Hummus at Thanksgiving: What It Actually Means to Grow Up Syrian-Lebanese in America

Sarah Azar remembers the exact moment she stopped being embarrassed about her lunch. She was twelve, sitting in a middle school cafeteria in suburban New Jersey, unwrapping a zaatar wrap her mom had packed. A classmate wrinkled their nose. "What's that smell?" And Sarah, who had spent the last three years trying to be as unremarkably American as possible, felt something shift inside her.

"I just said, 'It's zaatar. It's Lebanese. It's amazing. You want some?'" she recalls, laughing. "The kid actually said yes. And then other kids wanted some. And I thought — oh. This doesn't have to be a thing I hide."

Sarah is twenty-six now, a graphic designer in Brooklyn with a Lebanese flag sticker on her laptop and a deeply personal Instagram account that mixes Arabic calligraphy with New York street photography. She's also part of a generation of second-generation Syrian-Lebanese Americans who are rewriting the script on what it means to belong to two cultures simultaneously — and doing it without the guilt that often shadowed their parents' generation.

The Weight of the Hyphen

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with being hyphenated in America. Syrian-American. Lebanese-American. Arab-American. Each hyphen is a negotiation, a constant back-and-forth between two sets of expectations that don't always speak the same language.

For many second-generation Levantine Americans, childhood meant code-switching before they even had a word for it. Arabic at home, English everywhere else. Eid celebrations that had to be explained to teachers. Church or mosque on weekends, soccer practice during the week. Family dinners that lasted three hours and American sleepovers where you weren't sure if your parents would say yes.

"My parents came here with this very specific idea of what it meant to be Lebanese," says Karim Nassar, twenty-nine, who grew up in Dearborn and now works in public health in Detroit. "And they wanted to preserve that. Perfectly. Like it was something fragile that would break if it touched too much of America. But I'm not fragile. And neither is the culture."

This tension — between preservation and evolution, between honoring your roots and growing your own — is something almost every second-generation Syrian-Lebanese American we spoke to recognized immediately. It's the generation gap, but it runs deeper than most. It's not just about curfews or career choices. It's about identity at its most fundamental level.

Neither Here Nor There, and That's Okay

One of the most persistent myths about second-generation immigrants is that they're caught between two worlds, unable to fully belong to either. It's a narrative that's been applied to virtually every immigrant community in American history, and it tends to frame the experience as inherently tragic.

But the young Syrian-Lebanese Americans we spoke with largely rejected that framing. Not because the tension doesn't exist — it absolutely does — but because they've stopped seeing it as a problem to be solved.

"I used to feel like I had to choose," says Lena Haddad, twenty-four, a nursing student in Los Angeles whose parents immigrated from Syria in the late 1990s. "Like, am I going to be the Syrian girl or the American girl? And then I realized that's a fake choice. I'm both. I've always been both. The people who made me feel like I had to pick were the ones with the problem, not me."

This kind of confident dual belonging — what some researchers call "hyphenated identity" and what Lena just calls "being myself" — is increasingly visible in how second-generation Levantine Americans are showing up in public life. They're starting businesses that fuse Lebanese flavors with American street food culture. They're making music that layers Arabic lyrics over hip-hop and R&B beats. They're running for local office in communities where their parents were afraid to speak up at city council meetings.

The Parent Problem (Said With Love)

Of course, it's not all seamless confidence. The relationship with parents and grandparents remains one of the most emotionally complex parts of the second-generation experience — and the most honest voices we heard acknowledged that without glossing over it.

"My dad still introduces me to his friends as 'my son the engineer' even though I've been a musician for four years," says Danny Aziz, twenty-seven, who performs under the name Wadi and incorporates Syrian folk melodies into his electronic productions. "He's proud of me, I know he is. But he's proud of a version of me that makes more sense to him. We're still figuring out how to bridge that."

For others, the gap shows up around marriage, religion, or lifestyle choices that diverge from what their parents envisioned. These aren't uniquely Syrian or Lebanese tensions — they're immigrant family tensions, amplified by the particular weight of diaspora, of carrying a homeland that many second-generation kids have only visited, if at all.

But what's striking is how many of the people we spoke with described these conflicts with more compassion than bitterness. They understand, even when it's hard, that their parents' protectiveness is rooted in love and in loss. That preserving culture isn't just nostalgia — it's grief, and survival, and a way of keeping something real when everything else has changed.

"My mom puts hummus on the Thanksgiving table every year," Sarah Azar says. "My aunts used to tease her about it. But now everyone expects it. Now it's our tradition. That's how culture actually works — it moves, it adapts, it finds a place at the new table."

Building the Next Version

What's emerging from this generation isn't a rejection of Syrian-Lebanese heritage. If anything, the opposite is true. Young Levantine Americans are engaging with their roots more intentionally than any previous generation — learning Arabic as adults, traveling to Lebanon and Syria when they can, building community organizations that their parents never had access to.

They're also expanding what "the culture" means. Queer Syrian-Lebanese Americans are creating visibility in spaces that have historically excluded them. Women are pushing back on gender expectations while still showing up for family. Artists are making work that's unambiguously both American and Levantine, refusing the choice between the two.

It's messy and ongoing and sometimes painful. But it's also generative in a way that feels genuinely new.

"I don't think I'm between two worlds," Lena Haddad says, with the kind of certainty that only comes from having thought about something for a very long time. "I think I'm the world that happens when those two meet. And that world has a lot of good things in it."

Hummus at Thanksgiving included.