9781620974582_

Close Media Ties: Massoud Hayoun has a dense and wide network of friendships and connections across the media landscape.

Regular columnist for Pacific Standard and expert on immigration and China; outside of the scope of this book, Hayoun is an expert on the Mexican-American border and on Chinese politics, and is the weekly columnist on international affairs on psmag.com

Undiscovered history: Hayoun has gone back to primary source archives in Arabic, Hebrew, French, and English to uncover a lost history totally inaccessible to American readers.

Credentials/story: Hayouns coming out as a Jewish Arab is radical and disruptive within those communities and newsworthy in-itself, but Hayoun is a very well established international correspondent for multiple news outlets, covering the Middle East and China

Twist on a recognizable genre: This is a fresh take on family memoir stories such as The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, by Lucette Lagnado, Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Out of Egypt by André Aciman

(*_*)9781620974582_

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 familys Jewish Arab identity

There was a time when being an "Arab" didnt 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, Oscars son, the Jewish Arab journalist Massoud Hayoun whom Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his familys 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 Awardwinning 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.

...

Filtros

d638dbfd-5994-3f7b-a5e7-14a195ab6d6c