Sayed Kashua

Kashua was born in 1975 in Tira, in the Triangle region of Arab towns in central Israel.[3][2] His father, Darwish, was active in the Israeli Communist Party, Maki, while encouraging his son to enter Jewish society rather than remain within the boundaries of the village.[6] Kashua recalled that, during his childhood in Tira, his identity initially felt at one with his surroundings.[7]

He later attended the Israel Arts and Science Academy boarding school in Jerusalem.[8] He recalled having had little previous contact with Jewish Israelis and being teased for his clothing and provincial background.[7] He also remembered being mocked for his Hebrew and described a period at the school as “a nightmare.”[6] After three difficult years, however, he had learned Hebrew, encountered his first library—he said there had been none in Tira—and developed a love of literature.[7] Reading stories about Israeli fighters prompted him to feel that he had “different stories to tell, from a different perspective.”[7]

Kashua later graduated from the Hebrew University.[9] He spent much of his life in Jerusalem, which became a setting in works such as The Screenwriter.[3][10]

Kashua began his journalism career around 1995 and became known for a weekly Haaretz column.[2][11] He recalled spending more than two years trying to attract attention to his short stories before a newspaper column helped bring his writing to a publisher’s notice.[12] In a 2004 discussion of his work, he described writing after dawn prayer and taking his laptop to a mosque, which he called his “number one place of inspiration.”[12]

His choice of literary language developed through reading as well as schooling.[7] Kashua explained that classical Arabic differed greatly from the colloquial Arabic he had grown up speaking, while he initially doubted that his Hebrew was good enough for literary writing.[7] Encountering Etgar Keret’s work helped persuade him that he could write stories in Hebrew.[12] Much of his subsequent work used Hebrew to portray Palestinian life in Israel.[8][4]

In a 2012 review in the Jewish Review of Books, Alan Mintz characterized Kashua’s weekend-magazine columns as accessible, self-deprecating first-person vignettes that used everyday absurdities and family humiliations to examine wider cultural tensions.[11] Mintz described Kashua as having established himself in Israeli Jewish journalism and popular culture while remaining proud of his Arab identity.[11]

Mintz’s discussion of the March 2012 column “A Clean Getaway” illustrates his reading of Kashua’s comic method: its narrator works among Jewish television writers and producers in a West Jerusalem office building where Arab cleaners are employed.[11] Embarrassed by the contrast between his comfortable office and their work, the narrator secretly cleans his own room before dawn, only to be told by a cleaner that such behavior threatens the cleaner’s job.[11] Mintz interpreted the episode as exposing the narrator’s discomfort and the contradictions of his position.[11]

Dancing Arabs appeared in Hebrew as Aravim Rokdim in 2002; Miriam Shlesinger’s English translation followed in 2004.[2] The novel is a fictionalized exploration of Kashua’s experience as an Arab Israeli, following a protagonist from childhood into adulthood as he navigates Palestinian and Israeli culture.[2][4] Like Kashua, the protagonist attends a prestigious boarding school in Jerusalem, where he fears persecution because of his differences and tries to blend in.[2]

The protagonist imagines radically different futures, ranging from becoming Israel’s first non-Jewish prime minister and bringing peace to joining a militant Islamic group.[2] The story ends with him working as a bartender, married to an Arab nursing student, and raising a daughter.[2] Dancing Arabs received the Grinzane Cavour prize in Italy.[2]

Kashua’s second novel, Let It Be Morning, was published in Hebrew as Va-yehi Boker in 2004 and in Shlesinger’s English translation in 2006.[2] It follows an Arab Israeli journalist who leaves the frustrations of Tel Aviv for his native village.[2] The village is subsequently surrounded by the Israeli army and cut off from electricity, water, and communications.[2] In the fictional crisis, village elders attempt to appease the army by rounding up Arab workers from the occupied territories and handing them over to soldiers, but their action worsens the situation.[2]

The novel combines this siege scenario with everyday concerns about obtaining food and paying for utilities.[13] Discussing the book in 2004, Kashua said that he did not write to deliver a message: he had questions rather than fixed positions, and felt that the political situation pursued him in his writing rather than being something he deliberately sought out.[12]

Second Person Singular explores the identities of Arabs assimilated into Israeli culture and won the Bernstein Prize for literary achievement for writers aged 50 and younger.[7] Mintz described its structure as two alternating narratives whose protagonists remain unaware of one another until near the end, although readers discover a consequential connection between them.[11] In his account, one narrative follows a successful criminal lawyer living in East Jerusalem and practicing in the western part of the city; the other follows Amir Lahab, an introverted former social worker caring for a severely ill young Jewish Israeli named Yonatan.[11]

Mintz described the lawyer as a village-born graduate of the Hebrew University who remains in Jerusalem and becomes preoccupied with professional status, an impressive car, and clothing that might influence his treatment by Border Police.[11] His account of Amir traces a different path: the son of a father murdered after working with Israelis, Amir grows up an outsider, reaches university through academic achievement, and discovers photography through Yonatan’s cultural world.[11] After Yonatan’s death, Amir assumes his identity and pursues a career as a photographic artist.[11]

