Rating: NR | Runtime: 95 minutes
Release Date: October 29th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: mTuckman Media
Director(s): Amber Fares
Writer(s): Rachel Leah Jones & Rabab Haj Yahya

My biggest responsibility is to speak to my people.

Let’s be honest. When you sit down to watch Amber Fares’ Coexistence, My Ass!, you brace for what Noam Shuster Eliassi and the people she confronts have to say about October 7th. You must because you’re living in 2025 and Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people continues through its many supposed ceasefires. I was bracing because I lived through a similar moment via 9/11. I’ve experienced having my identity change outside of my own control overnight. I went to school a white American and left campus a Brown Arab.

It’s therefore no surprise Jewish friends and family who lived in and accepted the experiment that was Oasis of Freedom in Israel, where Noam grew up as a Persian Jew amongst Palestinian Muslims, would change the opposite way. Because their allyship was never real. Their fight for coexistence was always propped up by the reality of their superiority as an oppressor. And it’s not just Israeli neighbors suddenly telling Noam that Gaza should be wiped out despite 10/7 being a direct result of Israeli Apartheid. It’s her very own aunt.

But I get it. My cousin in 2019 tried to play semantic games by saying we were “still white” because the US census designates Middle Eastern citizens as Caucasian—I guess he was too young to experience 9/11 the way I did. My parents still regularly vote against the rights of the LGBTQ+ population despite saying they have no problems with the community as though one doesn’t directly affect the other. People love to find ways to justify their bigotry so they can assuage their guilt via double talk, selective memory, and self-martyrdom.

So, watching Noam continue to stand-up for Palestinians despite her own personal losses in 10/7 is inspiring. To hear her eloquently contextualize the dual reality that Hamas being a terrorist organization doesn’t absolve Israel from being an occupying force is exactly what I felt in the aftermath of 9/11. That we as human beings must look beneath the jingoism and knee-jerk desire for vengeance to understand “our” participation in “their” hate. This carnage does not occur in a vacuum. Coexistence only works after equality can be assured.

That’s what Noam fights to achieve. It’s what she’s fought for since a childhood of being thrust in front of cameras with her Palestinian BFF to give Hilary Clinton flowers and be name-dropped by Jane Fonda. It’s what drove her to pursue a career in peace activism leading to a job at the United Nations before realizing her pontification was falling on deaf ears. We all eventually discover this fact. That the only people willing to listen are those who already agree. So, jest or not, she took a page from Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s book and became a comedian.

Named after Noam’s one-woman Harvard show, Fares’ film uses that performance as the connective glue to return to as a way of refocusing things before the next real world transition impacts her subject’s evolution. She jokes about her adolescence and we see archived footage of it. She jokes about her stay at “Hotel COVID” being like her upbringing in the Oasis of Freedom and see footage of that too. Benjamin Netanyahu runs on a platform to absolve himself of the crimes he’s been indicted for and there’s Noam protesting in the streets.

Eventually, we get to October 7th and witness the chaos and heartbreak alongside the government’s exploitation of both to finally achieve what it sought from the beginning. By making us wait, however, we’re able to witness the gradual pathway towards a political landscape that allows it to be possible. Noam’s career and pushback run parallel to it. Her experience on public TV inevitably revealing her champion at the station as a fake ally himself. The constant hate posts calling her a traitor. The anti-Bibi brigade specifically fighting for Jewish democracy only.

And why? Because she treats Palestinians as human? Because she’s seen in youth and the pandemic (a great viral equalizer) that empathy is much less complicated than men in power would lead us to believe? No. It’s because Zionists truly do refuse to see Arabs as anything but animals. That their leadership’s decades-long crusade to dehumanize Palestinians has worked to indoctrinate them into not caring whether they live or die. Israelis killed Arabs with impunity the entire occupation, but they only pay attention when they become a target.

It’s why Noam’s work matters. And why her ability to understand the situation from multiple angles as an Israeli Jew whose Persian heritage makes her skin darker than some Arabs allows her to realize this work must target Zionists in hopes of deprogramming them rather than allies already on-board. But Noam’s mother isn’t wrong when she says things feel different now that people have “lost their humanity.” The global shift to tribalism has made it so those on the wrong side of history have simply replaced their eyes and ears with a bigger mouth.

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Noam Shuster in COEXISTENCE, MY ASS!; courtesy of mTuckman Media.