Still We Sing Brings Little Syria Home to Dearborn

By Dearborn Blog

A neighborhood that no longer exists on a map is coming back to life on a Dearborn stage, in rhyme, in oud, in opera, and in the voice of a storyteller who refuses to let a century of Arab American life be forgotten.

On Saturday November 14, 2026, at 7 pm, the Ford Community and Performing Arts Center at 15801 Michigan Avenue in Dearborn will host the Michigan premiere of Still We Sing: Omar Offendum’s Little Syria, presented by Concert of Colors Neighborhood Programs in partnership with the Arab American National Museum. Admission is free and open to the public. Free tickets can be reserved in advance, and walk ins are welcome according to the press release. The Arab American National Museum page describes the night as free with RSVP, so reserving ahead is the safest plan.

The show is not a concert in the usual sense. It is a piece of living history, built from hip hop, live Arabic instrumentation, and Hakawati, the centuries old storytelling tradition of the Levant. It asks a simple question that still cuts through the noise of the present: what did it mean to be Arab in America more than a century ago, and why does that question still sound so current?

For Dearborn, the answer is personal. This is the city where the Arab American National Museum stands on Michigan Avenue, where ACCESS grew from a small volunteer effort into a national institution, and where Ismael Ahmed, the founder of Concert of Colors, was remembered in this same hall in February. On November 14, that hall becomes a place of return.

The night in brief

Still We Sing features Syrian American rapper, poet and theatrical storyteller Omar Offendum, Palestinian oud virtuoso Ronnie Malley, and music producer Thanks Joey. The evening also features internationally acclaimed Syrian soprano Lubana Al Quntar and Detroit based interdisciplinary sound and visual artist Layan Srour.

The work is set in New York City’s Little Syria, the neighborhood on Washington Street in Lower Manhattan that thrived from 1880 to 1940. It began as a research residency with University Musical Society, known as UMS, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2018. This Dearborn performance marks its first return to Michigan as a fully staged production.

A related conversation, Sinsyrianly Yours: A Conversation with Omar Offendum, is scheduled at the Arab American National Museum, 13624 Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, on Thursday November 12, 2026, from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm. Together, the conversation and the performance give Dearborn two chances in one week to hear the story in two different registers, intimate talk and full stage.

Stories like Little Syria remind us that the American story has always been shaped by people who came here carrying their culture, traditions, music and dreams.

That line comes from Charles Ezra Ferrell, Neighborhood Programs Director and Fund Development for Concert of Colors, in the press release for this performance. He adds that the Neighborhood Programs create opportunities for communities to share those stories, celebrate their heritage and connect with one another.

Little Syria: a neighborhood erased from the map, not from memory

To understand the power of this show, start with Washington Street.

Little Syria sat on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, centered on Washington Street from Battery Place up past Rector Street, near the Hudson River docks and just south of the present World Trade Center site. For about sixty years, it was the heart of Arab America in New York. Store signs appeared in Arabic. Cafes served Arabic coffee and baklava. Churches, bakeries, linen shops, newspapers and families filled a few short blocks.

The first permanent Syrian settlers reached New York by the early 1880s, landing at Castle Garden at the Battery. Ellis Island did not open until 1892. A report from 1882 counted fewer than 1,000 Syrians in Manhattan. By 1899, a New York Times article described around 3,000 residents in the quarter. The word Syrian then meant something wider than the present country. It covered Greater Syria under Ottoman rule, including what is now Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Jordan. Most early arrivals were Christian merchants and craftspeople from that region, and the neighborhood was never only Arab. Irish, German, Slavic and Scandinavian families lived on the same streets.

Little Syria became a publishing center for the Arabic speaking world in America. Kawkab America, the first Arabic language newspaper in North America, began in 1892. Between 1890 and 1940, the New York Syrian community published more than 50 Arabic language periodicals, including Al Hoda and Syrian World. The neighborhood was home to writers and intellectuals including Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, and in 1916 some of them formed the Pen League, known in Arabic as al Rabitah al Qalamiyyah.

The New York Public Library, in its history of the neighborhood, notes that about 95,000 Arabs relocated to the United States in the Great Migration from 1880 to 1924, and that by 1924, when immigration was greatly restricted after World War I, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States. Many made homes in New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland. New York served as the mother colony, the hub of the Syrian community for several decades.

