Jewnaizah

The jarring similarities between Qassimi and Jewish culture

As I navigated the textured landscape of American subcultures when I first moved to New York, someone at an East Hampton house party a few summers ago offered this taxonomy: “At a Jewish party, you will never run out of food. And at a WASP party, you will never run out of alcohol.” But what about a Saudi party?

There weren’t many Saudis for me to befriend on this island, but there were plenty of Jews.

A year into my New York life, I found myself at weekly Shabbat dinners, having slowly and inadvertently assembled a friend group composed largely of Jewish New Yorkers. The PR firm where I worked, Wachsman, was filled with spirited Jewish women who leaned into the Jewish American Princess archetype. The Wachsmans themselves, the firm’s owners, were technically raised Catholic but wore their Jewish family name like a badge of honor. They embodied a certain Jew-ishness in their candor and intellectual curiosity, and crucially, they never subjected me to lectures about Saudi politics the way …