Saturday Night Live in Arabic

Madam Mazen writes about a new Arabic version of SNL, to be broadcast by the satellite service OSN, with the first episode featuring Egyptian actress/comedian Donia Samir Ghanem. The new program comes in the wake of El Bernameg, hosted by Bassem Youssef aka "Egypt's Jon Stewart", taken off air for being too incisive (and red line crossing) in …

Native: Dispatches From an Israeli-Palestinian Life

Sayed Kashua's new book Native: Dispatches From an Israeli-Palestinian Life is a collection of reflections written between 2006 and the summer of 2014, when Kashua left Israel and moved to the US to teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Native was originally published in Hebrew as Ben Ha’aretz. As Adam Kirsch writes, this "title that contains an untranslatable pun. Literally, it …

A New Iftah Ya Simsim

I have fond memories of watching the old Iftah Ya Simsim (the Arabic Sesame Street). As someone born outside the Arab world, and expected to be trilingual at a young age, the programme is probably one of the reasons I learned to speak Arabic as a mother tongue. Even though the videos were old by …