Then the city erased the physical place. In the 1940s, the city planned the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Its entrance ramps needed the land. By August 1946, residents and businesses on lower Washington Street had received condemnation notices. Crews knocked down the blocks. The tunnel opened in 1950. Later, construction of the World Trade Center took more of the area. Today only three buildings from the era remain, St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church, the Downtown Community House, and the tenement at 109 Washington Street.

That loss is the wound at the center of Offendum’s work. A community can lose its streets and still keep its songs, its newspapers, its poems and its names. Little Syria asks the audience to listen for what survived the bulldozers.

Omar Offendum and the Hakawati at the center

Omar Offendum was born in Saudi Arabia to Syrian parents and raised in the Washington DC area, in northern Virginia. He is a Syrian American rapper, spoken word poet and theatrical storyteller with a 20 year career blending hip hop and Arabic poetry. He was named a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow and an Arab America Foundation 40 Under 40 award recipient. He has toured the world, lectured at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Northwestern, UT Austin, UCLA and the American University of Beirut, among others, and helped raise millions of dollars for humanitarian relief groups.

His recent work in theater has brought Little Syria to sold out runs at BAM, the Old Town School in Chicago, the Center for Artistic Performance at UCLA, HERE Arts Center in SoHo, and Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York. The Public Theater named him to its New York Voices commission program for the work. He now lives in New York with his wife and two young children, still daydreaming, as his biography puts it, about the jasmine tree lined streets of Damascus.

On stage, Offendum takes the role of the hakawati, the community storyteller. In the Levant, the hakawati was not a lecturer. He was a keeper of memory, a voice that could hold a coffeehouse through a long night with a tale that was funny, tragic, moral and musical at once. Offendum updates that role without breaking it. He raps over live oud. He reads old headlines aloud. He lets a line of poetry from a century ago land next to a beat made today.

The research behind the show matters here. During his 2018 residency with UMS in Ann Arbor, Offendum studied newspaper articles published in Little Syria, now archived at North Carolina State University and at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn. He found headlines that sound as if they were written today. In a podcast conversation about the work, he points to lines like Arabs not wanted, Syrians must go back, and Syrians must be deported, and to a song in the show, Not Quite White, that draws on that language. The point is not to claim that nothing has changed. The point is to show that the argument about who belongs in America is old, and that Arab Americans have been answering it in print, in poetry and in song for more than a hundred years.

That is why the show’s poster line hits so hard: We tell these truths: Still We Sing. Singing is not decoration here. It is evidence. It is proof that a community under pressure kept making art, kept naming itself, and kept insisting on a place in the American story.

The artists on stage with him

Ronnie Malley is a Chicago native of Palestinian descent and a first generation Palestinian American multi instrumentalist. He began guitar at age nine, moved to piano and Middle Eastern percussion, and taught himself oud, the short necked plucked lute that is an ancestor of the European lute and the guitar. He grew up playing weddings, concerts, festivals and Middle Eastern clubs with his father and brother in the family band, accompanying artists including Kazem Al Saher, Majdi Husseini, Wael Jassar and Tony Hanna.

Malley holds a BA in Global Music Studies from DePaul University and an MA in Languages, Arabic and Hebrew, from the University of Chicago, where he is a doctoral student in ethnomusicology. He is executive director of Intercultural Music Production in Chicago, teaches at the Old Town School of Folk Music, and has worked in theater including Arabian Nights at Lookingglass, Berkeley and Arena Stage, The Jungle Book at Goodman Theatre, and The Band’s Visit on its North American tour. He was awarded the 2023 Chamber Music America Michael Jaffee Visionary Award. He is a co creator of Little Syria, and his oud gives the show its spine, a sound that is at once ancient and immediate, mournful and danceable.

Thanks Joey, the music producer who joins Offendum and Malley on stage, has been a central collaborator in Offendum’s recent music, including the album Lost In Translation. His production bridges hip hop drums and Arabic melodic lines without flattening either. In the press photo for this show, the three stand together in a brick alley, Malley with his oud, Offendum in a bright blue suit and red fez holding a cane, and Thanks Joey beside them. The image is deliberate. It places the present day artists inside the vanished streets they are singing back into view.

Press photo credit: Concert of Colors Neighborhood Programs and the Arab American National Museum.

Lubana Al Quntar brings a different kind of authority to the night. Born in Damascus into a musical family related to the legendary singer Asmahan, born Amal Al Atrash, and her brother, composer and singer Farid Al Atrash, Al Quntar began singing complex Arabic compositions as a child. She studied opera in Europe, at the Maastricht Academy of Music, the Royal College of Music in London, and the High Institute of Music in Damascus, and became the first Syrian woman to pursue opera professionally and the first Syrian opera singer to attain international recognition.

