Posted on 11/13/2008 7:36:52 AM PST by forkinsocket
"I'm totally secular, but I'm scared like hell of God." Sayed Kashua says this with the kind of neurotic, biting humor that has led many people - critics, fans and others - to compare him to Woody Allen. A Palestinian Woody Allen?
Kashua says it's Jerry Seinfeld (not Allen) whose humor he relishes - a connection that's more apt anyway since, like Seinfeld, Kashua has a wildly popular TV series on his hands. "Arab Labor," which Kashua created and wrote, takes a humorous look at a Kashua-like journalist and his Palestinian family as they navigate modern life in Israel. The groundbreaking series, which screened earlier this year at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and is the first in Israeli prime time to feature Arabic-speaking characters, premieres Saturday in the United States on the Link TV satellite channel, which is streaming the first episode for free on its Web site. It's not available on broadcast or cable TV.
Now American audiences can see what Israelis have been talking about for the past year - a series where Amjad (the Kashua figure) and his family are comfortably middle class, interact with Israeli Jews (Amjad's closest colleague is Jewish), and have to confront stereotypes (from both Israelis and Palestinians) that plunge Amjad from one identity crisis to another. In an opening scene, for example, the family is stopped at an Israeli checkpoint, where Amjad wonders if his underarm deodorant helped prompt the pull-over. "Do we smell of fear?" he asks his wife and young daughter as he sniffs his shirt. "Do we look different? All the money I spend on fashionable clothes!"
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Ultimately, the series will bomb.
What a dishonest headline. The man is ,of course, an Israeli and not Palestinian. If he lived outside of Israel, he'd already be dead for blaspheming allah.
“Blaster of my domain.”
You can’t get more leftist than Seinfeld.
LOL. Where’s the Falafel Nazi?
Well...arabs do need to learn to laugh at themselves. It would go a long way to solving their ‘radical’ problem. just sayin.....
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