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“She shouted Noam Shuster-Elassi at 1 of the demonstrations against Benjamin Netanjah’s regulation in 2023. She heard from the fellow Israelis that she was a traitor to the nation. Reason? He wants equality without business and for everyone – including the Palestinians.
At the time, she did not know that her unpopular postulate would prove fundamental to the fight against genocide, which she would further lead in her circumstantial comedy way.
In a documentary Coexistence, my ass! (You can view it online as part of the Millennium Docs Against Gravity festival presently underway, and the trailer is available Here.) the individual with whom Noam makes jokes for his performances, says that stand-up is no longer just a carefree joke, due to the fact that it is undergoing metamorphosis.
He became – as we hear – 1 of the main forms of storytelling, and for Shuster-Elassi, who, inspired by a satirist elected president of Ukraine, abandoned her work at the UN for a comic career and thus tries to change the world, is besides a political and humanist manifesto in a planet of dying humanism.
A Rebel from the Oasis of Peace
If he truly intends to scope a wide audience, especially the judaic one, which he admits is the hardest 1 to work on, he must go beyond the comic points, be authentic and tell his own story.
Noam's biography mixes the ranks of everyone for whom the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is besides complicated and so impossible to complete, and discussing it alone is an act of anti-Semitism. Shuster-Elassi presents a completely different perspective. "It's easy," he says. The stalker must halt persecuting the persecuted and learn – after the redemption of the wines and accounts – the title coexistence.
Is that even possible? Hero Coexistence, my ass! She doesn't seem naive or ignorant. It does not depreciate genocide and does not believe that it will end Gaza's bombing by laughing through tears. However, she has an crucial function – as she hears from a friend of Palestine – to play.
As a individual who grew up in the Israeli-Palestinian Oasis of Peace (Newe Shalom) – the only settlement where these 2 nations (by choice!) live in harmony, it is simply a surviving example of how the spectacle of common hatred is directed by political dictators alternatively than average people. So she must bear her witness even erstwhile she visits a burnt school where she studied with Palestinian peers.
Noam is the daughter of a Romanian-Iranian couple of those Jews who, as we learn from the film, “Israelis hatred the most” – for being progressive “woke” lefts and having extremist views specified as demanding equal rights for all Israelis and occupied Palestinian lands. Since childhood, she has been working for peace (but not in the spirit of naive pacifism), and in teenage years she has refused to service in the Israeli army, and is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and English.
“I will take 7 minutes, not 70 years”
Noam laughs that with so many languages, she should become a Mossad agent. possible espionage, however, gave way to a long and burning work in non-governmental organizations, the UN mentioned (she got there as a 20-year-old) and yet specified stunts as singing in Arabic viral song Dubai, Dubai, in which the comedian unceremoniously mocks the United arabian Emirates, which chose to standardize relations with Israel at the expense of Palestinians under the 2020 abraham agreements negotiated under Trump's patronage.
Another time, Noam became a sensation erstwhile during 1 of her performances she said that "Benjamin Netanyahu always takes dirt with him to the White House". The gag of her, repeated around the world, is besides the 1 in which she convinces the Palestinian audience that it will only take 7 minutes, alternatively than – like Israel – 70 years.
38-year-old Shister-Elassi present is not the first individual to search another than standard and trampled by experts and activists defending human rights paths to social change. On how creatively to introduce them, they are working in sweat against the academic at specified prestigious colleges as Harvard, where until late Noam wrote as part of the Peace Initiative program her comedy monodram. Until recently, due to the fact that it first came on October 7, 2023, and then Trump's re-election and akin initiatives were deleted.
Neither Noam nor the manager Coexistence, my ass! – Amber Fares – could not foretell these events in 2020 erstwhile they started working on the film. The closing of the communicative of a judaic pro-Palestinian comedian may have seemed unattainable at the time. Finally, a paper was created that does not give easy answers to the question of how to find hope for a better tomorrow. However, it clearly explains what it would look like next day and why it cannot be stopped imagining it, without forgetting that after October 7, 2023 Israel and Palestine will never be the same again.
This is besides a communicative about the possible of stand-up, about which In our pages she spoke Another comedian, Inga Gaile, persuading that comedy gives strength and restores control to those who have been brutally stripped of it and gives perceive to unpopular stories which in another, serious anturaze society does not want to perceive or call by name.
Knowing Your Privilege
Who knows whether in the stand-up audience of Noam, who realizes his own privilege and uses him to the maximum to pay attention to inequality and harm, there were no scientists who They waited a long time to admitWhat Israel truly does in front of the full world. Of course, a large abuse of victims on both sides and activists persecuted for utilizing the word “genocide” would be to attribute all merit to 1 judaic comedian. Besides, the bombings have not ended, and Israel is inactive blocking the supply of abroad humanitarian aid. 1 can and must besides wonder why she is gaining the attention of the public, and any another devoted origin of Palestine – not necessarily.
There is no doubt, however, that all specified as them all request many and many, though, to prevent individual burning and to motivate the idle remainder – if not to act, though to think – a reflection that, as Noam says in his film, Netanyahu has not given anyone time since the brutal consequence to Hamas' attack.
She herself did not respond to the massacre at the festival in Re’im for a long time, getting quite a few news from each side. She found out that her momentary silence was a consent to Hamas force or a transition to Netanyahu. Depends on who to ask.
But Noah did not abandon her belief in equality. She besides did not do so before, erstwhile she trembled for her life in a Palestinian-prone Israeli bar bomber, which rather clearly sums up her recorded conversation with the boy of Hamas the feminist who was murdered in favour of an agreement between both countries, Vivan Silver: “My parent did not do so to be spared by terrorists erstwhile they came. She did it so they wouldn't come.” Does her death put an end to years of activistic activity? This question is worth staying longer.
