In his 1996 contribution to The Immigrant Left in the United States (Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds. [Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996] 233–55), political scientist Michael W. Suleiman broadly sketched the contours of what he termed “the Arab-American left.” The community's heterogeneous racial, religious, and class composition, along with its sparse treatment in the social scientific research, challenged any sweeping generalizations about Arab Americans as a singular entity. For Suleiman, that the community was “generally perceived as fairly conservative, if not passive, and uninterested in political issues” further confounded a substantive sense of a Left outlook (p. 234). Yet, if the Left was understood to signify an interest in “consumers’ rights, health care reform, women's rights, and religious diversity,” as well as anti-imperialist opposition to “U.S. policies in the Middle East,” then, as Suleiman outlines, there was a substantive and impactful tradition from which to draw (p. 233).

Two decades later, historian Pamela E. Pennock's extensive study has expanded significantly on Suleiman's brief chapter. The Rise of the Arab American Left simultaneously contributes to the histories of Arab Americans, antiracist Left politics and organizing, and Palestinian freedom struggles. Pennock situates a constellation of Arab and Arab American individuals and organizations within a wider historical formation that centered the fate of Palestine and Palestinians within transnational struggles against racism and imperialism. Drawing on substantial archival research, extensive interviews, and a synthesis of the relevant historiography, Pennock persuasively demonstrates the relevance, creativity, and manifold challenges Arab Americans faced in advancing these struggles, particularly in the years between the 1967 Arab–Israeli war and the 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, whose Rainbow Coalition platform drew significantly on input from the Arab American community. Some chapters focus on particular organizations, others on events (such as the illuminating chapter on the trial of Sirhan Sirhan), and still others on coalition-building strategies.

The political geography of these struggles routinely moved across local, national, and transnational scales. To capture this labile geography, Pennock instructively grounds the book in the greater Detroit area and its Dearborn suburb, showing the dynamism among local organizations and activists and their connections to national and transnational political horizons. For instance, labor organizing among Black and Yemeni workers at the massive Ford Rouge plant by the Arab Workers Caucus informed a successful campaign for the United Automobile Workers to divest from Israeli bonds during the 1973 October War. Such organizing helped advance struggles against “urban removal” in Dearborn's Southend, and was spurred on by the activity of the Organization of Arab Students at Wayne State University, and the knowledge projects of the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG). Pennock effectively narrates how this fecund context gave rise to the Arab Community Center, an organization whose local neighborhood roots became the catalyst for an enduring and impactful organization with a national profile.

The Rise of the Arab American Left expands our understanding of the transnational dimensions, local constraints, and shifting historical contexts of Palestinian political struggle. In lucid prose, Pennock illuminates how the AAUG as an organization, as well as some of its leaders such as lawyer and activist Abdeen Jabara (one of the book's main protagonists), sought to intervene in the way Palestine was understood in the United States and among the antiracist Left in particular. The AAUG had a robust investment in knowledge production and dissemination, from its annual academic conferences, to the academic journal Arab Studies Quarterly, a periodic newsletter, and the Medina University Press; members of the AAUG leadership published letters and took out paid advertisements in national newspapers; and some coordinated delegations to Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank. They also actively, if not without friction, expended effort to build multiracial coalitions to confront injustice. As Pennock succinctly puts it, “Increasingly seeing themselves as people of color joined with these other groups in anti-colonial struggle, Arab American activists participated in the intersections that invigorated the anti-imperialist and antiracist movements on the left” (p. 117). While scholars (including myself) have previously written about the AAUG, Pennock's comprehensive account weaves the organization and its members into the wider social and political fabric of the period.

This book is avowedly not a genealogical history of the present. The insights it conveys about the fragile and contextual work involved in articulating a political imagination in the face of widespread animus are one of its great strengths. Nevertheless, today, as scholars in Middle East studies reflect on the legacies of the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, as scholars in ethnic studies contemplate the field's liberationist origins, and as Palestine's presence in justice-based coalitional imaginaries is invigorated anew, The Rise of the Arab American Left makes for essential reading.