It first hit me in February 2025. I was in North Brooklyn, where I had taken my older daughter to a bookmaking workshop for kids at Storm Books & People, an independent bookstore for Middle Eastern culture founded by Lebanese curator Nour Sabbagh. I ran into two friends, Ken and Youmna, who were there with their daughter. Later that day, I read at a fundraiser for Gazan journalists at Brooklyn Poets sponsored by Lammeh NYC — a women-run Syrian supper club, the name of which means “gathering” — and Youmna happened to be going too, along with Rhea Karam, the Lebanese American artist who taught the workshop that morning. There was an ease to hanging out; as opposed to catching up, we were just together. “Like in the blād,” I kept insisting — back home, overseas, but actually in New York. And not in someone’s living room or on a fire escape. We were together in Greenpoint. Together in Brooklyn Heights, in reputable bookstores. It wasn’t just us — people of all backgrounds, curious to learn about our culture, were also there.

This was new. Fifteen years earlier, I’d been a student of international affairs at Columbia University. Back then, it felt safer as a Middle Easterner to make yourself smaller, to gather in the privacy of someone’s home or in one of a handful of culturally aligned establishments. This was the era of the “ground-zero mosque,” when an initiative to build an Islamic center near the site of the fallen Twin Towers was lambasted as insensitive to the families of victims. Foreign-policy experts were publishing books with titles like The Closing of the Muslim Mind. A self-proclaimed Islam critic named Daniel Pipes had created Campus Watch, an organization that compiled a list of faculty “to avoid,” whom it deemed critics of Israel. I was part of both the Arab Student Association and Students for Justice in Palestine (now suspended by Columbia as an officially recognized student organization). On weekends, we danced and threw ASA fundraiser parties at Le Souk, a Moroccan club on 4th Street at Avenue B in the East Village, where we alternated Saturdays with reggaeton and Latino night (we were happy to share). Mona Khalidi, Professor Rashid Khalidi’s wife, was an assistant dean of student affairs, and she befriended all the Arab students. On occasion, we dined at the Khalidis’ home. We arrived from all across the university: Lebanese Ph.D. students, SIPA party boys from Ramallah, Arab Americans who had grown up in Bay Ridge or New Jersey. We would sit around their dinner table and Professor Khalidi would talk, sometimes about Edward Said, his dear friend and the namesake of his endowed chair, all of us trying to impress him with our knowledge.

26 People Shaping SWANA New York

When Eating Out Is Political

During these years, I would get a ping of excitement each time we came together, like when a crush texted. It was unusual for someone outside our specific communities to vocally champion our causes and take an interest in our culture. We were legible mainly to ourselves and in prescient publications like Bidoun, a literary magazine from both the diaspora and within the Middle East founded in the early post-9/11 years. Bidoun itself means “without” and is meant to evoke existing without the concreteness of space.

In the months after October 7, however, we were increasingly spilling into view, desperate to be close to people who knew what it felt like to pretend everything was normal when your family — not just blood relations but people who looked like you and spoke like you — was living under the threat of annihilation. So we protested, we boycotted, we wrote op-eds. And slowly, out of that resistance, a cultural ecosystem started to bloom. Protests led to friendships led to dinners led to new creative outlets. There was Kan Yama Kan, a reading series that began in Palestinian American author Hala Alyan’s lantern-lit Brooklyn backyard, evolving from a traditional open-mic crowd into a predominantly Arab and North African lineup. When Syrian American chef Gehad Hadidi opened Huda, his East Williamsburg restaurant, in November 2023, it became a hub of activity, hosting the artist Sabri Sundos’s tatreez workshop in October and, more recently, an Arabic storytelling hour for kids on Sundays. In February the following year, Barzakh Café opened in Crown Heights and quickly grew into the Platonic ideal of a third space, giving a platform to up-and-coming and established oud players and North African jazz musicians and single-handedly reviving the qawwali scene in New York. It could feel as if every gathering doubled as a fundraiser with QR codes placed on tables and slapped against walls. By March 2024, the now-annual Eid-al-Fitr Banquet put on by the nonprofit Pillars Fund — an occasion for Muslim journalists, artists, and creators to come together and celebrate the holiday — felt like the formation of a new center of gravity in the city. The first year, Zohran Mamdani arrived late from Albany as an assemblymember and had to stand against the wall until the hosts found him a seat next to his father. This year, he came as the mayor.

Many of these gatherings had a label attached: SWANA. An acronym for Southwest Asia and North Africa, the term has existed since the 1990s but only around a decade ago did it begin taking shape as a cultural and political force, one that has become almost synonymous with much of the current scene. SWANA includes countries from Palestine to Iran to Sudan. But there are ways in which no one label can capture the overlapping shared identities through which people feel kinship — so much so that letters keep getting added to the acronym to account for them all: SSWANA, for example, to include South Asians, many of whom have been crucial to building Muslim clout in the city, their causes and communities interwoven with those from the Middle East. “There is a widening understanding of what it means to be Arab, Muslim, or South Asian,” Kashif Shaikh, a Pakistani American and a co-founder of Pillars, tells me. “We’re expanding what it means to belong to our community and, as a result, building power.”

If you took the term in its most spiritual sense, it could be seen as a way of uniting people whose lives have been defined by American foreign policy in the region. To be in SWANA community meant embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns. That to care is nonnegotiable. Unlike Muslim, it was not defined by religion. And unlike Middle East, a term coined by an American and popularized by the British to define our countries and identities in relation to them, SWANA suggested a decolonial framework and a way of moving through the world. (Middle Eastern, though imperfect, remains in common usage and I will use it occasionally here.)

Perhaps no stronger testament to New........

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