Denaturalizing Culture: Sayed Kashua's Newspaper Columns on the Topic of Prejudice

Abstract

Discrimination is a recurrent topic in the work of the Israeli-Arab writer Sayed Kashua. In the last couple of years, Sayed Kashua has moved away from writing about the prejudice expressed by his own Israeli Muslim community towards the Israeli Jewish population to focus his attention instead on the prejudice shown by Jews against Arabs in Israel. Self-criticism has always been a hallmark of Sayed Kashua's work so this shift indicates a significant change in the columnist's perception of his own society. Based on a survey of various issues relating to Israeli society, such as the law, the educational system and language, as well as a theoretical review of authors who observe a mutual alienation of Arabs and Jews in Israel, this article analyses several of Sayed Kashua's recent columns in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It also investigates how the author understands prejudice and, in a singular and surprising way, expresses his concerns and solutions to this problem.