Brooklyn College Assigns a Book

by KC Johnson

My home institution, Brooklyn College, has been receiving some bad press as of late, after the dean and the English Department required that all incoming and transfer students read Moustafa Bayoumi’s How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. Jewish Week quoted from one of the courageous voices on the faculty, Jonathan Helfand, who noted that the “book is problematic if given without an alternative vision.” The New York Daily News reported that one BC alumnus, Bruce Kessler, has withdrawn a “significant bequest” to the school from his will. And in the New York Post, Ron Radosh accused the school of trying to “force feed” freshmen one (extreme) point of view on contemporary Middle Eastern matters.

Bayoumi’s book couples vignettes about several Arab-American youth (the book offers no guidance on how, or if, the author considers his subjects representative of the broader Arab-American community) with an extremist critique of Israeli national security policy and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Regardless of the merits of Bayoumi’s portrayal of his subjects, it’s hard to see U.S. policy toward Israel as the prime mover in how Arab-Americans are treated in the United States.

via Brooklyn College Assigns a Book.

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