The Jewish Comedian Calling Out Apartheid in Arabic

The +972 Podcast

Noam Shuster-Eliassi, an Israeli comedian based in south Tel Aviv, spent her childhood and early adulthood invested in a traditional model of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. Growing up in Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam, a mixed community in central Israel where Jews and Palestinains live together by choice, Shuster-Eliassi took to peace activism as a young adult, becoming part of dialogue groups and working with a UN subsidiary.

Yet she came to find this mode of activism inadequate, she told the +972 Podcast. "I got to a very extreme point where I couldn't deal anymore with how much we were not making any progress in humanitarian work and in the NGO world."

Turning to stand-up comedy, she said, not only helped her feel less alone in struggling against the situation in Israel-Palestine, but also helped the trilingual Shuster-Eliassi — she speaks Hebrew, Arabic, and English — express herself in the way that she wanted. "[Comedy] released my voice. It made me say the things that I dreamed of saying, it made me reach the people I'm dreaming of reaching — it made me speak in all the languages that I know."

The music in this episode is by DAM and Ketsa.

The audio clips in this episode are taken from the short documentary "Reckoning With Laughter," directed by Amber Fares and produced by Rachel Leah Jones. "Reckoning With Laughter" can be watched at either Al Jazeera or The New Yorker.

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