Akiva Tor, Israel’s consul general for the Pacific Northwest, called it “the best television we’ve produced in the last decade.”
He was talking about “Arab Labor,” the wildly popular and wickedly funny Israeli sitcom about an Arab Israeli family trying to make its way in the Jewish state.
Tor delivered his remarks July 28 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, where the show’s creator — Israeli Arab novelist, screenwriter and Ha’aretz columnist Sayed Kashua — received the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s Freedom of Expression Award just prior to a screening of three episodes of his show’s second season.
Two of those episodes have not yet aired in Israel, giving a few hundred lucky San Franciscans first crack at what is sure to raise eyebrows and generate a lot of ink back home.
“Arab Labor” takes on the most difficult issues confronting Israeli Arabs, from substandard infrastructure in their villages to persistent identity conflicts. But instead of wallowing in anger or despair, the show uses biting satire to skewer Arab and Jew alike, proving yet again humor’s ability to treat the most contentious topics without everyone coming to blows.
“I love this show because it’s the ultimate destruction of PC,” Tor told the crowd. “Without the ability to speak truth to each other, how can we make peace?”
Whether in English or Hebrew, Kashua is adept at delivering barbed hardballs disguised as the most innocent of jokes. Ambling up to the stage after Tor’s laudatory introduction, this first Arab recipient of the festival’s top creative honor feigned contrition, saying, “I prepared a speech against the occupation, but the consul general of Israel was so nice.”
Nothing gentle about this guy, or his show.
In “Shower,” one of the new episodes, Amjad Alian, an Arab Israeli reporter for a Hebrew newspaper, wonders why water drips fitfully from his own shower while his Jewish friend’s shower gushes forth. When he complains to the authorities, they slap a demolition order on his apartment.
Not a funny situation in real life, certainly. But because Amjad is the eternal optimist, convinced that he can take on the Israeli bureaucracy as well as any Jew, audiences are permitted to laugh even as they wince. And, as in every episode, Amjad eventually triumphs — if only because he learns how to cope. Like any Israeli.
In this case, he packs up and moves his family to a Jewish neighborhood. But he is unaware that the man who sells him his new apartment is doing it not because he’s a leftist, as he tells Amjad, but in order to get back at his own neighbors who will, he believes, be upset that an Arab family has moved in.
Are you laughing yet? Somehow Kashua makes it work, making his point even as audiences are chuckling.
Jewish leftists are not spared his barbs. In another episode from Season 2, the Alians’ Jewish neighbor is appalled that her dog “barks at Arabs,” telling her husband in exasperation, “But we vote Meretz!”
Season 1 of “Arab Labor” is available on DVD, and on S.F.-based Link-TV. The American rights to Season 2 are still being negotiated.
Kashua grew up in Tira, an Arab village in the Galilee. Like the fictional Alians, who send their daughter to a Jewish school so she’ll get a better education, his own parents sent him to a Jewish high school. There he saw his first library — Tira still doesn’t have one, he says.
That library had no Arabic-language books, and even today, Kashua writes only in Hebrew — an irony familiar to other Arab Israeli intellectuals.
Kashua has been called the Arab Woody Allen for his self-deprecating humor.
At the July 28 screening, an audience member asked whether he agreed with the comparison. “If by that you mean, a member of a minority scared to death by the majority culture, then no,” he quipped. Rethinking his response, he backtracked, saying he does employ “the kind of minority humor where you say, please don’t shoot me, I can be funny.”
“Arab Labor: Season 2” screens Monday, Aug. 9 at 8:30 p.m. at the Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. $10-$12. Tickets or information: www.sfjff.org.