Sesame Street, Palestine: The Ups and Downs of Producing a Children's Program

Big Birds are rare in Palestine.

After a surprise phone call from Children's Television Workshop, Daoud Kuttab took the chance of a lifetime to create a Palestinian coproduction of Sesame Street. But the challenges of producing a world-famous children's program quickly escalated beyond just teaching Elmo to speak Arabic.

From finding actors and puppeteers in a country starved of training to dealing with a community that considered the production too provocative, the early days were less than ...