Arab Labor: The Complete First Season
Directed by Yaakov Goldwasser, Roni Ninio
ARAB LABOR is a raucous and irreverent critically acclaimed comedy series from Israel about Amjad, a Palestinian journalist and Israeli citizen in search of his identity. His personal quest for status and success as a journalist at a Jerusalem newspaper is foiled by the humiliating searches he endures everyday when he leaves his Palestinian neighborhood to commute to his job. In the midst of a walloping identity crisis, Amjad jockeys between two cultures as he tries to polish his image for his Jewish friends and colleagues while enjoying his own down-to-earth family life. The result is a comedy series that pierces the taboos of acceptable language and humor surrounding the prickly, long-standing status quo in which Palestinian and Jewish Israelis live side by side.
Reviews
“Meet the Palestinian Seinfeld.” - San Francisco Chronicle
"groundbreaking and amazing" - Los Angeles Times
"It will tickle your funny bone, and maybe strike a nerve." - The Associated Press
"groundbreaking TV show" - The Chicago Tribune
"barges through cultural barriers" - The New York Times
"It's not really an Israeli version of Jerry Seinfeld, the Jewish American actor whose mother is a Syrian-Jew (making him my favorite Arab comedian, by the way). It's more like the 1960s and 70s American TV sitcom, All in the Family, where race and race issues were ripped apart to make a social point." - Jerusalem Post
"one of the most brilliant portrayals of the challenging life Arabs in Israel face every day...remarkably captivating... Episode after episode draws the viewer through the maze of conflicts that make of the reality of Arab-Jewish life in Israel...I urge you to get it. Not to laugh at the foibles of human tragedy, but rather to understand through the only medium that permits understanding in the emotion-charged Arab-Israeli conflict, humor." - The National Arab American Times Newspaper