Noam Shuster-Eliassi

Noam Shuster-Eliassi (Hebrew: נועם שוסטר אליאסי; born 1986 or 1987), is an Israeli comedian and activist. She performs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Shuster-Eliassi was born to an Iranian-born Jewish mother and a Jerusalem-born father whose parents were Holocaust survivors from Romania. From the age of seven years, she was raised in Neve Shalom/Wāħat as-Salām ("Oasis of Peace"), a community north of Jerusalem where Jews and Palestinians live together by choice. Therein, she learned Arabic quickly and was often mistaken for an Arab. Shuster-Eliassi performed national service instead of serving in the IDF, then attended New York Film Academy for a year. She played a part in Talya Lavie's 2006 short film "The Substitute" before attending Brandeis University on a scholarship, graduating in 2011. Through an internship with Women's Equity in Access to Care & Treatment (WE ACT), she went to Rwanda to help women obtain medical treatment. When she was in her early twenties, Shuster-Eliassi became a co-director of Interpeace, an organization founded by the United Nations. She worked on a project in Israel that aimed to involve groups that had been excluded, or had excluded themselves, from conversations about a peaceful future with Palestinians. Her outreach included ultra-Orthodox Jews, Russian-speaking Israelis, Palestinian Israelis, and even those strongly opposed to a Palestinian state, such as religious Zionists and settlers. After directing Interpeace for five years, the United Nations shut the program down in 2017 due to "political concerns". Looking for another position, she applied to become a member of the Jewish engagement and social change leadership program ROI Community, and delivered a stand-up comedy routine at an ROI Summit talent show in Jerusalem, where she realized that she needed to perform comedy as part of her activism. In 2019, she attended Harvard Divinity School as a fellow under the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, where she was to develop her one-woman show to be performed at various venues in major US cities. However, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, she returned to Israel, where she contracted the virus and stayed at a "coronavirus hostel" in Jerusalem until testing negative. She was the subject of the mini documentary Reckoning with Laughter, directed by Amber Fares and produced by Al Jazeera. The film was released in 2021.