An-Najah Staff

Wafa Abu Shmais is an English teacher, the mother of four children, a wife, daughter, and an aunt. She is also a Palestinian, Arabic and Muslim, her entire life spent in an apartheid state where the simple fact of not being Jewish makes one not fully human, expendable and hated. Wafa and her family endure the type of racism and oppression not seen in the United States since the slave days and briefly glimpsed with the internment of the Japanese during World War II.