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Provocative and controversial Iranian-Jewish comedian Noam Shuster, who grew up in the binational community of Neve Shalom and speaks Arabic and Hebrew as her mother tongues, is the subject of mini-documentary Reckoning With Laughter, which airs on Al Jazeera.
In 2019, she went to the Harvard Divinity School for a fellowship under the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, where she was to develop her one-woman show and spin it out through US clubs with a planned hour of stand-up, in English, Hebrew and Arabic, titled Coexistence My Ass. The arrival of the Covid pandemic, however, put paid to those plans.
Instead she returned home to Israel, but contracted the virus, was hospitalised and eventually sent to a Jerusalem Coronavirus hostel. Realising that the world was a different place, she set about refining her political comedy message, with a routine that some Israelis may find hard to appreciate, but which has strikingly been recorded by the Qatari broadcasting network. The 25-minute film is directed by Amber Fares.
