Ayman Ismail

I get invited to do a book talk in Boston.

And I get an email from the organizer saying, oh, actually, the situation has escalated a little bit.

It seems like there's going to be a protest outside.

We just want to make sure that you're still comfortable showing up.

And it's like a protest.

A protest for what?

This is a book about parenthood.

This is a book about childhood.

And it turned out that there was this pro-Israel Zionist group who had been fighting with that local bookstore for a long time because they feel like their bookstore is too sympathetic to Palestinian authors.

I'm not Palestinian.

I'm just Arab and Muslim.

But still, that was enough, I think, for people to assign me with a responsibility of something that I didn't ask for.

And at the same time,

it's becoming painfully aware that this is going to be the same ecosystem that my kids are going to be growing up in.

And one of the things that I think makes my book really interesting is that I talk about what it was like to be in an Islamic school situation.

And then right after 9-11, when the school shuts down because of all these bomb threats, and my parents didn't really feel safe sending our kids to Islamic school anymore.

So we're in New Jersey, like 10, 15 minutes out of New York City.

And so after 9-11, or the day of 9-11, the school got shut down.

They let everybody out early because a mob had formed outside.

Outside of your Islamic school, yeah.