PHOTO: From left, comedians Gibron Saleem, Paul Schissler, Dotan Malach (stage name Erik Angel) and Liz Glazer take questions at Comedy for Peace's afternoon performance Sunday, Nov. 17 at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center. (Andie Petkus Photography for  The Jewish Review)

By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
Few things can cross divides like comedy. 
“I grew up in Israel with two million Muslims and Arab Christians that I never really met,” Dotan Malach said. “We were supposed to be enemies, but I think we were all curious about each other.” 
That curiosity led Malach, a professional comedian, to establish Comedy for Peace five years ago. The group’s unique brand of humor came to Portland for a pair of shows  hosted by the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland Sunday, Nov. 17 at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, giving nearly 400 attendees a chance to laugh, relax and enjoy a moment to decompress from modern life – for Jews, Americans and everyone. 
Malach, who performs under the stage name Erik Angel, relayed a story that cut to some of those difficulties. Being picked up in a rideshare car in Alabama, Malach said he learned his driver was Egyptian. The driver inquired where Malach was from and, fearful of what might happen if he revealed himself as an Israeli, he skirted around the question before identifying himself as Syrian. 
At the ride’s end, Malach said, “I came to the window, and I told him, ‘I’m an Israeli,’ and I started to walk as fast as I can. He calls out, ‘Me too!’”
While antisemitism is real, there’s a stupidity behind it, Malach said, “because everyone can be Jewish. You can be black. You can be brown. You can even be happy!”
It was comedy that first introduced Malach to cultures outside his own, and his work traveling with Comedy for Peace has given him a new appreciation of those cultures and the similarities with his own. 
“Jews and Muslims, we’re much more alike than different,” he said. “We believe in one God. We pray a lot. We fast. Somebody who is Muslim can marry four wives. Jews can marry one wife with four different personalities.”
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Muslim comedian Gibran Saleem doesn’t have any wives.
“I’m single, born and raised. You can’t forget your roots,” he told the crowd. “If I took a DNA test, it would just come back ‘alone’ at this point. It would be ‘23 and Just Me.’”
Saleem grew up in North Carolina, the child of Pakistani emigrant parents who wed through an arranged marriage. 
“When they got to the states, they got divorced. Don’t feel bad. That’s a good thing. They came here for the opportunity,” Saleem recalled. When his parents arrived in the United States, “I think my dad was like, ‘What do you want to see first?’ And my mom was just like, ‘other people.’”
He had never met a Jewish person until he moved to New York – a rideshare driver was giving him a tour of an Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn and pointed out a Hasidic couple mid-argument on a street corner. 
“I had never heard the word Hasidic before in my life,” Saleem recalled. “I thought Hasidic was a vocabulary word. The couple seemed really upset, so I thought Hasidic meant ‘sassy.’ So, I just started using the word Hasidic in everyday vocabulary conversations, confusing everyone around me.”
Many people have not heard his name before, Saleem said, leading to some awkward introductions. 
“I feel like sometimes, when I say my name, people only hear what they’re already expecting. So, I’ll meet someone, and I’ll be like, ‘Hi, my name is Gibron,’ and they’d be like, ‘Oh, nice to meet you, Muhammad,’” he said. “How in the world did they get my middle name? That is so impressive.”
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Paul Schissler, a Christian from Florida, has one wife with whom he is raising three sons. He recounted his wife giving birth. 
“For nine months, she carried a human being in her stomach, then her body ripped open, and a baby came out. She was walking an hour later,” he said. “One time in high school, I pulled the hip muscle, and I was in a wheelchair for six weeks, and she’s just over here like, ‘let’s have another one!’”
His two oldest sons, ages 6 and 3, sometimes push him to his breaking point. 
“They teamed up on me because I was being really cruel and making them leave the playground, and they got mad and they shouted at me ‘You’re a stupid man,’” he recounted. “I’m tired. I’m not sleeping, I have no patience left, I have 1.3 brain cells left, and so the only thing that I shouted back was, ‘Yeah, I am a stupid man!’ And then I realized how silent the playground was.”
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Liz Glazer, the evening’s headliner, has experienced some of the anxieties that come with being Jewish amid the Israel-Hamas War. For example, when she saw a man in a “Hamas” t-shirt on a flight – though the shirt turned out to say “Bahamas.” 
“I did think the tie-dye was an odd choice,” she said. 
In another instance in New York, “I noticed that there was a sign, and it said ‘Free,’ and I got nervous again, but it’s because somebody was standing in front of the rest of the sign, and then that person moved and it said, ‘Free Samples’.”
Glazer previously taught law before changing paths and entering comedy, a career track that she explained has plenty of difficulties. 
“Here’s what pursuing comedy is like,” she said. “One time a guy asked me, ‘Hey, Liz, can you do this show? It’s in a tent outside of a strip club off Route 46 in New Jersey. It does not pay, and it’s on Thursday.’ And I asked this guy, in all seriousness, ‘Do you think I could do every Thursday?’ He said, ‘No.’ And I was upset.”
Glazer mentioned the Jewish tendency to find humor in life’s difficulties – a fitting theme for the evening, and the world as it is today, by recounting the days after her father’s passing when she found expired lox in her parents’ refrigerator. She mentioned to her mother that the lox was out of date, and her mother insisted that it was fine, pointing out her father had eaten it just days before. 
“I was like, ‘I’m pretty sure I won that argument’” Glazer recalled. It was heart disease that killed her father, she said, but “had he died of food poisoning, he would have died going out exactly doing what he loved the rest of his life, which was eating expired lox.”
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Audiences at both shows ate up the jokes like Glazer’s father’s lox, proving her point about the Jewish people’s ability to laugh through adversity. It’s an idea that was the whole point behind Comedy for Peace, and one that has proven true time and again. 
“The first show was amazing,” Malach said of Comedy for Peace’s founding five years ago. “Two hundred fifty people came to support us. After five years, more than 50 cities, two countries, we feel that we're just starting.”