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How One Woman Is Using Comedy to Speak Up About Palestinian Rights

The documentary “Reckoning with Laughter,” directed by Amber Fares, follows the Israeli comedian Noam Shuster as she returns home amid the COVID pandemic and quarantines with both Palestinians and Israelis.

The story behind the film.

Released on 12/22/2021

Transcript

I promised I'm not going to do this

and I'm not going to cry so much

but it's so hard.

[Noam sobbing]

I can't believe that I have to go back home.

Who gets a chance to come to the US to work on a comedy show

and then gets booked by the Kennedy Center.

And at the same time,

a global health crisis

[laughing]

happens

[siren wails]

So this white man here,

is John Harvard

and this shoe might be the dirtiest

and most unsanitary corner of the United States.

Why? Everyone come here, they touch it.

They rub.

They're like, oh, I want my kids to go to Harvard.

[laughing]

You don't want your kids to go to Harvard.

It's just like a name.

They can go to any other university and it will be fine.

Okay. I got it out of my system,

Everyone running around with their books,

going to their classes.

And I'm going to write comedy.

When I tell people, yeah, I'm writing comedy at Harvard

they're like, what?

And then I have to explain, but I was at the UN,

I was trying to make peace in and I couldn't do it.

So now I'm doing it through comedy.

[upbeat music]

[speaking in foreign language]

I went to sleep anonymous, I woke up the next day.

My phone was exploding all over the Arab media,

Zionist proposes marriage to Mohammed Bin been Salman.

[upbeat music]

First Jewish comedian ever come to the stage

here at the 1001 laugh comedy festival.

So please help me welcome to the stage Noam Shuster.

Good evening, everyone.

It's your lucky night, the Mossad is here to record you.

Just kidding.

My name is Noam, white liberals can't pronounce my name,

So they call me Chomsky.

My last name is Schuster.

So I have a name of a Jewish European professor from MIT

in a body of a Persian wonder woman.

My parents are considered traitors.

They're left-wing liberals.

So they raised me in a mixed community where Jews

and Palestinians live together.

My best friend Ranin, she's the Palestinian.

She looks like Gigi Hadid,

i look like Ahmed in hijab next to her.

[crowd laughing]

When we cross checkpoints the soldiers,

they stopped our car,

they hit on her and they look at me and they're like,

give me my ID please.

[crowd laughing]

I found letters that my father received to the military

detention when he refused to serve

in their occupied Palestinian territories.

I brought it with me here because I have this feeling like

it's going to make it into my shell.

And these are like the first memories I have from my dad.

Just me and my mom,

kind of alone in the house and my father in prison.

And I remember asking all the time questions like,

where is dad, where is dad.

This is the first uprising. This is the first Intifada.

It was a very different outlook on

those that are questioning the system.

And that was a point where we could still turn things back.

Today, It's much, much, much harder.

So I'm making, basically I think

what I've been eating my whole life,

Persian Jews call it Gondi.

This is the food that my grandma and now my mom,

like we had this pretty much every week, all the time.

I'm adding a few more healthy things to it.

Don't tell my ancestors I'm changing the recipe.

The first show I ever had was in English.

And that show was so incredible and amazing.

And people were listening to me in such a different way than

I was used to.

I love performing in Hebrew also,

but there's something about Israeli audiences

that sometimes I feel very anxious about.

And in a way, saying it out loud,

kind of breaks my heart because from the beginning,

I kind of know that I'm not going to have a lot of space

among my own community, or even in Hebrew.

Like it's going to be limited because of who I am,

because of my messages.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I hope I'm wrong.

But this is the kind of feeling that I have.

So we have a couple of building blocks

of your show, right?

So one big building block is like who your parents are.

And then the next building block Neveh Shalom, right.

And then like, then you have a series of

little vignettes that's with Neveh Shalom.

And then eventually through this, I went to the UN.

I was advocating to work more and more

with those sections of society that are usually

not spoken to that are like

spoilers of future peace agreements.

So there was a pushback

From who?

From the UN.

Yeah.

They didn't want to fund it, they didn't want

to be part of it.

It was too risky for them.

And I told them, so who's who needs

to work with those extreme Israelis?

Who? The Palestinians that's their responsibility?

And it ruptured my belief that there was

like a traditional avenue to do peace work through.

And it led me to start making jokes on Arabic TV about MBS.

Like, and now here I am, you know, what I mean?

Like this rupture led you to that.

Yeah.

Getting ready to perform for the Harvard Hillel chapter.

American Jews.

It's my biggest responsibility to speak to my people.

They're coming from a place where I believe they

have more to learn, they can do better,

they need to be part of the change.

Palestinians know the things that I'm saying.

They don't come from an ignorant perspective.

The oppressed doesn't come from an ignorant perspective.

