Massoud Hayoun is a journalist based in Los Angeles, most recently freelancing for Al Jazeera English and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown online while writing a weekly column on foreign affairs for Pacific Standard. He previously worked as a reporter for Al Jazeera America, The Atlantic, Agence France-Presse, and the South China Morning Post and has been published widely. He speaks and works in five languages and won a 2015 EPPY Award. The author of When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History (The New Press), he lives in Los Angeles.
“In his intriguing debut book, EPPY Award-winning nonfiction writer Massoud Hayoun tells his family’s compelling story as a means of engaging in a deeper re-evaluation of its place in a larger politicized history.”
“Addressing a full house at 14th street’s Busboys and Poets in Washington DC on July 8, Massoud Hayoun enchanted an engaged audience with stories of his cosmopolitan North African Jewish ancestors; the subject of his memoir When We Were Arabs”
“Hayoun wants to reclaim the Jewish Arab identity. In When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History, he tells the story of his family — specifically, the stories of his maternal grandparents, who raised him.”
