Fifty Books Project 2023

We Are Not Here To Be Bystanders. By Linda Sarsour

Soon the streetlights came on, illuminating the faces of people I had grown up with in my beloved Brooklyn, and the two women who now marched by my side.  As I made my way through the roar of the crowd toward my sisters, my own fist pumping in the air, no one but God heard me whisper:  This is where I belong.

I met Linda Sarsour almost 20 years ago, when my wife first met her through work.  She lives a few blocks from me and most of my interactions with her have been as a friend and neighbor.  She is a warm, kind and enthusiastic person, strikingly pretty and strikingly forthright.  As she points out on a regular basis, she is a kind of walking stereotype of the Brooklyn girl who is all attitude and confidence.

However, the fact that she is a good neighbor is not why she has a major publisher putting out her memoir. She is also a nationally known activist, a key advisor to Bernie Sanders, a spokesperson for Black Lives Matters and one of the three chief organizers of the 2017 Women’s March following Trump’s inauguration – the largest public demonstration in American history.

I am happy to say that We Are Not Here To Be Bystanders gives us both sides of her – as warm, funny Brooklyn neighbor and political activist.  She does not even seem to see them as two sides – they are both part of who she is and they are inseparable in this memoir.

Sarsour grew up in Sunset Park and attended the old John Jay High School in Park Slope.  Her father ran a small bodega in Crown Heights named, in honor of her birth, “The Linda Sarsour Spanish and American Food Store.”  She credits her father with building her own sense of community.  He knew and cared for all his customers and she recalls a moving incident in which he caught a young man shoplifting a snack cake and quarter juice and scolded the boy for shaming his parents, then gave him the cake and the juice and told him that if he was hungry all he had to do was ask.

She makes clear that her growth towards political activism did not come from some intellectual analysis of the American system, but from her life as a Muslim woman in a strong and vibrant Muslim community.  There are several chapters dedicated to her relationship with Basemah Atweh, the founder and first director of the Arab American Association and a cousin of Sarsour’s who recruited her to volunteer at the AAA , an experience that steered her away from becoming a high school English teacher.  There is graphic and moving account of the car accident Sarsour and Atweh were involved in that killed the older woman.

She recounts her experiences in high school with anti-Musliim prejudice but spends more time recounting stories of teachers she loved and friendships she and how those have affected her sense of community.  Her career as an activist developed gradually, as part of her concern for her growing family and the embattled Brooklyn Muslim community.  This becomes much more the focus of her life and thinking after 9-11.  Sarsour recounts deciding to wear her hijab after the attack and it becomes clear that a straightforward support of her heritage is her bedrock political stance.  She recounts debates with other Muslims who argue for playing it safe and staying quiet and is clear in her rejection of that advice.

For the most part the book is strikingly positive.  Sarsour is a believer in non-violence and recounts several stories in which she and her allies have reached out to those who disagree with her in an attempt to form some sort of community.  She speaks a great deal about her friends and allies and for most of the book says very little about those who disagree with her.   However, since the success of The Woman’s March, Sarsour has been the subject of daily hate mail and death threats, with a good deal of the danger being aimed at her family.  When recounting recent controversies in her life she is unsparing in her criticism of people who have contributed to this harassment.

Most of her discussion of family is intrinsically woven in with her activism – she recounts several stories when her busy schedule has kept her from her kids and the pain that has caused her.  There is a poignant story of her being in Washington DC in the days before the January 2017 march and finding out that her son had gotten his first college acceptance letter and the pain it caused her to be away from him at that moment.

This is the story of a very human radical activist.  It does an excellent job of portraying her place within a religion, a culture, a neighborhood and a family as the source of her activism.  In doing so she turns the two-dimensional figure of controversy that sometimes appears on the news into a full-blooded woman – a daughter, a mother, a Muslim and a Brooklynite.