In fluent Arabic, Comedian Noam Eliassi turns pain into healing

Voted New Jewish Comedian of the Year in the UK Jewish comedy festival, Eliassi also performed in Arabic in the Palestinian 1001 laughs festival in Jerusalem.

Noam Shuster Eliassi  (photo credit: YOUTUBE SCREENSHOT)
Noam Shuster Eliassi
(photo credit: YOUTUBE SCREENSHOT)
Voted New Jewish Comedian of the Year in the UK Jewish comedy festival, Noam Shuster Eliassi joked with the Palestinian audience in her Jerusalem show not to worry, “I’ll only be here for seven minutes, not 70 years,” she said.
She also performed in the 1001 laughs festival in Jerusalem that was created by American-Palestinian comedian Amer Zahr. 
Eliassi speaks fluent Arabic having being raised in Neve Shalom, “where Ashkenazi Jews and Ashkenazi Arabs live together,” she joked in an interview with Channel 13. 
Eliassi went viral on Arab social media when she said in an interview with i24 news Arabic that she would like to marry Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, The Times of Israel reported on Wednesday.

Abdelkarim al-Banawi, a Syrian citizen, tweeted jokingly on February 19: “An Israeli activist asks to marry the Saudi crown prince! Will there be a relationship between Tel Aviv and Riyadh by marriage?”

Neve Shalom is the only community in Israel where Arabs and Jews opt to live together in an attempt to promote the value of peace, as the name of the community indicates.
Coming from a strong activist background, the comedian works for a UN project aimed at integrating populations in Israeli society. She also spent time in Rwanda immersing herself in that country’s painful past and did groundbreaking work in reaching national reconciliation.
“The [Rwandan] children I worked with would come to me and ask what’s Bibi?” Eliassi said to Channel 13, “because in their language it means something is broken and in ours it’s a nickname for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu, I thought about the answer and told them it means the same thing.”