Her awards include Fifth Prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium in 2000 and the Audience Prize at the Belgrade International Competition. She has performed more than 270 times worldwide, including Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, and starred as Salome at Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, blending Arabic and operatic styles. She returned to Syria to head the Department of Opera Singing and to launch the Department of Classical Arabic Singing at the Syrian National Conservatory. She came to the United States in 2012 and now lives in Dearborn, where she founded the Jawqa Choir in collaboration with the Arab American National Museum, a pioneering initiative blending Arabic and Western choral traditions. Her presence turns the night from a guest performance into a homecoming.

Layan Srour, a Detroit based interdisciplinary artist and curator, completes the Dearborn thread. Her practice explores sound, media and visual art, with a focus on memory, movement, displacement and belonging, deeply shaped by her upbringing in Beirut, Lebanon. She is one half of Taqsim, an Arabic electronic and experimental duo with Yvonne Pruneau, rooted in improvisation and personal soundscapes recorded in Lebanon. With the Arab American National Museum and Artists At Work, she developed Jalasat, Arabic for gatherings, a monthly pop up performance series that reframes site specific performance as community care, cultural exchange and collective storytelling through live music, poetry and art.

Srour’s work asks what it means to grieve a home, to be away from home and to lose home, and to make a space to belong through sound. That question is close to the heart of Little Syria. The old neighborhood is gone. The new Dearborn audience carries its own versions of that loss, from Beirut, from Damascus, from Baghdad, from villages in Lebanon and Palestine whose names live on in family stories even when the streets themselves have changed.

We tell these truths: Still We Sing.

The poster line is not a slogan for one night. It is a method. Tell the truth about the past, in public, in beauty, and keep singing while you tell it.

Why a free show matters, and what it cannot do alone

Concert of Colors is Detroit’s oldest and largest free global music and cultural festival. It was launched in the early 1990s, with the Smithsonian dating the launch to 1993, in partnership with the New Detroit Coalition, partly in response to the tragedy of the 1982 murder of Chinese American Vincent Chin in Detroit and the national outcry that followed. The first concert was a one day event on the riverfront at Chene Park, now the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre. It was free from the start, so anyone could come.

That free admission is not a detail. It is the philosophy. Ahmed believed music brings people together, creates respect, and once respect is there, people can come together as a community. That idea, repeated by his friends after his death, explains why the festival grew from a single day at Chene Park to a multi day festival in Midtown Detroit, drawing tens of thousands each year and more than 100,000 in 2001 for the city’s 300th birthday, and why it now extends through Neighborhood Programs into communities across Metro Detroit.

In 2026, the festival marked its 35th year, during America’s 250th anniversary and Detroit’s 325th birthday. It was also the first festival since Ahmed’s death. The Smithsonian, as a partner in its Of the People: The Smithsonian Festival of Festivals initiative, noted that the 2026 festival would commemorate its founder. The November 14 performance in Dearborn carries that commemoration into the fall, as the culmination of a yearlong celebration of Ahmed’s life and legacy described by the organizers who shared this story with Dearborn Blog.

Free access has a cost, and it is fair to name it. A free festival depends on foundations, public support and partners. The Neighborhood Programs are supported by the Gilbert Family Foundation, the Kresge Foundation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and presented in partnership with Detroit PBS and WDET 101.9 FM, with additional support in part from an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. That support makes a night like November 14 possible. It does not by itself solve the larger questions of how artists are paid, how small venues survive, or how a community keeps its cultural institutions open year round.

A second fair question is whether looking back to 1880 to 1940 risks nostalgia, a soft focus on peddlers and newspapers that avoids the harder present. Offendum’s answer, in the work itself, is to refuse that soft focus. He brings the old headlines forward. He names xenophobia directly. He lets the audience hear how familiar the language of exclusion sounds. The history in Little Syria is not a refuge from the present. It is a mirror for it.

A third question is whether one night can carry a legacy as large as Ahmed’s. It cannot, and the organizers do not claim that it can. A single performance is a beginning, not a conclusion. Its value is in who gathers, what they hear, and what they do after they leave the hall. If the night sends people to the museum, to a conversation on November 12, to a book, to a family story, to a neighbor they had not met, then it has done the work Ahmed imagined for music: connection first, then community.

