Arab American Festival In Prospect Park

I’m back after a considerable hiatus. I plan to make several postings in the coming days and then don’t expect much for two weeks as I will be on a two week ‘roots’ jaunt from Rostov-on-Don, through Belarus and Lithuania in search of evidence of my ancestors who left those places in the 1870’s and 1890’s for the Goldine Medina, and look how wildly unsuccessful I have proven after all those years. Nu shto?!? But more on that later…

Sunday, I attended the Third Annual New York Arab-American Park Festival in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, which fascinated and surprised me on several levels. Please read directly below the story I wrote on the event—it will be in the Jewish Week on Friday, but much cut and I wanted you, my faithful readers to read the full account. Then click 'continued' and read my analysis….

By Walter Ruby

It was a succulent pastiche of kebabs, humus and babaganoush from Lebanon and couscous dishes from Morocco; hora-like debke dances from the Palestinian territories and a swirling dervish-like folk dance from southern Egypt; thick Arab coffee and apple-scented tobacco being smoked in hookahs, and an approximately equal number of women in hijabs (head scarves) and with uncovered heads, including some in alluring blouses and form-fitting jeans.

Yet for all the obvious contrasts, what clearly united the approximately 500 Arab-American New Yorkers of all ages who gathered on blankets and on folding chairs in front of a temporary stage in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park for the Third Annual Arab Heritage Park Festival on a broiling Sunday, July 8, was a palpable manifestation of pride and joy that, after several years of being in the closet, they now feel safe to proclaim their Arab identities in the open air in strong and confident voices.

According to Linda Sarsour, 27, a Palestinian-American who is acting director of the Arab-American Association of New York, one of the agencies that sponsored Arab-American Heritage Week, including the Park Festival, the Annual Arab American and North African Cultural Street Festival in Greenwich Village the previous day and the upcoming Bay Ridge Arab American Bazaar, set for July 17; “After 9-11, Arab-Americans went into isolation for several years. It was home to school or work, and back home again.”

Yet according to Sarsour; “Arab-American Heritage Week, which began three years ago and was officially proclaimed by Mayor Bloomberg, has played an important role for Arab-Americans in New York to reclaiming their identity. When our people saw community leaders promoting the event, they came out and got caught up in the celebration.” Sarsour said the point of the week of festivities is to “not only to have fun and interact with each other, but to display our culture to non-Arabs.” Pointing out that the Arab community includes Christians and secular people as well as Muslims, Sarsour said, “We want to take away the image that Arabs are deeply religious people who can’t have a good time. Hopefully people will accept our culture and who we are if they get to know us better.”

Sarab Al-Jikali, a 31-year-old Syrian-American who works as an advertising executive, said the Park Festival “is a wonderful occasion full of fun, good food and great music that gives a chance to our very diverse community to come together and feel what unites us.” Al-Jikali, who wore a tee-shirt with the slogan ‘Arab X-ing’ said that message conveyed by both his shirt and by the Festival is, “Hey, there are Arabs present here. We exist as a people and a culture, and are tired of being demonized by the mainstream media as terrorists or fanatics. Nowadays, the only acceptable form of racism in America today is against us.”

Young women wearing hijabs at the event mixed freely, and seemingly unjudgmentally, with others in more western garb. Hanan Tabbara, an 18-year-old political science major at Hunter College, who emigrated to New York from Lebanon in 2001, said non-Muslims often misunderstand why she chooses to don the hijab. “I do not wear it for religious reasons, since I am not religious at all, but rather as an identity thing,” Tabbara explained. “For me it’s like the ‘Afro’ was for black women in the 1970’s; an assertion of pride in my heritage.” Tabbara said that the Park Festival was the first outdoor community event she had ever attended and left her feeling “wonderful, empowered. It feels so safe and comfortable to be surrounded by your own, celebrating what you are about.”

Nearby, Mina, a 27-year-old Yemeni-American fashion designer from Bay Ridge clad in a low-cut blouse and a nose ring, sat smoking a hookah with a similarly dressed friend originally from Saudi Arabia. “The hijab thing is no big deal,” Mina asserted. “Sometimes I wear one and at other times I wear shorts and a tank top. My parents used to ask me to cover up, but now accept that I have the freedom to live my own life. At the same time, I never forget that in Arab society, you represent your family and not yourself.” Mina, who declined to give her family name; said of the festival, “By being out here today, we are saying to all of New York, ‘We are here among you, and we are not afraid. I am so proud to be Arab and American. After 9-11, I was afraid to say that, but not anymore.”

Spectators of the sonorous musical presentations performed on drums, the lute-like oud and santoor (dulcimer) on a temporary stage near the corner of Prospect Park West and 15th Street, appeared to have come to the event primarily from Bay Ridge and other parts of Brooklyn, although considerable numbers came from Arab communities in Queens and Westchester. The celebrants originated from countries across the Arab world, with the largest groups seemingly from Yemen, the West Bank and Lebanon.

