health of Arab Americans and their opinions on mental health, however, remain understudied despite higher than average rates of mental illness and lower rates of treatment. Culturally-mediated conceptualizations of mental illness may generate stigma, contributing to disparities in treatment. This study aimed to assess the attitudes and perspectives of Arab Americans regarding mental illness in order to address barriers to treatment. Using an anonymous bilingual Qualtrics survey, we collected data from Arab and non-Arab participants (N = 294; ages 18+) on their conceptualizations of the causes of mental illness and on their stigma towards mental illness and mental health treatments. Compared to non-Arabs, Arab participants reported higher average mental illness stigma and were more likely to rate psychiatric medications as addictive and unhelpful. Among Arabs, being Christian, male, and older (>29 years old) were each associated with higher stigma. Arabs were less likely than non-Arabs to endorse biological explanations for mental illness. These are among the first findings to describe mental illness stigma and conceptualizations of mental health in the Arab American population and may inform future community interventions providing culturally competent care to Arab Americans.

This article focuses on the life experience and political activism of Palestinian American lesbian activist Huda Jadallah as a representative example of how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT/queer) Arab Americans came out to both queer communities and Arab American communities in the 1980s and 1990s. The author argues that this dual outness was utilized as a strategy through which to accomplish three interrelated aims: to build a queer Arab American community, utilize that community as a starting point from which to challenge anti-Arab racism within queer communities, and challenge homophobia in Arab American communities. Based on an oral history interview with Jadallah, in conjunction with analysis of Jadallah’s personal ephemera collection, this article takes a queer archiving methodological approach to consider how outness as strategy may also be utilized with regard to queer Arab American archiving and history.

Immigrant populations provide a unique intersection of cultural and environmental risk factors implicated in asthma etiology. This study focuses on asthma prevalence and severity in 600 Arab American households in metro Detroit, the largest immigrant reception zone for Arab Americans in North America. The survey method introduced a number of novel features: (a) a ranking scheme for the key environmental risk factors for asthma was used to derive an aggregated environmental risk index (ERI) for each household, and (b) an aggregate measure of asthma severity based on symptom frequency and intensity. Environmental risk factors and surrogates for socioeconomic status (SES) were found to be stronger predictors of asthma prevalence than asthma severity, while demographic variables such as English fluency and birth in the United States were better predictors of asthma severity than asthma prevalence. These results suggest that SES variables may be more reflective of environmental exposures in communities involved in this study, while English fluency and birth in the United States may be linked to health care access and utilization behavior that can influence the asthma management. We also found a significant relationship between asthma prevalence and degree of acculturation. Asthma prevalence was highest among moderately acculturated immigrants compared with new immigrants and those who were well acculturated, suggesting that among Arab Americans in the Detroit area, risk factors associated with new immigrant status are replaced by "western" risk factors as the population becomes more acculturated.

Palestine Solidarity, Political Discourse, and the Peace Movement, 1982–1988 Hilton Obenzinger (bio) From the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 through Jesse Jack-son’s second presidential campaign in 1988, the issue of Palestinian rights entered American political discourse in an unprecedented fashion. Arab and Palestinian Americans began to be involved in all aspects of American political life, including electoral politics, while a loose alliance of white New Left activists, African Americans, liberal Jewish groups, churches, and others began to create a consistent pro-Palestinian presence in the peace and anti-intervention movement, despite the fact that it was “arguably the most vilified peace and solidarity effort in the country” (Elbaum 2002, 266). At the same time, several attempts to deepen intercommunal relations between the Arab American and African American communities were launched, and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition presidential campaigns of [End Page 233] 1984 and 1988 brought the Palestinian issue into the public arena as never before. The task was to crack open the pro-Israel consensus that had dominated political life in the United States since at least 1967. This essay reviews some of the key initiatives that set the stage for deeper American sympathies and political action for Palestinian rights leading up to the first intifada. None of these efforts—as limited as they were—came easily; and in the end, despite major openings in public discourse, the goal of overturning the pro-Israel consensus in national politics ultimately fell short. A historical review of several aspects of this period—the response to the 1982 war, the development of a self-conscious Palestine solidarity movement, and the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns—will help to understand this mixed assessment. On June 12, 1982, nearly a million people marched in New York City during the Second Special United Nations Session on Disarmament calling for an end to the nuclear arms race, targeting President Reagan’s policies of increased militarization in particular. A week before, Israel had launched its invasion of Lebanon with a number of unannounced goals, one of the most important of which was to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The invasion heightened already existing conflicts within the peace movement. The rally was organized by predominantly white peace groups, many associated with the nuclear freeze movement, which believed that it would be necessary to limit potentially controversial demands of the demonstration to generate a massive turnout. A Third World and Progressive People’s Coalition (TWPPC) formed with leaders from communities of color and leftists to demand representation on the planning committee. Sheila Collins, in her history of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, recounts how TWPPC “also insisted that the march call for an end to US intervention in the third world, a redirecting of the nation’s priorities from military spending to human needs, and an end to racism and other issues of concern to people of color” (1986, 101). As a result, the planning committee became embroiled in bitter fights, with accusations of left sectarianism and racism exchanged among the factions. Notably, however, “This was the first time since the anti–Vietnam War movement that black and other minority activists had made a serious bid to shape the direction of a movement [End Page 234] that white activists saw as ‘theirs,’ and it very nearly exploded” (101). Compromises were made, the leadership committee was broadened, and the program expanded to include a demand for money to be directed from military spending to human needs at home. Anti-interventionist speeches and slogans were to be allowed—except for anything having to do with the invasion of Lebanon. The leadership of the June 12th demonstration refused to link the nuclear threat to the Israeli invasion and the stateless condition of the Palestinians. As Max Elbaum explains, “Activists from the TWPPC as well as others pointed out that conflict in the Middle East was consistently identified as one of the most likely trigger-points for a nuclear war and that Israel’s nuclear capacity was an open secret. . . . But the influence of Zionism among central antinuclear organizers was too great for such points to be allowed a mention from the rally platform” (2002, 266). Those opposed to...

Experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization/survivorship and the health and well-being of Arab American women remain understudied despite a growing U.S. Arab population. This study examines 164 Arab American women in relationships and their experiences with IPV, self-rated physical and mental health, and relationship satisfaction. Analyses revealed three key findings: (a) IPV victimization is negatively associated with self-rated physical health (including composite, injury, and sexual coercion measures) and relationship satisfaction (including composite, injury, physical assault, and sexual coercion measures), but a negative relationship with mental health has only limited support (i.e., injury measure), (b) Christian and Muslim respondents reported overall similar levels of IPV victimization and physical and mental health, and (c) Muslim women reported lower relationship satisfaction, independent from IPV experiences. The findings reaffirm the call for culturally responsive and tailored programming aimed at eradicating or reducing IPV within Arab American communities. Moreover, increasing research on Arab American women can be an important resource for clinicians supporting this community.