A COMMUNITY OF MANY WORLDS : ARAB AMERICANS IN NEW YORK CITY. This item is unavailable.A COMMUNITY OF MANY WORLDS : ARAB AMERICANS IN NEW YORK CITY

New York City's main Arab communities exemplify the continuity and change that has taken place throughout the city's rich history. The Museum of the City of New York, in partnership with the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and a group of local Arab and non-Arab scholars, activists and educators, undertook a long overdue exploration of New York's Arab populations. The result is a revealing collection of writings and photographs that document and tell the stories of these communities.

Published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, this collection of 17 essays ranges from the personal to the academic and covers a wide array of topics, such as Arabic poetry, immigration patterns, community formation and the sustaining of cultural traditions. A big challenge, writes curator Kathleen Benson in her preface, "was encompassing the great heterogeneity of `Arab New York' ", given the multitude of immigrant nationalities that fall under that rubric. This collection does a fine job documenting and elucidating the diverse abundance of Arabic cultural manifestations that reflect historic precedents, and are contributing toward hybridized world views. Gregory Orfela's "My Mother's Zither" places Arab-American poetry in a specific U.S. tradition (Kahlil Gibran was influenced by Stephen Crane) and discusses the political content of work by new poets. "The Syrian Jews of Brooklyn" by Walter P. Zinner profoundly challenges preconceived ideas of identity in its discussion of the complex social and religious practices of a small group whose religion and ethnicity seem, to many, to be at odds with one another. Jerrilynn Dodd's "NY-MASJID: The Mosques of New York" notes the interplay of architecture and religious observance; in a country that often conflates Muslim "style" and belief, imams repeatedly tell her, "in prayer all external concerns must vanish." The pieces are often personal and include multiple reminiscences of growing up Arab-American, yet strike a clear and instructive balance with sound scholarship and intellectual inquiry.
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