Skip to content

Tag: palestinianamerican

Episode 183 [in English]: Coming Around

Eman Abdelhadi is a second generation Palestinian-Egyptian academic, activist, and artist based in Chicago, IL. She’s also the subject of the upcoming documentary Coming Around, which follows her close and evolving relationship with her mother over the past six years, including Eman’s decision to come out as queer. Eman discussed what it was like to have intimate moments of her life documented, the importance of representing both herself and her mother outside a binary lens of good and bad, and the subversion of the singular coming out story most prominent in Western media. 

Eman also talked about coming into the public eye as part of a wave of queer Muslim activists following the 2016 Orlando shooting, how the public discourse surrounding that intersection shifted during and after the Trump era, and her current work as an organizer with the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity.

Additionally, we discussed her research on gender differences in Muslim-Americans’ ties to religious communities as adults as well as her upcoming book (co-written with ME O’Brien) Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, set in a post-disaster, post-capitalist, post-national world.

**Coming Around is currently crowdfunding for the final stage of their production process! You can donate to help this film come to life! **

Leave a Comment

Episode 182 [in English]: Samer Ghrawi


Samer Ghrawi is a Palestinian/Syrian-American musical artist based in California. With musical influences including Gospel, Soul, RnB, Arab pop, and older Arab music, his work sheds light on emotional struggles that are often swept under the rug.  

Samer tells us about growing up gay in a strict Christian environment and Arab in an overwhelmingly white school, falling in love with RnB music as a “guilty” pleasure, experiencing conversion therapy, and eventually repairing his relationship with his parents. He also discusses the unspoken prevalence of alcoholism and addiction in both Arab and queer cultures, his own to sobriety and recovery, and running BIPOC-centered AA groups. We also talked about the particular difficulty of friendship breakups, recording zaghareet in Ikea, Americans not knowing geography, and why heteronormativity is actually kinda gay.  

You’ll also hear Samer’s most recent track “I Ain’t Got No Time.”

Leave a Comment