While music, dance and food were clearly the main emphasis, groups like the Arab-American Family Support Center set up tables and handed out pamphlets about ESL and computer training classes and a man dressed in a bear costume promoted health insurance on behalf of WellCare of New York. Several pro-Palestinian political groups also distributed literature, including Al-Awda, a staunchly anti-Zionist group mainly composed of university-aged youngsters, and Brooklyn for Peace, a more middle-aged group based in nearby Park Slope, several of whose volunteers at the event identified themselves to a reporter as Jewish. One, Naomi Allen, commented, “I feel that I have a responsibility as a Jew to speak out against what Israel is doing in the Occupied Territories, which is stimulating an upsurge of anti-Semitism effecting Jews around the world. We are out here today to educate Brooklynites about the complicity of our own government in Israeli policy and to build bridges between the Arab community, the Jewish community and others.”

Sarsour of the Arab-American Association, said her group is building ties with more mainstream Jewish organizations; locally with the Bay Ridge Jewish Center, and on a city-wide basis taking part in coalition-building activities with the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. Sarsour said that she will not allow political groups to distribute literature at the Bay Ridge Arab-American Bazaar next Sunday because, “I want all of our neighbors in Bay Ridge to feel welcome and comfortable at the Bazaar, including our Jewish neighbors.”

Several people at the Festival said they have had positive encounters with Jews, including Sheren Atfal, the 25-year –old director of the Yallah Youth of Arts Teen Dabke Dance Troupe, who emigrated to the U.S. from the Israeli town of Lod at the age of 3. Atfal remarked, “We have to let Americans know that we are not terrorists and that we don’t want to kill Jews. They are our neighbors and we are engaged in outreach to them. I am one of many Arabs in Brooklyn who take part in the Dialogue Project (a Brooklyn-based organization that has held monthly dialogues between Jews and Arabs in Brooklyn and Manhattan since 2000). Also, Yalla Youth did a dance together with Israelis in Red Hook.”

Atfal acknowledged that, “There is some radicalism among our youth, especially among kids who listen to their grandparents complain about the injustice done to Palestinians and Arabs. I’ve heard some kids say, ‘Screw all Israelis’ and I respond, “No, we can’t say that. Israelis have sisters and brothers too. They are human beings, just like us.”

Zafer Tawil, a musician, who came to Brooklyn from East Jerusalem seven years ago. “Since coming to New York, I have played my darbuka (Arabic drum) with musicians from around the world, including Richard Teitelbaum, who is well known for his electronic music. Richard and I made beautiful music together, and politics seemed very far away. That was an exciting moment for me.”
So what surprised me? First, the degree to which so many people said they had gone into the closet after 9-11, and how excited and fulfilled they felt to come out and manifest their pride thanks to the festival. Well, obviously not only to the Festival—the shock had worn off and life goes on, but it was fascinating to witness a whole community shouting, ‘Say It Loud, I’m Arab and I’m Proud’, but not in a belligerent way, but rather in a self-appreciative and celebratory mode. Its obviously a healthy sign.As Marcia Kannry,
the founder and director of the Dialogue Project, a Brooklyn-based group of Jews and Arabs in ongoing conversation said of Arab-American Heritage Week, “I am so happy and grateful that the Arab-American community is claiming its heritage. That is important for me as a Jewish person, because I believe that celebrate their culture, they will better be able to understand the pride I feel in my own.”

The second thing was the hijab thing. It had never occurred to me—though it should have—that someone like Hanan Tabbara, the Lebanese-born but American raised and accented 18-year-old political science major at Hunter College, would choose on her own free will to wear a hijab where ever she goes, not because she had become an observant Muslim—she pointed out that she is completely non-religious, but as an expression of Arab/Muslim pride? As you see above, she compared it with black women wearing Afros in the 70’s. Do I approve of her choice to walk around with a head scarf all the time, even on broiling days like we are going through at the moment? No I don’t, but then my feelings about it are hardly the point. What I can say, though, as a secular liberal Jew, is that her motivation becomes somehow more understandable and less threatening to me when I hear that she is doing it out of ethnic pride, rather than being one of millions turning back to some medieval religious oputlook.

And what about Mina, the fashion plate in the low cut blouse, whose family came to New York from Yemen when she was a child? Mina said that one day she can slip on a hijab and the next shorts and a tank top. Mina just got back from studying four years in Dubai, which she said was “like an Arab L.A.—all Gucci and glitz, and I loved it.” Mina said she puts on the hijab sometimes to please her family and other times because she wants to effect a certain look. So the thing is that Mina and Hanan are totally different types; one serious and scholarly, the other sometimes a sexy vamp into expensive clothes and design, but each puts on hijab for her own reasons—which contrast with those of the other and both of which are very different from what those of us in the non-Muslim world assume is the reason that women put on head coverings.

In other words, we outsiders understand next to nothing about what is going on within the Arab and/or Islamic psyche, even in our own backyard here in New York. Some people have written on this forum, ‘The Arabs/Muslims think this or that’—usually something nefarious or evil, when in fact these same people have never spoken to a live Arab/Muslim. If you are going to understand them, you have to communicate with them. I’ve done a bit of it over the years, but I’m out of practice and my visit to the Park Festival tells me I need to do a lot more talking to Arab-Americans in the weeks and months ahead.