Published: 14 December 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EW3kLAbtOY&feature=youtu.be[/embed]
SINCE TRADING IN THE United Nations for the comedy stage, former peace activist turned stand-up, Noam Shuster Eliassi, has won a legion of fans across the Jewish and Arab world for her whip-smart humour.
In early 2020, Shuster Eliassi was in the midst of a coveted Harvard Fellowship, writing a one-woman trilingual show entitled “Coexistence my Ass!”, when the global pandemic struck.
She returned home to Israel in April, before being struck down with Covid-19 and then quarantined at the Dan Jerusalem Hotel in Jerusalem. Living for a fortnight as “Patient 3555”, Shuster Eliassi was surrounded by Jews, Palestinians and Bedouins “dancing, laughing and partying” and “radically getting along”.
In a special online conversation on Sunday night with fellow Arabic-speaker Rabbi Elhanan Miller, titled Welcome to Corona Hotel, Shuster Elliasi reflected on this unique experience – now being developed into a screenplay – as well as her background (mixed Persian and Romanian Jewish family), growing up in the cooperative, bi-national village Neve Shalom and her (in-jest) marriage proposal to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Miller also questioned the 32-year-old about her passion for speaking Arabic and how she navigates the taboo of ‘making jokes about the other side’. Among the many wickedly funny anecdotes Shuster Eliassi shared was her first foray into stand-up comedy in the Arab world.
“The first performance I had in front of a Palestinian audience was in East Jerusalem, where I was the first Jewish performer in the Palestine Comedy Festival. It was a crazy experience because I got up on stage and there was 300 people in the audience. They had no idea a Jewish comedian was coming; so I was like ‘Relax everybody. I am only here for seven minutes – not 72 years’.”
Sunday night’s event was hosted by The Jewish Independent and This Is Not An Ulpan, one of the only language schools in Israel that teaches both Hebrew and Arabic and is run by Jews.
WATCH THE FULL CONVERSATION