Kashua’s Hebrew-language fiction also includes Herzl Disappears at Midnight, discussed alongside Second Person Singular in scholarship on Arab identity in Israel.[14] By 2014, he had published four Hebrew-language novels, and Dancing Arabs and Second Person Singular were included among recommended works of Hebrew and Israeli literature.[3]

Arab Labor, or Avoda Aravit, was Israel’s first prime-time television show with Arabic-speaking main characters.[15] Created and written by Kashua, it examines Arab-Jewish cultural divisions through Amjad, an Arab journalist experiencing an identity crisis, and through an Arab family and Jewish neighbors living in the same building.[15][16] The series’ journalist protagonist shares aspects of Kashua’s professional life, although Kashua cautioned that he was not trying to tell the truth about himself through Amjad.[15][16]

By its fourth season in 2013, Arab Labor averaged a reported 30 percent rating per episode.[16] At an Israeli Academy of Film and Television awards ceremony, it won every category in which it was nominated, including Best Comedy and Best Screenplay.[15] Kashua received several Israeli Television Academy Awards for his writing on the series.[3]

Kashua also created and wrote The Screenwriter, whose protagonist, Khatab, is an Arab-Israeli novelist and screenwriter living in a secular Jerusalem neighborhood.[10] The character’s previous success with Arab Labor and reluctance to continue making comedies about Arabs and Jews establish explicit parallels with Kashua’s career.[10] He served as lead editor of Shtisel’s second season and later worked in writing and story-editing roles on Israeli series including Shtisel and Madrasa.[17][18]

His 2023 series Madrasah is set in a bilingual school attended by Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking children and follows students, teachers, and parents.[1] It addresses religion and identity and includes a romance between an Arab boy and a Jewish girl.[1] Kashua’s own children had attended a bilingual school in Jerusalem.[1]

Kashua’s books also reached cinema through A Borrowed Identity, a 105-minute narrative film directed by Eran Riklis.[5] Based on his books, it follows Eyad from an Arab town in Israel to a Jewish boarding school in Jerusalem, where he struggles with belonging and identity.[5] Let It Be Morning became the basis for a film directed by Eran Kolirin; Kashua said he loved the adaptation despite its differences from the novel.[17]

Kashua left Israel with his wife and three children in 2014.[6] He had initially planned a year abroad after receiving teaching offers from the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, but said that the situation in Israel turned the proposed sabbatical into a move.[6] In the United States, he taught Hebrew and gave public talks.[6]

Explaining his decision in August 2014, Kashua cited Jewish extremists in Jerusalem and his fear after the kidnapping and killing of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir.[19] He said that he could no longer allow his daughter to take Jerusalem buses and described feeling that he had lost his world.[19]

In 2017, Kashua described family life in Champaign, Illinois, saying that the quiet had initially frightened him but later became one of the best aspects of living there.[20] He contrasted the responsibility he had felt as an Israeli citizen to change things with his experience in the United States, where he did not feel the same obligation, while remaining uncertain whether to stay or return to Israel.[20] By 2023, he was based in St. Louis and continued working as an author, television writer, and opinion columnist.[17]

Kashua received the Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature in 2005, while his television writing earned recognition from the Israeli Television Academy.[3] His novels became bestsellers, were translated, and received awards.[20] His international readership includes France, where his works have been translated, celebrated, and read alongside those of Aharon Appelfeld, Zeruya Shalev, and Ronit Matalon.[21]

His literary position belongs to a broader trend, increasingly prominent from the 1990s, of Israeli Arab authors writing in Hebrew for Hebrew readers.[22] His fiction has been read as semi-autobiographical writing about assimilation and the lives of Israeli Arabs, including the crisis of assimilation associated with the October 2000 events.[22] In 2014, Kashua described himself as “in between” and expressed concern for making Israel better for both Jewish and Arab children.[7]

Mintz framed Kashua’s work around “a common question about assimilation: not whether it is good or bad but whether it is possible.”[11] Academic readings have examined how the fictional characters in Herzl Disappears at Midnight and Second Person Singular introduce a Jewish-Zionist component into questions of Arab, Palestinian, and Israeli identity.[14]

A 2024 scholarly reading of Let It Be Morning approaches its apocalyptic setting through the concepts of the uncanny and the abject, distinguishing a journalistic, local-political layer from a universal layer emerging as ordinary social order collapses.[23] In that interpretation, the village’s removal from Israeli borders expresses anxiety about expulsion, while the novel’s “double homecoming” encompasses both the narrator’s return to his birthplace and the village’s return to Palestinian sovereignty.[23]

Kashua’s use of Hebrew has brought criticism as well as literary recognition.[7][11] He described estrangement from Israeli Arabs concerned with preserving Arabic as a means of maintaining identity, and spoke of the painful loss of his connection to Tira.[7] Mintz reported that the Arab press had criticized him as a cultural collaborator even as Hebrew readers valued his distinctive voice.[11]