“Coexistence doesn’t happen between the oppressor and the oppressed. It happens between two equals,” political activist and comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi says in her one-woman show “Coexistence, My Ass!,” which lends its name to Canadian filmmaker Amber Fares’ biographical documentary. Shot over the tumultuous five years between 2019 and 2024, “Coexistence, My Ass!” traces activist-turned-comedian Eliassi’s rise in the comedy world as it parallels the rise in tensions between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories due to settler violence and the election of right wing politicians to Israel’s government.
Throughout the film, Eliassi performs her one-woman show for an audience in a small black box theater. Unlike her early punchline-driven stand-up, the show takes a more long-form storytelling shape, a la “Hannah Gadsby: Nanette” or Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel.” Fares and her editor Rabab Haj Yahya add context to her stories by cross-cutting from her live performance of the show to new footage they filmed of Eliassi with her family and friends in Israel, as well as archival footage from Eliassi’s childhood, her viral satirical videos during quarantine, and appearances she made as a political correspondent on Israeli television.
Fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and little Farsi, Eliassi was raised by an Iranian-Jewish mother and Romanian-Jewish father, whom she calls “woke progressive leftists,” in the Oasis of Peace (Neve Shalom/Wahatal-Salam), a planned community of Israelis and Palestinians whose aim was to prove coexistence could be achieved. The community’s hippie-tinged utopian ideals are broadcast loud and clear by the rainbow-colored arch with a rainbow-colored dove perched on top that welcomes visitors to its grounds. As a child, Eliassi and her Palestinian best friend Ranin met Hillary Clinton and Jane Fonda. As a teenager, Eliassi went on a tour around Israel speaking about peace. After attending Brandeis on a full ride scholarship for her activism, she took a job at the United Nations.
Described by her mom as a funny, yet deeply serious child, Eliassi soon found herself drawn to the world of stand-up comedy, quipping she chose to pursue comedy as a means to further her political career after seeing Volodymyr Zelenskyy pivot from sitcoms to being elected president of Ukraine. After becoming the first Jewish performer at the Palestine Comedy Festival, she was invited by Harvard to work on a peace project. She chose to develop her one-woman show, “Coexistence, My Ass!” During this process Fares began filming Eliassi, both on the Harvard campus and following her on a comedy tour across the U.S., which was halted during the early days of the pandemic. Back in Israel, Eliassi recovers from COVID-19 in a luxury hotel known as Hotel Corona, where contagious Palestinian and Israelis “radically” got along.
Over the next few years, Eliassi’s set evolved from topics like her body hair to more politically charged comedy, inspired by the anger she feels watching new stories like the murder of Eyad al-Hallaq, the autistic Palestinian who was shot by the Israeli police on his way to school in East Jerusalem, the rise in settler violence and forced expulsions masked as evictions in the West Bank, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sixth re-election as the country’s Prime Minister, despite several standing criminal indictments.
As her profile rises, she begins seeing the widening political divide online; she’s either a traitor or a hero. Nothing in between. During protests after Netanyahu’s contentious election, Eliassi encounters plenty of Israelis who are worried that fascism is threatening their democracy, but very few who agree that the occupation of Palestine is part of the same issue. One older man violently accosts Noam over her views, calling her a provocateur. Not one to back down, she holds her ground as she replies, “Democracy and equality are not acts of provocation.”
The film’s final coda takes a somber turn. After spending the last five years fending off questions about her singledom, Eliassi finally brings a man home to meet her parents — on October 6, 2023. The next day, everything shifts. Eliassi describes all the people she knows who have been affected by the events, both Israeli and Palestinian. Worrying texts fill the screen as she watches videos of the event online. “I don’t know how we’re going to come out of this,” she says. Later, after the bombing of Gaza begins, she gives a fiery speech, making it clear in her view the country’s “racist, fascist government” took advantage of everyone’s collective grief to escalate the situation into a total annihilation of Gaza.
Here, the documentary moves beyond Eliassi’s views on the subject. Unsure how to move forward in the name of peace, she speaks with others in her community, including the son of an Israeli peace activist who died on October 7. She asks him if his mother would regret her work. He replies that “she didn’t work for peace so that when they come, they’ll spare her. She worked so there’d be no reason for them to come.” He adds that her death proves that she was right, and that, “If we don’t want to experience the tragedies of war, we have to end warfare.”
Eliassi also checks in with her family, discovering that her cheerful Aunt Zipi, who enjoyed making jokes about Palestinians in the past, now says she doesn’t want peace or “anything to do with them.” Her mother shares a story of a friend who told her, “I can’t find empathy within me for the kids being killed in Gaza.” In an earlier scene, Eliassi and Ranin worried because they felt the whole country was losing its grasp on humanity. Now Eliassi, along with everyone else she speaks with, can see exactly what this numbness towards Palestinian life has wrought.
There is an abundance of material from Eliassi’s life during these fraught years, and Fares, Yahya, and co-writer Rachel Leah Jones struggle to balance this striking footage with that of her one-woman show. The show which, in-person, builds toward its devastating coda, is not really given room to flow the way it would if you watched it live. The cross-cutting editing deflates the show’s rising tension as it pivots from politically themed comedy to Eliassi’s devastatingly serious final monologue.
Really, there are two documentaries here, each made with a different approach. And while they are both searing fusions of the personal with the political, the attempt to meld them together doesn’t wholly work, undercutting the momentum of both. However, “Coexistence, My Ass!,” remains a compelling front row seat to a country on the brink of implosion, with Eliassi’s humor and insights acting as a melancholic elegy for a peace that, at least until real change happens soon, might not ever come.
Grade: B
“Coexistence, My Ass!” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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