Ayman Ismail

Oh, I mean, it's everything.

I mean...

If you'll let me, let me just tell you about what happened to me recently.

So I launched this book.

It's a personal book.

And then the book has been out for one day.

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.