The Arab Americans: A History

by Gregory Orfalea

Gregory Orfalea’s new and definitive work spans a century and a half of the life of Arab immigrants and their descendants in the United States. In The Arab Americans: A History, Orfalea has marshaled over 150 interviews and 25 years of research to tell the story that begins in 1856, when camel driver Hajdi Ali (or Hi Jolly) was hired by Jefferson Davis to cut a “camel trail” across the Southwest, and continues through the 2005 arrest of a former Virginia high school valedictorian accused of plotting with al-Qaeda. Once seen as the “benevolent stranger,” as the author points out, today Arab Americans are “the malevolent stranger.” His book, however, is an assault on such ignorance, both celebration and warning. The Arab Americans is the culmination of a life’s work, a landmark in the history of what it means to be an American. It is also the history of a community uniquely repressed in American scholarship, history, literature, and politics. The Arab Americans fills a sizable void, and it could not be more timely. With American troops sprawled across the Arab and Muslim world, Orfalea’s work is like light in a dark tunnel—facts, not stereotypes; people, not shadows; the vibrant world of a lost American experience come to life. Orfalea brings to this work an historian’s love of meticulous and telling detail, a poet’s ear, and a novelist’s sense of story. The cumulative effect is symphonic and its arrival none too soon.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

512 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2005

About the author

Gregory Orfalea was born and raised in Los Angeles. He is the author of ten books, including Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra’s Dream and the Founding of California, published in January 2014 by Scribner.

With degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Alaska, Orfalea has published ten books, including a history of his father’s unit in World War II, Messengers of the Lost Battalion, and Angeleno Days, a memoir of growing up in Los Angeles, which won the Arab American Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN USA Prize in Creative Nonfiction. He is also the author of a collection of short stories, The Man Who Guarded the Bomb, as well as the seminal study, The Arab Americans: A History.

Orfalea directed a writing program at the Claremont Colleges and has taught at several universities, including his alma mater, Georgetown University and California Lutheran University. For the past six years (2010-2015) Orfalea has been writer-in-residence at Westmont College in Santa Barbara and director of its Creators of California speakers series.

In 2013, Orfalea visited Turkey and Armenia with the University of Iowa International Writers Program and the US State Department.

Orfalea and his wife have three sons. He divides his time between Santa Barbara and Washington, DC.

Reviews

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting topic (especially Chapter 2, about the first Arab immigrants), but not the most engaging book. I feel like Orfalea was too close to his subject, though the amount of interviews he did with Arab Americans from across the country was impressive.

Popsugar Reading Challenge 2016 | Task 37: About a culture you are unfamiliar with

[Omar · Rating 5 out of 5]

An encyclopedic study of Arab Americans that takes a linear, historical approach, this book naturally ends up dedicating most of its time on the larger Arab subpopuplations (Syrians and Lebanese), who arrived earlier in the US and have a longer history; but, in so doing, provides excellent context for those later waves of Arab immigration, by the time it gets to them. I took my time through this book, as it was dense with people and place near that I wanted to know intimately - someone for whom this is a less personal topic will likely find it dull

[Zeynep Aydogdu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Orfalea's survey of Syrian immigration to America is not a scholarly work because of its immensely biased account of the history of Arab immigration to the United States. The author is not able to set aside his prejudiced view of the Ottomans in the greater Syria while recounting what was supposed to be an objective history. Nice read if you are looking for autofiction.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gregory Orfalea is to be commended for taking on a demographic that is often ignored in American discourse. The fact that the Arab-Americans escape visibility is obvious whenever someone looks at the ethnic section of any official document. There is rarely a box to check “Arab-American”.
The book is incredibly well-written, as one might expect from a professor of creative non-fiction. The first chapter, where Orfalea describes his trip back to his ancestral homeland of Syria is at times humorous, sentimental and familiar. Whether in our mind’s eye or through an existential experience, many of us have journeyed back to the place of our roots. We do this to determine where we come from, and where we are going. This opening chapter sets the tone for the entire book in its emphasis upon the incredible sense of community in the Arab culture. The nuclear family, Orfalea states, is not as important to Arabs as the extended family, quite a reversal from the Western world. The family, the community looks out for one another.
Ellis Island is an often talked about place as we are taken back to the 1870’s when the first known Arab immigrant arrived on our shores. This is where the book enters into an area comprising my one major criticism. Orfalea often takes a tone of trying to prove that Arabs could be successful in American Capitalism. The tone strikes me as an effort to show assimilation vs. the contributions of this rich ethnic history that have CHANGED America for the better. It is true that any immigrant demographic has to adjust to culture shock, the American labor market, and American consumption. However, the interviews which Orfalea chose to put into the book tended to portray “successful” Arabs (according to Western standards). I certainly do not wish ill will on anyone, but I would have liked to have seen a bit more on the average American who happened to be Arab. It is my Marxist training and class consciousness that always looks at how a particular ethnic group is treated within the poor and working classes.
What is encouraging to me as an activist is that overall the Arab-American community is quite aware and informed of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and their views tend to be “liberal” in this respect regardless of whether or not they are fiscal conservatives. This should go without saying, but there is an element of 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation Arab Americans who are as uninformed about the crisis as any other demographic.
I was glad to see Orfalea showcase the great intellectuals that have an Arab ethnicity. I was especially struck by a particular incident of civil disobedience in which Orfalea was joined by Edward Said (who was a close friend). For years, the two of them were accompanied by a handful of other intellectuals in instigating an Israeli tax boycott (which has inspired me to do the same). They averaged out the amount that the US government contributes to Israel per person and deducted the $37 from their tax returns. Never once did they receive an audit or penalty from the IRS.
The difficulties with which the Arab-Americans have had to deal with since 9/11 was the topic of the last major section of the book. Here again we come back to the common theme of community. My impression is that this idea of community and its importance to Arabs has had to do with the incredible adversity and constantly changing landscape of their homelands. Whatever the reason, it is admirable, and it is something from which the individualistic West could learn a great deal. Orfalea’s own experience with community becomes quite personal to the writing of the book as he closes with an anecdote about his own father. When the research for the book took more time and money than was expected, his father put a 2nd mortgage on his house to help Orfalea finish the project. While this could happen within any close American family, the emphasis here was that it was just a normal part of the Arab consciousness. My hope is that Americans realize how beneficial the idea of community can be with one’s family or social environment. I also hope that we as Americans (no matter what our ethnic background) acknowledge this great need for the other in order to survive, enrich, fulfill and change for the better our own lives and the lives of those with which we share our time on this earth.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abandoned at p. 157.

Extremely poor organization. Requires more than a passing knowledge of Middle-East geography and the various religions and their various sects of the area.

First chapter is the author's excuse to pen a travelogue of a trip that meant a lot to him without a whole lot of history.

The next chapters spend a lot of time on interviews that bounce around in time and place and don't reflect how the Arab-American experience was unique from any other immigrant group to the US before or after.

This may be touted as the leading work on the subject of Arab Americans but at a quarter of the way through, it's little more than documentation of the individual immigrant experience.

[Carolyn Fitzpatrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has a very misleading title. I had assumed that it would discuss the history of ALL Arab-Americans. However, the author chooses to deal exclusively with Arab-Americans of Syrian ancestry, since that is where his own family comes from. There is a very interesting story about a visit that he makes with his family to his grandfather's hometown, but it seemed out of place, since the rest of the book is pure history.

[Weavre]

OST NON-FICTION ADULT STK 305.89 ORF

[Yahya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the best history of Arab-Americans out there. It's not a perfect book, but it's good enough.