The Jew Who Leads the Brooklyn Arabs

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, home to an estimated 35,000 Arabs, is the largest Arab-American community outside of Michigan and California. That number is an estimate because no one in government has been able to count. “The community doesn’t like to fill out forms, and for good reason,” a staffer at the Arab-American Association of New York, in Bay Ridge, told me, referring to the recent revelation that the NYPD targeted Muslims for surveillance. Over the next two months, however, the Arabs of Bay Ridge will submit to their first-ever community census. It won’t be conducted by the city, but by the Arab-American Association of New York, the only support organization in the neighborhood that doesn’t take government money, leaving it free to serve undocumented immigrants, a major part of its base, and provide services demanded by its constituents rather than city bureaucrats.

In the last five years, the Arab-American Association of New York, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in December, has quintupled its budget to a half-million dollars, drawn from individual donations and foundation support from the likes of the New York Foundation, the Union Square Awards, and the Brooklyn Community Foundation. It is the front line of American acculturation, if not integration, for tens of thousands of ESL-hungry Arab immigrants from Palestine, Morocco, Algeria, and beyond. The organization plays more or less the role that Abraham Cahan’s Forward played for the immigrants of Eastern Europe a century ago.