“ I am an Arab because that is the legacy I inherit My Arabness is cultural. “I am Arab because it is what I and my parents have been told not to be, for generations, to stop us from living in portentous solidarity with other Arabs.”įor Hayoun, asserting his own Arabness is in itself a political act, one of solidarity and of retaliation: “ In large part, I identify as Arab because reclaiming my place in a broader Arab world scares our foes who have, for so long, taught us to fight against ourselves,” he writes. 18) From the beginning, Hayoun writes a disclaimer of sorts, stating that his is an origin story, and as such, it has a political agenda. Hayoun, a Los Angeles-based journalist, writes in the introduction that his intention for writing this book is to reclaim his Jewish Arab identity and “ to recuperate it as a stolen asset of the Arab world.”(p. Massoud Hayoun’s family memoir is an attempt to recapture the Arab identity that was stripped away from him and millions of other Arab Jews. The colonized, filled with self-loathing, in turn attempted to distance themselves culturally from the greater mass of indigenous people, who in a new world order were seen as backward and whose identity became shameful.” ~Massoud Hayoun, When We Were Arabs (p. “ The colonizers envisioned family trees in which Jewish Arabs became progressively less Arab with each generation, and imposed policies to that effect.

The Jewish Neighbor by A.M. Khalifa