A response to "Habibi City," New York magazine, August 10 to 23, 2026

Zaina Arafat opens her essay in a bookstore in North Brooklyn. It is February 2025, and she is there with her daughter for a kids' bookmaking workshop. By the end of the day she has run into friends twice, once at the bookstore and again at a fundraiser for journalists in Gaza. What she remembers most is the ease of it. She and her friends were not catching up, she writes. They were just together, "like in the blad," back home, except in Greenpoint.

Then she remembers what it was like fifteen years earlier, as a student at Columbia. Back then it felt safer to make yourself smaller. You gathered in someone's living room, or at one of a handful of places that were already yours. Arafat says her community was "legible mainly to ourselves." After 9/11, her father started giving the name Frank instead of Fawaz when he made dinner reservations.

If you have ever shortened your name for a barista or picked your words before answering the question "where is your family from," that detail lands in the chest.

What the scene gets right

The essay, and the issue around it, make a case that something real has happened in New York. A generation of Arab, Iranian, Muslim, and South Asian New Yorkers stopped gathering quietly and started gathering in public. Reading series started in backyards. Cafes became what Arafat calls the "Platonic ideal of a third space." Parties like Laylit, Haza, and Disco Tehran built dance floors where Arabic and Persian music was the point, not the novelty. Non-diaspora guests started showing up, and the rooms got bigger.

Two moments in the piece stayed with us.

The first is Kimia Zakerin, who in December 2023 asked her Instagram followers whether anyone wanted to practice their Farsi. Hundreds of people filled out a Google sign-up sheet. At the first meeting, she says, everyone kept wondering where all these people had been.

The second is El Atigh Abba, the owner of Barzakh Cafe in Crown Heights. He tells Arafat that he and his friends, many of them restaurant workers and drivers, could never find a place to hang out comfortably. They were tired of bars where they could not hear one another talk. So he built one. Barzakh, in Arabic, means the liminal space between worlds, and that is a better description of the diaspora experience than most of the vocabulary we have been handed.

Both stories say the same thing. The demand was never the problem. The people were already here. What was missing was a place that gathered them.

Who the scene can leave out

Here is where we want to add a note, with respect for what the piece documents.

Arafat describes a network where people are "one or two degrees removed" from each other. That is a beautiful way to build community and a hard one to enter. A scene that runs on Instagram, word of mouth, parties, bars, and protest circles is wonderful if you are already plugged in, and invisible if you are not.

Who is not plugged in? Someone who moved to the city for work and knows no one. Someone who grew up in New Jersey or Long Island, far from any enclave. Someone who is Arab or Iranian or Muslim and passes in most rooms, and has never been sure whether they would be welcome in the ones built for people like them. A couple with young kids who cannot make a late party. Someone who is shy, or religious in a way that does not match the nightlife, or simply tired.

None of them are failing at community. The map just does not show them the door.

The politics are real, and so is the open door

The essay is candid that the scene grew out of grief and politics, and that it is not free of argument. Arafat writes about the tension over who belongs under the SWANA label, and about the debates at Barzakh over who can share a stage. Abba's answer, posted at the door as the cafe's "Rules of Engagement," is to welcome strangers with respect, dignity, and curiosity.

We are a social app, not a political organization, and we will not pretend to settle questions that this community argues about with good reason. What we can say is how we want our own door to work. No applications. No membership test. No one checks how you look, what you are called, or how much of the culture you can recite. If the table is set and you want a seat, you are welcome to it.

From visible to held

Arafat closes with the Arabic word sumud, steadfastness, which she describes as a quiet refusal to disappear. We keep returning to that phrase. Visibility is a kind of victory, and it is hard won. But being written about in a national magazine is not the same as being held by a community on an ordinary Tuesday.

That is the older tradition we named this company after. A finjan is not for performing culture. It is the small cup you hand someone before you ask them anything at all. Hospitality is the unglamorous work that comes after the scene becomes cool: learning a name, pulling out a chair, saving a seat for the person who walked in alone.

New York has been told that we are here. At Finjani, we want to help you find who you are here with.

Want to read the full article? We reached out to New York magazine and got a PDF just for Finjani readers, Habibi in The City PDF.

Fill your cup.