WEST ORANGE / SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — A documentary made by Philip Kayal and Abe Kasbo that premiered at Seton Hall University last year is now making its way to national television. PBS is airing the documentary “The Arab Americans” on NJTV on Thursday, Aug. 31. The film, which tells the stories of Arab groups of people in the United States, will be rolled out nationally, airing in New York City sometime in September.
“PBS has a series about a lot of different ethnic groups,” Kayal said in an Aug. 17 phone interview. “We’d been wanting to make it happen for a while, and we thought it was a good time to do it. We had always wanted it to be national.”
Kayal, a West Orange resident and sociology professor at Seton Hall University, served as the documentarian on the project while Kasbo did much of the production work. The documentary took approximately eight years to make. The two met in the early 1990s when Kasbo was a student in one of Kayal’s classes.
“We had to put together the story and put together the research first,” Kasbo said in a phone interview on Aug. 18, about presenting the documentary to PBS. The film has already aired on local television in Baltimore and Portland, and Kasbo said tickets have sold out for screenings in Atlanta and Houston.
“It’s been really popular in the south so far,” he said. “People across the country will see a different side of Arab culture. It’s a more positive story. Arab Americans have contributed so much, from business to health care to politics. It challenges the ideas that have been put out there already. And the timing is good right now to see a more positive outlook.”
According to Kayal, the film features information that many people have never heard before.
“No one really knows about Arabs in America,” he said. “We’ve been here since the 1700s, but that history has never been written. Most Americans don’t even know there are so many successful Arabs in science and in politics and other fields.”
When Kayal talks about the Arab group, he is referring to groups of people from many different countries. The documentary talks about and to people from Egypt and Syria, among others. As for Arab Americans, Kayal and Kasbo talked to people nearby and as far away as California.
“The mosaic is enormous, there are so many ethnic groups,” said Kayal, citing a large Egyptian population in Jersey City and the many Palestinian Arabs who live in Paterson. “We hoped to cover every group of Arabs in the county. We really bent over backward to not favor one group.”
Part of the reason Kasbo and Kayal embarked on making the film, according to Kayal, was to combat negative stereotypes often associated with Arabs in the national media.
“When you see the word ‘Arab’ in the newspaper, often the word ‘terrorist’ follows it,” he said, adding that the pair hopes their film will help to change that perception. “We knew there was a gap to fill and we wanted to do it,” said Kayal about many Americans’ knowledge of Arabs.
The project is the first film Kasbo has made. The near-decadelong project made him realize that his own contributions were important to the Arab community in America as well. He was born in Syria and moved to the United States as a child.
“You fall on your face a lot and if you’re serious about it, you get back up and dust yourself off,” Kasbo said about his experience as a first-time documentarian. “And as someone who’s never made a film, it was great to be able to make this contribution. That’s why I felt like I had to see the project through.”
NJTV will air “The Arab Americans” on Thursday, Aug. 31, at 8 p.m.
Photos Courtesy of Abe Kasbo
Local team’s documentary to be aired on PBS on Aug. 31 added by Amanda Valentovic on
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