​​When you hear the name Noam Shuster — a tall, dark, voluptuous, Hebrew/Arabic/English/Farsi speaking comedian is not what first comes to mind. If God bestows the gift of complex identity, he may have gone too far with Noam Shuster. “I have the name of a Jewish MIT professor and the body of a Persian wonder woman.”

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Noam is an Israeli anomaly, a mash-up of cultures. Her mother is a black-haired, brown-skinned Iranian Jew and her father the blond, blue-eyed son of Romanian Holocaust survivors. She was raised in “Oasis of Peace,” an intentional community made up of 50% Jews and 50% Palestinians — in a country hellbent on religious, ethnic, and national separation. “I grew up in a small pastoral suburban village perched on a hilltop with little white houses and red tile roofs; you know like a settlement just with Arabs.”

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She learned Hebrew at home and Arabic in school and on the playground — unlike most Israeli Jews who, if they learn Arabic at all, do so as recruits for military intelligence. Her parents always told her: “You’re the ‘model’ of what Israelis should look like, and be like.” Taller than most children and more outspoken than most adults, Noam alwatys felt like the odd-girl-out; being funny was her defense mechanism. Today, as a grown woman, it’s her super-power.