If she wins, she will be the first Arab-American City Council Member.
Because the increasingly high-profile Sarsour, who took over the AAANY in 2005, now travels a lot, the organization's daily operations have been delegated to Jennie Goldstein, a 24-year-old from the Upper East Side of Manhattan whose father is Jewish and whose mother is Protestant.
Goldstein, a non-Arabic speaker who grew up lighting Shabbat candles on Fridays and going to church with her mother on Sundays, is a Middlebury graduate in international economics who came to AANY in 2009 through AmericCorps to do community-building.
By the most conservative estimate, there are 35,000 Arabs in Bay Ridge, making it the biggest Arab-American community outside of Michigan and California. Over the next two months, the AAANY, which receives no government funding, will conduct its first-ever census of the Arab community.
The ten-year-old organization has quintupled its budget over the past five years to a half-million dollars, sourced from individual donations and foundation support, including grants from the New York Foundation, the Union Square Awards, and the Brooklyn Community Foundation.
As The Forward did a century ago for Eastern European immigrants, the AAANY has become an acculturation portal for tens of thousands of Arabs from Palestine, Morocco, Algeria, and other Mid-Eastern countries.
The post from Tablet Magazine.
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