Empowering Arab Immigrant Women in Chicago: The Arab Women’s Committee

Before my deportation from the United States in 2017, I spent the best years of my life working with the Arab Women’s Committee (AWC), a grassroots formation that focuses its activities on Arab American and Arab immigrant women in Chicago and its inner suburbs (henceforth Chicagoland). The activities of the AWC form a significant part of the programming of the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), a Chicago-based grassroots organization providing social services, education, youth development, cultural outreach, advocacy, and community-organizing programming to Arab Americans and Arab immigrants. Chicago has hosted Arab communities since the early 1900s, when Lebanese and Syrian immigrants first made it their home. After World War II and especially after the 1967 Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem, Palestinians were the largest, most diverse, and most urban Arab group in Chicagoland, while communities of highly skilled Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese gravitated...