Arab-American Culture in Midcentury New York: An Oral History

Introduction

Welcome to the digital visualization of a series of interviews with Jackie O'Keefe (née Homsy) on her experiences as an Arab immigrant to the United States. The interviews themselves covered a broad variety of topics, and thus will not be transcribed or summarized in full here. These excerpts presented here were chosen for their pertinence to contemporaneous historical events or trends among Arab-Americans, particularly how her experiences both typified and subverted those of the average Arab-American. This book as a whole is arranged in roughly chronological order, with subchapters divided by content. However, as mentioned before this is not intended to be a comprehensive view of either the interview series or Ms. O'Keefe's life.Though this project functions as a standalone interview series, we owe a great debt of inspiration to the previous Arab-American Oral History Project. As a contrast to that project's focus on contemporary Arab-American immigrants, this project aims to depict the circumstances of Arab-Americans prior to the contemporary political climate. Their work is greatly appreciated, and we hope this project serves as a valuable partner to that project's findings. 
Moreover, we'd like to thank Jackie O'Keefe for consenting to be interviewed for this project, for the invaluable information and insight her testimony has provided us, and for her courtesy in providing all images used in this book.

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