Ismael Ahmed: the man behind the music

Ismael Ahmed, known to many as Ish, died on January 31, 2026, at age 78, at his home in Farmington, Michigan, after a brief battle with cancer. His memorial, a celebration of life, was held on February 8, 2026, at the Ford Community and Performing Arts Center in Dearborn, the same venue where Omar will perform on November 14.

Ahmed was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1947, to an Egyptian father and a Lebanese American mother, and moved to Detroit at age six. He grew up in Dearborn’s South End, shaped by factory work, public education and a commitment to justice. He attended the University of Michigan, where his passion for social reform took root while he was still a student.

In the early 1970s, he helped found the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, known as ACCESS, with other Arab American activists trying to help a growing community. He served as its executive director for about 25 years, starting in 1983, and under his leadership ACCESS grew into one of the nation’s largest Arab American nonprofits, with annual revenue near 50 million dollars as of 2024 and assets of 100 million dollars, according to tax records cited in press coverage of his death. He helped guide ACCESS through the tense climate facing Arab Americans after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Ahmed helped co launch the Arab American National Museum, which opened in Dearborn on May 5, 2005, and served on its advisory board for many years. He later served as director of the Michigan Department of Human Services, now the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, under Governor Jennifer Granholm from 2007 to 2011, becoming the first and only Arab American to hold one of the state’s most significant cabinet roles. He oversaw a 7 billion dollar budget and almost 11,000 employees. He later returned to the University of Michigan Dearborn as associate provost, with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree for his lifetime of service. President Joe Biden appointed him to the National Council on the Arts.

Music was central to his activism, not separate from it. He hosted This Island Earth, an eclectic global music show on WDET 101.9 FM, for years. He performed as a DJ in his free time. He formed the Cultural Exchange Network, a coalition of more than 64 civic leaders and partners from across Michigan. His friends describe him as a connector, a man who believed that music creates respect, and respect creates community.

The press release for November 14 quotes Ferrell on this point directly:

This program is special because Ismael Ahmed, the late founder and executive director of the Concert of Colors, was a co founder of the Arab American Museum and ACCESS, our partners, and his memorial was held in the program venue.

Ferrell’s invitation in the release is plain: celebrate his legacy. That is the emotional center of the night. The audience will not only hear a story about immigrants a century ago. They will sit in the hall where a community said goodbye to the man who spent a lifetime building the institutions that make a night like this possible, and they will hear music that carries his belief forward.

What Dearborn should hear in this story

Dearborn is not a backdrop for this performance. It is a protagonist.

The Arab American National Museum, founded in 2005, is the national home for Arab American history, stories and culture. It is located in Dearborn, home to one of the largest concentrations of Arab Americans in the United States. It is a national institution of ACCESS, accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, a founding member of CultureSource, and a member of the National Performance Network. Its building on Michigan Avenue is a few minutes from the Ford Center. Its archives helped Offendum research Little Syria. Its stage, its choir, and its community programs, including the work of Lubana Al Quntar and Layan Srour, are part of the living culture the show celebrates.

For many Dearborn families, Little Syria is not distant history. It is family history in an earlier chapter. The peddlers who carried packs from Washington Street, the merchants who opened linen shops, the editors who printed Arabic newspapers, the poets who wrote in a new country while dreaming in an old language, those figures have Dearborn descendants. Some families trace their arrival through New York, through Ellis Island and Castle Garden, before they came to Michigan for factory work, for schools, for mosques and churches, for community. Others arrived later, from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Yemen, and found in Dearborn a city where Arabic is heard on Michigan Avenue, where bakeries, bookstores and community centers keep a culture alive in daily life.

The show also speaks to Dearborn’s present. In a year when America marks 250 years, the Neighborhood Programs ask a necessary question: whose voices make up the American story? The answer in Dearborn is not abstract. It is heard in classrooms, in city council meetings, in small businesses, in houses of worship, and in living rooms where grandparents tell stories that sound, at times, like the stories Offendum tells on stage. Immigration, xenophobia and the ever evolving American Dream are not topics for a textbook here. They are lived experience, discussed at kitchen tables and in community halls.

That is why a free show matters in this city. A ticket price, even a modest one, can be a barrier. A free night at the Ford Center, with walk ins welcome and reservations available, says that culture belongs to everyone in the room. It says that a child can hear an oud for the first time without a parent having to choose between a ticket and another bill. It says that an elder who remembers a parent’s stories of the old country can sit beside a teenager who knows Offendum from streaming and hear the same song in two different ways.