Never.

I'm not telling them anything new,

but the Jewish audiences where we have to work.

Hello.

[crowd babbles]

I have the diverse audiences following me everywhere.

I have already an Iranian here.

Any Palestinians showed up tonight? Security.[laughing]

You're like 70 minutes, not 70 years, relax

[crowd laughing]

So my parents, when I was seven years old,

they decided to raise me in the only

coexistence community in Israel.

And two years ago, a big fire broke.

And so a lot of security forces and firefighters,

which I liked, rushed to the community.

And they tried to evacuate all the Jews

and all the Arabs from their houses.

But my Palestinian neighbors,

no one moved from their houses.

And the firefighters was like,

You have to evacuate your homes immediately.

And Yusef is, I am not leaving my house.

And the firefighters go,

Yusef you will be able to come back.

And Yusef is like, That's what you're told back in 48,

I'm not leaving my house. [laughing]

It was a good show, considering everything.

I was surprised that they actually let you in because

they would never like bring activists from

Jewish voice for peace. Right?

But they did bring you,

even though your views are more progressive than

a lot of people I know.

And still, it's interesting.

She got an invitation because she's an artist, because she's

doing something that sucks.

More approachable to them.

Well that's what radical about using cultural work.

You know, she gets to use comedy

and art to get in the door when you

wouldn't otherwise be able to get in the door.

What she did yesterday,

it wasn't a part of her evolving career as a comedian.

It was just straightforward activism.

What you did yesterday, cultural activism.

I'm gonna go to New York

to perform at the famous 30 Rock.

It's my first time doing comedy in LA.

Hollywood improv, laugh factory.

Sound check at the Kennedy Center.

Good luck. Mom I love you.

Another one. [laughing]

Palestinians in the audience were like,

Noam we can't believe that we're here

to see an Israeli comedian.

And I was like, oh my God.

[upbeat music]

The world health organization officially

declared it a pandemic

New cases are surfacing in new places every day

with at least 98 countries and territories

now reporting infections.

Carnegie, The Sale and the Mattress closed.

I think Rave will be closed by the end of the day too.

My inbox is a festival of cancellations

and I have no idea what to do at Harvard,

in an empty campus with like no one around,

literally no one is around.

I think I've come to terms that I should leave

Cambridge and go home.

[somber music]

This is it.

My empty room.

Everything is packed.

[train honks]

[speaking in foreign language]

I feel like God is looking at me and telling me,

Oh Noam, you thought you were going to be

a big shot in America this year.

Come, come.

I'm taking you back home. I have other plans for you.

[speaking in foreign language]

Hello. This is Anna Frank from my shelter

[speaking in foreign language]

[birds chirping]

I wonder how Palestinians survived all these years.

Enclosures and restrictions of movements.

This is pretty hard.

[speaking in foreign language]

I am in one of the only places where people are gathering,

hugging, meeting each other

and have no restrictions inside the hotel.

[energetic music]

That's my Stand Up song.

I'm in a lobby right now of microcosm of everything.

We have all the ages, all the genders,

all the religious spectrum, everything, everything.

[crowd murmurs]

So what's happening here is the Jews are shocked

and surprised by the Arabs.

And they're asking me if I'm Arab

because I'm singing and speaking

in Arabic with like Palestinians.

And they are so confused

and there's asking very,like,

basic, preliminary questions to the Arabs.

And she was saying,

In what other case scenario would we

be able to sit with Arabs and meet them?

We're all here under very unique circumstances

and we're getting the same food.

We're getting the same treatment.

And the toxic identity issues and hatred

and stuff that I'm used to seeing outside.

And that exists outside.

It's just absent here.

In an utopian future of a one-state solution.

That is not an apartheid state that doesn't separate us.

And doesn't divide us into hierarchies.

This is the closest I've seen.

I don't want to sound like a cliche because obviously,

you know, the inequality and everything still exists,

but I cannot find it here.

And I don't want to be looking under the ground to find it.

[speaking in foreign language]

Anger and grief on the streets of

occupied East Jerusalem as Iyad Halak

was buried late on Sunday night.

32 year old Iyad Halak was chased and killed

in occupied East Jerusalem.

Iyad who was autistic,

was walking to a special needs school

near the Al-Aqsa mosque compound when

he was confronted by Israeli security forces.

[speaking in foreign language]

Benjamin Netanyahu is promising to carry out

the annexation of illegal Israeli settlements,

as well as large parts of the Jordan barrier.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu,

has ramped up surveillance with virtually no oversite.

There's also been a lag of some weeks between

testing facilities being set up in Jewish areas

and in Palestinian ones.

Speaking up here is scarier

because there is a bigger price to pay

But I'm not going to shrink myself.

[speaking in foreign language]

[somber music]

Director: Amber Fares

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