"Direct and accessible. A tour de force of research that demonstrates seemingly unlikely origins, evolutions, and contradictions of social identities."—George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark and American Studies in a Moment of Danger

“This ingenious study . . . will transform how we conceptualize immigration, race, gender, and the histories and boundaries of Arab and Latin America” (Nadine Naber, author of Arab America). Los Angeles is home to the largest population of people of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, Syrian and Lebanese migration to Southern California has been intimately connected to and through Latin America. Arab Routes uncovers the stories of this Syrian American community, one both Arabized and Latinized, to reveal important cross-border and multiethnic solidarities in Syrian California. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri reconstructs the early Syrian connections through California, Texas, Mexico, and Lebanon. She reveals the Syrian interests in the defense of the Mexican American teens charged in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder, in actor Danny Thomas's rise to prominence in LA’s Syrian cultural festivals, and in more recent activities of the grandchildren of immigrants to reclaim a sense of Arabness. Gualtieri reinscribes Syrians into Southern California history through her examination of powerful images and texts, augmented with interviews with descendants of immigrants. Telling the story of how Syrians helped forge a global Los Angeles, Arab Routes counters a long-held stereotype of Arabs as outsiders and underscores their longstanding place in American culture and in interethnic coalitions, past and present.

WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents' lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. Today, in the age of the Likud and ISIS, Oscar's son, the Jewish Arab journalist Massoud Hayoun whom Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his family's story. To reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity is, for Hayoun, part of the larger project to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. It is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world; an age that is now nearly lost. When We Were Arabs showcases the gorgeous prose of the Eppy Award–winning writer Massoud Hayoun, bringing the worlds of his grandparents alive, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines over which we do battle.

Middle Easterners: Sometimes White, Sometimes Not - an article by John Tehranian The Middle Eastern question lies at the heart of the most pressing issues of our time: the war in Iraq and on terrorism, the growing tension between preservation of our national security and protection of our civil rights, and the debate over immigration, assimilation, and our national identity. Yet paradoxically, little attention is focused on our domestic Middle Eastern population and its place in American society. Unlike many other racial minorities in our country, Middle Eastern Americans have faced rising, rather than diminishing, degrees of discrimination over time; a fact highlighted by recent targeted immigration policies, racial profiling, a war on terrorism with a decided racialist bent, and growing rates of job discrimination and hate crime. Oddly enough, however, Middle Eastern Americans are not even considered a minority in official government data. Instead, they are deemed white by law. In Whitewashed, John Tehranian combines his own personal experiences as an Iranian American with an expert’s analysis of current events, legal trends, and critical theory to analyze this bizarre Catch-22 of Middle Eastern racial classification. He explains how American constructions of Middle Eastern racial identity have changed over the last two centuries, paying particular attention to the shift in perceptions of the Middle Easterner from friendly foreigner to enemy alien, a trend accelerated by the tragic events of 9/11. Focusing on the contemporary immigration debate, the war on terrorism, media portrayals of Middle Easterners, and the processes of creating racial stereotypes, Tehranian argues that, despite its many successes, the modern civil rights movement has not done enough to protect the liberties of Middle Eastern Americans. By following how concepts of whiteness have transformed over time, Whitewashed forces readers to rethink and question some of their most deeply held assumptions about race in American society.

Bringing the rich terrain of Arab American histories to bear on conceptualizations of race in the United States, this groundbreaking volume fills a critical gap in the field of U.S. racial and ethnic studies. The articles collected here highlight emergent discourses on the distinct ways that race matters to the study of Arab American histories and experiences and asks essential questions. What is the relationship between U.S. imperialism in Arab homelands and anti-Arab racism in the United States? In what ways have the axes of nation, religion, class, and gender intersected with Arab American racial formations? What is the significance of whiteness studies to Arab American studies? Transcending multiculturalist discourses that have simply added on the category “Arab-American” to the landscape of U.S. racial and ethnic studies after the attacks of September 11, 2001, this volume locates September 11 as a turning point, rather than as a beginning, in Arab Americans’

Through his own life story, from childhood through is life as an adult, El Rassi illustrates the prejudices and discrimination Arabs and Muslims experience daily in American society. He contends with ignorant teachers, racist neighbours, bullying classmates and a growing sense of alienation. He also examines the roles that media and popular culture play and with examples from film and news media, he shows how difficult it is to have an Arab identity in a society saturated with anti-Arab messages.

Perceptions of the Middle East in conflicting discourses from North America, South America, and Europe