Linda Sarsour

Early life

Sarsour is the oldest of seven children born to a pair of Palestinian immigrants. She was raised in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and went to John Jay High School in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Sarsour was married in an arranged marriage at the age of 17. She had three children by her mid-20s. After high school, she took courses at Kingsborough Community College and Brooklyn College with the goal of becoming an English teacher.

Career

After the September 11 attacks, Sarsour began to volunteer for the Arab American Association of New York. She worked to have Muslim holidays recognized in New York City's public schools, which now close for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. She eventually became the organization's executive director and a fellow at the New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Sarsour has appeared in The Hijabi Monologues, a performance art piece based on stories about veiling.

After the Arab American Association of New York's executive director was killed in a car accident in 2011, Sarsour was appointed to the position, having already served in a variety of roles at the organization. As director, she advocated for passage of the Community Safety Act in New York, which created an independent office to review police policy and expanded the definition of bias-based profiling in New York. Sarsour and her organization pressed for the law after instances of what they saw as biased policing in local neighborhoods, and it passed over the objections of the city's mayor and police chief.

Political activism

Sarsour has spoken of the importance of the role of her and her former organization in building a progressive movement in the United States.

Sarsour is an alumna of the Women's Media Center's Progressive Women’s Voices Media and Leadership Training Program.

In 2016, Sarsour endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for President of the United States.

Teresa Shook and Bob Bland recruited Sarsour to be a co-chair of the 2017 Women's March, held the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

After a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri was vandalized in an apparent anti-Semitic incident in February 2017, Sarsour worked with other Muslim activists to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to repair the damage and restore the gravesites. More than $125,000 was raised, and Sarsour pledged to donate any funds not needed at the cemetery to other Jewish community centers or sites targeted by vandalism. She said the fundraising effort would "send a united message from the Jewish and Muslim communities that there is no place for this type of hate, desecration, and violence in America." St. Louis's United Hebrew Congregation Senior Rabbi, Brigitte S. Rosenberg, whose congregants have family members buried in the vandalized cemetery, called the campaign "a beautiful gesture."

In March 2017 Sarsour was a co-chairwoman of the Day Without a Woman protest, during which she was arrested along with other activists.

Sarsour does not support either Hamas or the Palestinian authority, preferring nonviolent Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation policies. She supports Israel's right to exist, and favors a one-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian question under conditions that would foster "peace and justice and equality for all." Sarsour has been described as a proponent of the BDS movement. She has acknowledged that members of her extended family have been arrested on accusations of supporting Hamas but said they were not necessarily charged with crimes and that their situation was "just the reality of Palestinians living under military occupation."

Along with other activists in her movement, Sarsour opposes attempts to ban sharia religious law, having expressed such concerns on The Rachel Maddow Show and elsewhere. Activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and columnist Candice Malcolm have criticized Sarsour for her comments on sharia law, the status of women in Saudi Arabia, and some female public figures. The terrorism analyst Steven Emerson has argued that Sarsour has not worked to oppose religious groups that subjugate women and minorities. An op-ed by Emma-Kate Symons in The New York Times described Sarsour as "a religiously conservative veiled Muslim woman" and criticized the inconsistency of her role in ordering pro-life women out of the 2017 Women's March despite what Symons alleged to be Sarsour's association with an illiberal ideology connected to her "fundamentalist worldview" over female body coverings. An op-ed by Daniel Pipes in The Jerusalem Post was critical of Sarsour's comments on Saudi Arabia, among other issues, and called her "the new, seemingly ubiquitous symbol of the hard Left-radical Islam alliance." An op-ed by political scientist Mira Sucharov in the Canadian Jewish News characterized Sarsour's comments on sharia as "tongue-in-cheek". Sucharov found no evidence that Sarsour supported Hamas or anti-Semitism, concluding that she "[smells] a toxic brew of Islamophobia and misogyny" in these accusations.

After the Women's March, Sarsour was targeted by an Internet smear campaign she described as the work of "fake news purveyors" and "right-wing media outlets recirculating false information". The posts used altered photographs and false or partial quotations to falsely claim that she supported Islamic State militants and favored replacing the U.S. legal system with Islamic religious law. Supporters responded to the online criticism with the Twitter hashtag #IMarchWithLinda.

Personal life

Sarsour lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.