About Sami Michael
Sami Michael (Hebrew: סמי מיכאל, Arabic: سامي ميخائيل; 15 August 1926 – 1 April 2024) was an Iraqi-Israeli author, having migrated from Iraq to Israel at the age of 23. From 2001, Michael was the President of The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). Michael was among the first in Israel to call for the creation of an independent Palestinian state to exist alongside the state of Israel. In his novels, Michael writes about the aspirations and struggles of both Jews and Arabs. This new approach in modern Hebrew literature was controversial and has been widely discussed in academia and in the media. Michael was awarded the EMET Prize in 2007. Michael defined himself not as a Zionist, but as an Israeli in order to make room for the inclusion of all citizens in Israel. Born as Kamal Salah, Sami Michael was the firstborn of a large, secular, Jewish family in Baghdad, where his father was a merchant. In 1974 he published his first novel, in Hebrew, All Men are Equal – But Some are More, about the lives of immigrants in transit camps in Israel in the 1950s.
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