Supporting Arab and Palestinian Communities

Arab and Palestinian communities have a long and rich history in the United States, though it has also been a troubled history given the stereotypes, bias, and discrimination that many Arabs and Palestinians experience in this country. Recent immigrants from Arab nations are particularly vulnerable to mistreatment. 

Whether you are seeking ways to actively support Arab and Palestinian friends, neighbors, and/or colleagues, or you identify as Arab or Palestinian and seek educational resources, support or wish to report a bias incident, each of us can play a part in supporting these communities.

The resources below were compiled in partnership with students, faculty, and staff from across the University for you to use as you explore this critical issue and develop skills to support Arab communities. Requests to add additional items can be sent to [email protected]. 

The resources below include off-campus resources that Columbia is neither affiliated with nor explicitly endorses. This list is intended only to inform our community of available resources.

BOOKS

The books listed below are only a small sample of books available from Columbia Libraries on this topic. Please consult with a Columbia reference librarian for additional resources.

Book descriptions are visible when hovering over book covers.

Book cover for Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes From and What It Means for Politics Today
Steven Salaita explores the reality of Anti-Arab racism in America. He blends personal narrative, theory and polemics to show how this deep-rooted racism affects everything from legislation to cultural life, shining a light on the consequences of Anti-Arab racism both at home and abroad. (Image courtesy of Pluto Press)
Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes From and What It Means for Politics Today

by Steven Salaita

Book cover for Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim Bias in American Newspapers: How They Reported the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah and Israeli-Hamas Wars
This research compares the New York Times news coverage of the Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006 (July War) and the Israeli-Gaza conflict of 2006 (Operation Summer Rain) with war coverage as reported by the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times,. Using Herman and Chomsky's (1988) Propaganda Model and Edward Said's (1994) notion of Orientalism, this research investigates the range of permitted opinion and the representations of Arabs and Muslims in news articles. (Image courtesy of The Edwin Mellen Press)
Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim Bias in American Newspapers

by Jeffrey Tischauser

Book cover for Daily Life of Arab Americans in the 21st Century
This title documents the key aspects of contemporary Arab American life, including their many contributions to American society. It begins with an overview of the immigrant experience, but focuses primarily on the past decade, examining the political, family, religious, educational, professional, public, and artistic aspects of the Arab American experience. (Image courtesy of Greenwood Press)
Daily Life of Arab Americans in the 21st Century

edited by Anan Ameri and Holly Arida

Book cover for Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11 by Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber
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? (Image courtesy of Syracuse University Press)
Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects

edited by Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber

Book cover for Arab New York by Emily Regan Wills
Arab New York draws from rich ethnographic data and presents a narrative, compelling picture of a community engaging with politics on its own terms. Written to expand the existing literature on Arab Americans to include more direct engagement with politics and discourse, Arab New York also serves as an appropriate introduction to Arab American communities, ethnic dynamics in New York City and elsewhere in urban America, and the concept of everyday politics. (Image courtesy of New York University Press)
Arab New York: Politics and Community in the Everyday Lives of Arab Americans

by Emily Regan Wills

Book cover for Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism by Nadine Naber
Arab Americans are one of the most misunderstood segments of the U.S. population, especially after the events of 9/11. In Arab America, Nadine Naber tells the stories of second generation Arab American young adults living in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of whom are political activists engaged in two culturalist movements that draw on the conditions of diaspora, a Muslim global justice and a Leftist Arab movement. (Image cour
Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism

by Nadine Naber

The Rise of the Arab American Left
Focusing on the ideas and strategies of key Arab American organizations and examining the emerging alliances between Arab American and other anti-imperialist and antiracist movements, Pennock sheds new light on the role of Arab Americans in the social change of the era. She details how their attempts to mobilize communities in support of Middle Eastern political or humanitarian causes were often met with suspicion by many Americans, including heavy surveillance by the Nixon administration. Cognizant that they would be unable to influence policy by traditional electoral means, Arab Americans, through slow coalition building over the course of decades of activism, brought their central policy concerns and causes into the mainstream of activist consciousness. (Image courtesy of University of North Carolina Press)
The Rise of the Arab American Left

by Pamela E. Pennock

Book cover for Between the Middle East and the Americas
Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora traces the production and circulation of discourses about "the Middle East" across various cultural sites, against the historical backdrop of cross-Atlantic Mahjar flows. The book highlights the fraught and ambivalent situation of Arabs/Muslims in the Americas, where they are at once celebrated and demonized, integrated and marginalized, simultaneously invisible and spectacularly visible. (Image courtesy of University of Michigan Press)
Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora

edited by Evelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat

Book cover for Arab Americans in Film by Waleed F. Madhi
Hollywood films have fostered reductive imagery of Arab Americans since the 1970s as either a national security threat or a foreign policy concern, while Egyptian filmmakers have used polarizing images of Arab Americans since the 1990s to convey their nationalist critiques of the United States. Both portrayals are rooted in anxieties around globalization, migration, and US-Arab geopolitics. In contrast, Arab American cinema provides a more complex, realistic, and fluid representation of Arab American citizenship and the nuances of a transnational identity. (Image courtesy of Syracuse University Press)
Arab Americans in Film: From Hollywood & Egyptian Stereotypes to Self-Representation

by Waleed F. Mahdi

Columbia Resources

External Resources