Sayed Kashua comes to EWCJS
Best known for Arab Labor, his wildly popular Israeli TV sit-com, Israeli-Palestinian novelist and Haaretz columnist Sayed Kashua was greeted by a standing-room-only audience at the Elie Wiesel Center on February 18. The New Yorker has described him as “the most visible representative of Palestinian life in Israel.”
In conversation, he shared some of the backstory behind his TV projects, about what it means to straddle Israel’s Jewish-Arab divide, and – as the father of three, who was raising his children in one of Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods – how it feels to start life over in America’s MidWest.
Kashua’s new series, The Screenwriter, is in its first season. Unlike Arab Labor, a comedy that skewered Israeli stereotypes, the new show is a barely fictionalized drama about an Israeli-Palestinian writer who navigates Israel’s two worlds. Why the shift to drama? Kashua said he had no choice.
“My work has always been political, always about identity and nationality, and the personal and political pain of being trapped in stereotypes,” he said. “But as the situation – and the occupation – got worse in Israel, humor became impossible. I needed a new way to talk about these things.”
Kashua left the country in the summer of 2014. Three Jewish teenagers had been murdered, Jerusalem crowds were shouting “death to the Arabs,” and a Palestinian boy was found, burned to death. “I called my agent and said I had to leave, “he recalled.
Today he teaches at the state university in Illinois. His children are learning English and making friends, as he and his wife adapt. “I was tired of choosing camps, of people putting words in my mouth,” he explained. “But I still have an empty house in Tira, my village. Now we live in the cornfields in Illinois. I’m less scared. But I was raised in a place where you’re not supposed to leave.”