Dearborn Blog exists to connect local experience to larger struggles for justice, democracy, peace and human dignity. This night does that work without a lecture. It does it through music, through memory, and through the simple act of gathering in a public hall to listen together.

How to attend

What: Still We Sing: Omar Offendum’s Little Syria, featuring Lubana Al Quntar and Layan Srour, with Ronnie Malley and Thanks Joey

When: Saturday November 14, 2026, at 7 pm

Where: Ford Community and Performing Arts Center, Michael A. Guido Theater, 15801 Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, MI 48126

Admission: Free and open to the public. Reserve a free ticket in advance. Walk ins are welcome according to the press release.

Reserve: Use the Ford Center event page for Still We Sing.

Related event: Sinsyrianly Yours: A Conversation with Omar Offendum, Thursday November 12, 2026, 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm, Arab American National Museum, 13624 Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, MI 48126.

Presenters: Concert of Colors Neighborhood Programs in partnership with the Arab American National Museum.

Supporters: Gilbert Family Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Detroit PBS, WDET 101.9 FM, with support in part from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Media contacts: Lana Mini or Ben Curry, Marx Layne and Co., 248 855 6777.

Arrive early. The Ford Center fills quickly for free community nights, and the doors and the lobby are part of the experience, a chance to see neighbors, to meet the museum team, and to feel the room settle before the first note.

Conclusion: a song that outlives a street

Little Syria is gone as a place. Its streets were condemned, its blocks were knocked down, its storefronts were replaced by tunnel ramps and towers. What remains is harder to demolish: a language, a music, a set of stories, a way of naming home that travels.

Omar Offendum understands that. He does not rebuild Washington Street on stage. He rebuilds its voice. He lets a hakawati speak again, in hip hop and in Arabic, with an oud behind him and a soprano beside him, in front of an audience in Dearborn that knows, in its bones, what it means to carry a culture across an ocean and into a new city.

Ismael Ahmed understood it too. He spent a lifetime building rooms where that voice could be heard: ACCESS, the museum, Concert of Colors, a radio show that played music from around the world to listeners in Detroit. He believed that if people could hear each other, they could respect each other, and if they could respect each other, they could build something together.

On November 14, in the hall where Dearborn said goodbye to him in February, that belief gets its clearest test. A free show. A full house, hopefully. A story from 1880 to 1940, told in 2026, to people who live the next chapter every day.

Come to listen. Come to remember. Come to sing, even if only in your head, along with a community that has been singing for a long time, and is still singing now.

Still we sing. In Dearborn, on a Saturday night in November, that is not a title. It is an invitation.

