Presented with UNO’s Schwalb Center for Israel & Jewish Studies, this screening will be followed by a discussion with author/screenwriter Sayed Kashua and fellow Israeli writer Assaf Gavron moderated by Curtis Hutt, Professor of Judaic Studies and Special Programs Coordinator for the Schwalb Center.

Adapted for the screen by Kashua from his 2002 memoir, A BORROWED IDENTITY tells the story of Eyad, a Palestinian Israeli boy given the chance to go to a prestigious Jewish boarding school in Jerusalem. As he desperately tries to fit in with his Jewish schoolmates and within Israeli society, Eyad develops a friendship with another outsider, a boy with muscular dystrophy, and gradually becomes part of the home Jonathan shares with his mother. After falling in love with a Jewish girl, he leaves school when their relationship is uncovered, and he discovers that he will have to sacrifice his identity in order to be accepted. Faced with a choice, Eyad will have to make a decision that will change his life forever.

Kashua, an Arab Israeli who writes in Hebrew, is well known in Israel for his weekly column in the newspaper Haaretz and for “Arab Labor,” a groundbreaking television sitcom that explored racial and cultural tensions. He currently teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Acclaimed writer and translator Assaf Gavron is the Visiting Israeli Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Schwalb Center. His fiction has been translated into German, Russian, Italian, French, English, Dutch, Swedish, Greek and Bulgarian. His latest novel is The Hilltop.