Noam Shuster-Eliassi
Noam Shuster-Eliassi, is an Israeli comedian and activist. She performs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English.
Biography
Shuster-Eliassi was born to an Iranian-born Jewish mother and a Jerusalem-born father whose parents were Holocaust survivors from Romania. Since she was seven years old, she grew up in Neve Shalom/Wāħat as-Salām, a community north of Jerusalem where Jews and Palestinians live together by choice. In this community, she learned Arabic quickly and was often mistaken for an Arab.Shuster-Eliassi participated in national service instead of serving in the army, then went to study acting at the 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, she went to Rwanda to help women get medical treatment.
When she was in her early 20s 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 working with the organization 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. It was then she realized she needed to perform comedy as part of her activism.
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 to be performed at various nightclubs 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.
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. Their further collaboration resulted in the 2025 feature documentary Coexistence, My Ass!, directed by Fares. In Coexistence, My Ass! Fares follows Shuster-Eliassi's path from a diplomat to stand-up comedian. The movie won several awards, including the Golden Alexander Award for Best Documentary at TDF 2025, and the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Freedom of Expression at Sundance 2025.