Sources and References

1. Concert of Colors Neighborhood Programs and Arab American National Museum. Press release, Omar 2026 release, November 2, 2026. Supplied to Dearborn Blog via Google Drive, with photos Omar.jpeg and LittleSyria Portraits 012.jpeg, and video Interview BTS 2 High Res.mov. Event details, artist lineup, Ferrell quotations, venue, time, free admission, and supporter list are drawn from this release.
2. Arab American National Museum. Still We Sing: Omar Offendum’s Little Syria with special guests Lubana Al Quntar and Layan Srour. Event page, Saturday November 14, 2026, 7:00 PM, Ford Community and Performing Arts Center, 15801 Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, MI 48126. https://arabamericanmuseum.org/event/still-we-sing-little-syria-by-omar-offendum/
3. Concert of Colors. Neighborhood Programs. https://www.concertofcolors.com/neighborhood-programs
4. Ford Community and Performing Arts Center, Michael A. Guido Theater. Events, November 2026, Still We Sing, November 14, 7:00 PM, tickets 0 USD. https://www.dearborntheater.com/events/
5. Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. At the Global Concert of Colors, Detroit and Its Unifying Voice Take a Bow. July 15, 2026. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-center-folklife-cultural-heritage/2026/07/15/concert-of-colors-detroit/?itm_source=related-content&itm_medium=parsely-api
6. National Endowment for the Arts. Travels with the Chairman: Detroit and Jackson, Michigan. July 2026. Notes Ismael Ahmed passed away in February 2026, co founded ACCESS, established the Arab American National Museum, and created Concert of Colors. No direct article URL was returned in search, so no link is listed here.
7. Detroit Free Press via Gannett. Longtime community activist Ismael Ahmed dies. February 1, 2026, updated February 2, 2026. Died January 31 at age 78, led ACCESS, led Michigan Department of Human Services under Governor Jennifer Granholm, founded Concert of Colors, co launched Arab American National Museum.
8. Fox 2 Detroit. Metro Detroit activist Ismael Ahmed dies at the age of 78. February 2026. https://fox2detroit.com/news/metro-detroit-activist-ismael-ahmed-dies-age-78
9. William R. Boyer. Short Aside on a True Paragon. Substack, February 2026. Celebration of life February 8, 2026, at Ford Community and Performing Arts Center in Dearborn, with summary of Ahmed roles including ACCESS, Concert of Colors, Arab American National Museum, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, University of Michigan Dearborn, and WDET This Island Earth. https://williamrboyer.substack.com/p/short-aside-on-a-true-paragon
10. ACCESS. Mourning the passing of Ismael Ahmed. January 31, 2026. https://mailchi.mp/accesscommunity/you-have-48-hours-left-to-make-a-difference-5442996
11. Middle East Institute. Omar Offendum Live: Arab Pop Art Closing Night. Biography: Syrian American rapper, spoken word poet and theatrical storyteller, 20 year career, Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, Arab America Foundation 40 Under 40, Little Syria sold out runs at BAM, Old Town School Chicago, UCLA, HERE Arts Center and Joe’s Pub, Public Theater New York Voices. https://mei.edu/events/omar-offendum-live-arab-pop-art-closing-night/
12. New York Public Library, Carmen Nigro. Remembering Manhattan’s Little Syria. November 19, 2015. Washington Street and Rector Street, Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, Kawkab America 1892, more than 50 Arabic periodicals 1890 to 1940, Great Migration 1880 to 1924, about 95,000 Arabs relocated, about 200,000 Arabs in the United States by 1924, displacement for Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in 1940. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/11/19/manhattans-little-syria
13. Hyperallergic. Remembering Little Syria, a Forgotten Manhattan Neighborhood. Little Syria, NY: An Immigrant Community’s Life and Legacy, organized by the Arab American National Museum, at Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. https://hyperallergic.com/remembering-little-syria-a-forgotten-manhattan-neighborhood/
14. Kennedy Center. Lubana Al Quntar. Born in Syria, related to Asmahan and Farid Al Atrash, first Syrian opera singer to attain international recognition, returned to Syria to head Department of Opera Singing, came to United States in 2012. https://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/a/aa-an/lubana-al-quntar/
15. Artists At Work. Lubana Al Quntar, Dearborn 2025 to 2026. Internationally acclaimed Syrian opera and classical Arabic singer, first Syrian woman to professionally pursue opera, Fifth Prize Queen Elisabeth Competition, founded Jawqa Choir with Arab American National Museum, now residing in Dearborn. https://www.artists-at-work.org/lubana-al-quntar
16. University of Chicago, Arts and Humanities. Ronnie Malley. Multi instrumentalist on oud, guitar, keys and percussion, producer, theater maker, educator, executive director Intercultural Music Production, co creator Little Syria, 2023 Chamber Music America Michael Jaffee Visionary Award, BA DePaul, MA University of Chicago. https://music.uchicago.edu/directory/ronnie-malley
17. Artists At Work. Layan Srour, Dearborn 2025 to 2026. Detroit based interdisciplinary artist and curator, memory, movement, displacement and belonging, upbringing in Beirut, Taqsim duo with Yvonne Pruneau, Jalasat with Arab American National Museum. https://www.artists-at-work.org/layan-srour
18. Movement with Meklit Hadero, Podscan. Syrians must go back ft Omar Offendum. July 8, 2025. Little Syria research residency at UMS 2018, newspapers archived at North Carolina State University and Arab American National Museum, headlines including Syrians must go back, Not Quite White. https://podscan.fm/podcasts/movement-with-meklit-hadero/episodes/syrians-must-go-back-ft-omar-offendum-1
19. Arab American National Museum. Sinsyrianly Yours: A Conversation with Omar Offendum. November 12, 2026, 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm, Arab American National Museum, Dearborn. Listing via AANM events and AllEvents. No direct event URL was returned in search, so no link is listed here.

Editorial Disclaimer

Editorial Disclaimer: This article represents independent commentary, reporting, and analysis published by Dearborn Blog. Opinions expressed are those of the identified author and do not necessarily represent every contributor, partner, or affiliated organization. Information is based on sources available at the time of publication and may be updated as new evidence emerges. Allegations and disputed claims are attributed to their sources and should not be interpreted as independently established facts unless expressly verified. Dearborn Blog welcomes factual corrections and good faith responses.