by Linda K. Jacobs | Dec 4, 2020 | Uncategorized
There is a long history of Arabs performing in the United States, beginning before the Civil War when North African acrobatic troupes (some including women) traveled around the East Coast and as far west as Iowa, performing athletic feats and tumbling on vaudeville...
by Linda K. Jacobs | Apr 30, 2017 | Uncategorized
(Above): Syrian women sewing at Denison House, Boston, 1912. It is interesting to compare the Syrian colonies of New York City and Boston. Both cities were major ports in the nineteenth century and, along with Providence and Philadelphia, were east coast entry points...
by Linda K. Jacobs | Sep 22, 2016 | Uncategorized
The lower west side of Manhattan, part of the historic First Ward, was a vibrant, architecturally significant neighborhood before it was completely obliterated by the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and the World Trade Center in the mid-twentieth century....
by Linda K. Jacobs | May 31, 2016 | Uncategorized
In the spring and summer of 1893, a spectacle such as had never been seen before in America came to life on the shores of Lake Michigan. The Columbian Fair attracted more than twenty-seven million visitors in its five-month run, embodying the proud (some say...
by Linda K. Jacobs | Mar 6, 2016 | Uncategorized
Why would two seemingly respectable Syrian immigrants be publicly repudiated by their countrymen? As everyone who reads this blog knows, I have an affection for, if not an obsession with, stories that seem to contradict the Syrian myth of success, assimilation, and...
by Linda K. Jacobs | Feb 15, 2016 | Uncategorized
When I was researching my book, Strangers in the West, about the Syrian colony of New York City in the nineteenth century, I was immediately struck by the absence of Syrian Jews in the colony. I would have expected that these new immigrants, whose first language was...
