In the late 2010s, Noam Shuster Eliassi was working at the United Nations, the latest step in a lifelong effort to build peace between Israelis and Palestinians, when she had an epiphany. In Ukraine, a Jewish comedian named Volodymyr Zelenskyy had made the improbable leap from sitcom about accidentally becoming president to actually becoming president. Perhaps, if she were to take her political career seriously, she should start writing jokes.
It worked. As an Israeli Jew fluent in Hebrew, Arabic and English, Shuster Eliassi could nimbly weave between different audiences, and what started as short comedic videos on social media soon became an invitation from Harvard to develop a full-on stand-up routine skewering the idea of coexistence as it’s often used in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The show would riff on her upbringing in one of the only joint Israeli-Palestinian communities in the country, threading a fine needle with self-deprecating humor and an activist’s edge. The aim, she told the Guardian, was to “unpack” the idea of coexistence, “and say, like, ‘this is how I grew up, there are so many funny kumbayah moments, and I propose something else.’”
