Opinion Today: After surviving a terror attack, this comedian is opening up about it for the first time

Trauma may make great comedy, but April 7 was different.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story October 25, 2022 By Sarah Wildman Staff Editor, Opinion After several years of earnest work for the United Nations in peace building and conflict resolution, Noam Shuster-Eliassi began to think of something that might have more political impact: humor. That's not simply because Noam is funny. It's because she has something many performers do not — the ability to be funny in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and English. Noam's language skills were nurtured from childhood; she grew up in what she calls a "sociopolitical experiment," Neve Shalom/Wahat-al-Salam, an intentional community of Jews and Palestinians living side by side, learning each others' languages and cultures. Noam was the first Jewish comedian to be invited to the Palestine Comedy Festival in East Jerusalem, in 2018. "I used to beat myself up about not doing peace building anymore and just gaining personal fame from comedy," she wrote to me in a WhatsApp message. "But joking in three languages, where I'm from, is activism." Her work has drawn the attention of documentarians at The New Yorker and Al Jazeera, and her comedy has been written up by The Guardian and CNN. As a comedian, Noam has broken taboos, making fun of governments and leaders, peace treaties and soft power. But until now she has not written, let alone joked, about her experience running from a terror attack near Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Center this past spring. As she writes in a moving essay for Times Opinion: "My close friends ask if the reason I have not publicly joked about the night of April 7 is because the attack changed my politics. My simple answer is quite the opposite." Read the full essay here. Ariel Schalit/Associated Press Guest Essay Trauma Is the Best Comedy Material, but April 7 Was Not Funny Comedy helped me to process the Israel-Palestine conflict. Then I was in a terrorist attack. 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