Before Oct. 7, 2023, Naser Salman had two rules: Never cry in public, and never cry in front of another man. Then he traveled to Gaza, where he served for a month as a nurse in Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. He saw families bombed in their tents. He watched children die.
This week, several months after his return to the United States, Mr. Salman sat in a bakery in his hometown, Paterson, N.J., and told stories about his time in Gaza. He began to cry. Beside him sat his friend, Zahed Rahman, who had also left his job as a nurse in New Jersey to work in hospitals in Gaza. Mr. Rahman reached over and rubbed his friend’s neck. Soon he also had tears in his eyes.
“I’ve never cried in front of anybody,” said Mr. Salman, 37, who now lives in Clifton, N.J. “My view on the world is never going to be the same.”
Paterson is the longtime center of New Jersey’s large and thriving Palestinian community. Located 15 miles west of Manhattan, it can seem in some places like a country unto itself, especially in the neighborhood of South Paterson, where Arabic speakers predominate, many businesses fly Palestinian flags and a section of Main Street has been officially renamed Palestine Way.
The community is directly, often painfully, connected to the war in Gaza. Many residents of Paterson and its suburbs lived in Gaza or the West Bank before emigrating to the United States. Many remain in touch with relatives there, who for the last two years have sent a steady stream of text messages, photos and videos of bombs falling, homes destroyed, civilians wounded or dead and displaced families searching for shelter and food.
Two years on, members of New Jersey’s Middle Eastern community took the opportunity provided by a tenuous cease-fire to reflect on how the war in Gaza has changed them, sometimes profoundly.
“I’m back in therapy!” said Rania Mustafa, 33, executive director of the Palestinian American Community Center in Clifton, N.J. “During a genocide, you have to be in therapy.”
Ms. Mustafa’s father, Diab Mustafa, was born in Jersey City, spent his boyhood in the West Bank, and moved back to New Jersey to attend college and have a family. When the war began in 2023, he said, he woke up every morning, reached for his phone, and watched YouTube videos from Gaza depicting the latest attacks by the Israel Defense Forces. Then he would switch to Instagram, and TikTok, and spend his day consuming unfiltered images of tragedy and gore.
He soon grew depressed. Eventually, Mr. Mustafa decided to abstain from news consumption. He signed out of all social media apps, and deleted them from his phone. He replaced them with Headspace, a meditation app.
“There is nothing I can do to keep my family in the West Bank safe,” said Mr. Mustafa, 58, the board president of the Palestinian community center. “So I became hooked on meditation. I just didn’t want to see the killing anymore.”
After years of responding to bloody tragedy as an ambulance E.M.T. and an emergency room nurse, Zahed Rahman spent his personal time looking for comfort. He ate well, and saved his money in hopes of buying a big house, a nice car and a backyard grill to host family barbecues.
“I was your average American, bro,” Mr. Rahman, 46, who lives in Teaneck, N.J., said of his life before the war. “I didn’t even know what primaries were.”Then came the Hamas-led terrorist attacks of Oct. 7.
Mr. Rahman, whose family is from India, and who grew up in Jersey City, watched videos from the war in Gaza. He started reposting them. Then he decided to get personally involved. He quit his job as a nurse at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., and traveled twice to the Middle East, working each time as a volunteer nurse for different hospitals in Gaza.
Like his friend, Mr. Salman, he too saw displaced families bombed in their tents, he said. He saw shoeless orphans lying on the ground by their parents’ graves.
When he returned to New Jersey, the nice house and splashy car had lost their appeal. He went to Macy’s and, for the first time, bought a pair of slacks and a button-down shirt. He wore the outfit when he went to Washington, D.C., to lobby members of Congress to support a cease-fire in Gaza.
“I finally found a purpose,” he said.
For years after 9/11, the N.Y.P.D. spied on Muslims in New Jersey, which spread fear in the community, said Raed Odeh, owner of the Palestine Hair Salon in South Paterson. Years after the surveillance program was disbanded, Muslims in Paterson began to assert themselves in public ways. Main Street was renamed Palestine Way in May 2022. Beginning around that time, and accelerating after the Gaza war started, many local businesses flew Palestinian flags outside their shops, and painted scenes of Palestinian history on their walls.
“We feel more confidence here, now, to be ourselves,” said Mr. Odeh, 53, who is president of the South Paterson Business Association.
The neighborhood’s new brand, as a home to Palestinian culture, attracted Middle Eastern tourists from across the United States, who drove to Paterson to eat in traditional restaurants and buy jewelry and souvenirs from their home countries. The number of visitors has more than doubled, Mr. Odeh said, to 25,000 a week.
“Paterson came out strong the last few years,” Mr. Odeh said. “So many people want to buy apartments and stores in Paterson now, we have waiting lists!”
As the community grew, some people realized that they never had to leave it. When the war in Gaza began, Barry Mahmoud resolved to insulate himself within the Palestinian and Arab community.
The benefit of his strategy, Mr. Mahmoud said, is that he no longer needed to boycott any businesses, or cut friends out of his life, because they disagree with him about the righteousness of the Palestinian cause.
“It worked, I’ve isolated myself within this bubble,” said Mr. Mahmoud, 22, a Clifton resident who is preparing to apply to law school. “I wish I didn’t do it as strictly as I did because I can see that my experiences are a little narrow.”
Even those who have pushed away the community can attest to its growing influence. Mahmoud al-Shahn opened a cafe, a sweets shop and a hookah bar on Main Street in 2019. For years the businesses thrived, he said. Then, in May 2024 and again the following year, more than 10,000 people gathered on the street for Palestine Day on Palestine Way. Palestinian artists performed music and read poetry. Mr. Salman and Mr. Rahman took the stage to describe their experiences as nurses in Gaza.
Most business owners in the area closed for the day. Not Mr. al-Shahn’s. The door to his shop remained open, the lights on.
“All these people come to march and shout, ‘We are here for Gaza!’” said Mr. al-Shahn, who is originally from Egypt and lives in Paterson. “You are not helping anybody. If you want to make fights, go to your original country and do it there.”
It appears that his neighbors have noticed. As he spoke this week, Mr. al-Shahn sat smoking Marlboro Lights in the back of his empty hookah bar. People stopped buying his cookies and candies, so he had closed the sweet shop a few months ago. The lease for his cafe and his hookah bar expires at the end of the year. If customers don’t come back, he said, he’ll be forced to close them both.
“I don’t care about Gaza,” he said. “I care about myself and my family. Maybe this did not help me.”
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
Vincent Alban is a photojournalist and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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