An Exile in the Corn Belt
“Kashua, who is forty, with thick, once black hair and a brooding gaze, slouched a little behind the lectern. He grew up in Tira, an Arab village in central Israel, in a family of fruit farmers who had lived in the same house since the days of the British Mandate. In the past decade, he has become the kind of writer whose column, in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, “people hang on their fridge,” as a colleague put it. In 2007, a sitcom he wrote, titled “Arab Labor” (a Sabra idiom for second-rate work), had its début, introducing an Arab family to Israeli audiences for the first time. It made him a celebrity not just on the comfortable left but, as one television executive told me, among “taxi-drivers and supporters of Beitar,” a Jerusalem soccer club whose right-wing fans have been known to chant “I hate all Arabs.”
Source: www.newyorker.com