An Israeli stand-up comic's brave and intelligent peacekeeping effortsThis is a documentary portrait of Israeli-born stand-up comic Noam Shuster Eliassi, whose show intelligently tackles the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the struggle for equality, challenging audiences with uncomfortable truths. She is big, bold, zoftig, feminine, ebullient, always authentic and of course funny. But we will see her weep. What makes this film moving and perhaps very sad is that it spans from 2020 and Covid (and she got Covid, and was sent to quarantine at a Jerusalem hotel and performed stand-up to her fellow patients there, who included both Israelis and Palestinians). It runs through the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the brutal genocide of Gaza by Israel that has used that attack as its pretext. How do you laugh at this?
Bold humor about such events would only seem cruel and evil. Noam doesn't do that, of course. She leads demos, and she goes into the street and interviews people. Most of them are not of her liberal persuasion and she quickly turns away from them.
As Noam points out, Netanyahu became president when she was seven. A criminal now, he hass sought to gain authorization to neuter the judiciary. Her Iranian-Jewish mother and Romanian-Jewish father are very supportive of her. It is good to be reminded that such people still exist in Israel, but the mood there is very extreme. It is proof of Noam's resilience that she can still be there and speak up. However it seems that the arrival of October 7 the day after Noam meets, she says, a wonderful guy, may have nipped the relationship in the bud.
Noam comes from a place of humanity that can be traced, no doubt, to her inner nature, but also to growing up in a special place in Israel called Neve Shalom, which means Oasis of Peace, in Arabic Wahat as-Salam (واحة السلام). Here she studied together as equals with Arab kids. She also acquired fluency in spoken Arabic at an early age. Her intelligence and charisma and her eloquence about peace led at first in other directions, like a United Nations job and working towards peacekeeping in the Middle East. But she had that sense of humor too, and that turned out to be the best way to convey her message.
She performs in Hebrew and also in English. and Arabic As she says and we see early in the film, she can be provocative more easily in the US; it's harder to get away with joking about the politics in ISrael. As she says she needs to "grow bigger balls" for that. "Don’t worry, I’m only going to be here for seven minutes, not 70 years," she says with pointed irony to a Palestinian audience that explodes in laughter.
Earlier, Noam says, the takeoff point of her routines was occupation; now it is genocide. The film and Noam's life and career are a focus for the question of how comedy can deal with violence. It works when the violence is at one remove, but when Noam and her friends and relatives all lose loved ones in the October 7 attack, the smiling and the detachment stop.
Noam is a very dominant personality, big in every way (though she is also quite appealing), so it is important for balance that he other people in her life, and the school and community of Neve Shalom where she grew up are also well represented by Fares' film. It's especially important to see her Palestinian best friend, Ranin, from early days, and her supportive parents. We learn that they come from a Persian background and there is a small thread about Noam and her Persian Jewish grandmother. They had a loving relationship even while not speaking the same language. Her grandmother dies and we glimpse the funeral (why are the men not better dressed?) and the tombstone is covered with Hebrew writing and a emblazoned with a star of David.
Then, after October 7 and the assault on Gaza, the school Noam attended is torched. She and her friend go and walk through it. Why? they ask. She knows why October 7 occurred and it is the Occupation. She says this publicly, and she is attacked for that. Still, Israel sometimes at least remains a democracy where dissent, if not appreciated, is tolerated, at least if you're an Israeli Jew. What comes out in Noam's on-the-street interviews is that Israelis want to further democracy - for Jews. Rights for Arabs? That can come later, perhaps; not now.
Of course there is not much room for subtlety here, however much we would have liked subtlety. I would have liked more precision about Noam's changes as a stand-up comic through the course of these four years. It isn't clear when some early, catchy scenes of stand-up in the US actually took place, or whether Noam is going back to it, or has changed permanently to a more serious kind of appearance, a possibility that is discussed. I'm not sure quite enough time is spent explaining the title "Coexistence, My Ass!" that Noam gives her show, used also for the film, originally developed on an invitation from Harvard University. The basic point is clear tough, that peaceful coexistence can only exist between equals, not between oppressors and oppressed). Nonetheless as a portrait, thanks to the vibrancy and authenticity of Noam Shuster Eliassi, issues come to life and we are moved.
Coexistence, My Ass! 95 mins., premiered at Sundance Jan. 26, 2025, showing also at Thessaloniki, CPH DOX,also showing at a dozen other festivals, including SF Jewish, Busan, and Woodstock. It opens in the US Oct. 29, 2025.
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