From Baghdad to Brooklyn: An Arab-Jewish America

In his memoir From Baghdad to Brooklyn, Jack Marshall—son of an Iraqi Jewish father and Syrian Jewish mother—recreates his Brooklyn childhood amid a vibrant Arab community. Surrounded by Arabic speakers and Middle Eastern foods like kibbeh, olives, and Syrian bread, he evokes the scents and tastes of a lost world transplanted to America. Rather than longing for ancestral homelands, Marshall celebrates 18th Street’s cultural mix of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, Turkish to Yemeni, an enclave of coexistence and memory in mid-century New York.