When We Were Arabs

Close Media Ties: Massoud Hayoun has a dense and wide network of friendships and connections across the media landscape.

Regular columnist for Pacific Standard and expert on immigration and China; outside of the scope of this book, Hayoun is an expert on the Mexican-American border and on Chinese politics, and is the weekly columnist on international affairs on psmag.com

Undiscovered history: Hayoun has gone back to primary source archives in Arabic, Hebrew, French, and English to uncover a lost history totally inaccessible to American readers.

Credentials/story: Hayoun’s “coming out” as a Jewish Arab is radical and disruptive within those communities and newsworthy in-itself, but Hayoun is a very well established international correspondent for multiple news outlets, covering the Middle East and China

Twist on a recognizable genre: This is a fresh take on family memoir stories such as The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, by Lucette Lagnado, Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Out of Egypt by André Aciman