Jewish and Muslim comedians team up to turn tension into titters

Comedian Gibran Saleem had never met a Jewish person until starting his graduate studies at New York University more than a decade ago. The child of Pakistani immigrants, Saleem was raised in a Muslim household in northern Virginia where, he said, he was mostly surrounded by people with a similar cultural background.

“I knew about the Holocaust, and that was it,” Saleem said. “I didn’t know anything about the [Jewish] religion, culture, any of that until I moved to New York [City], which is pretty wild to me.”

Things have changed drastically since then. Today, Saleem is part of a loose collective of about a dozen comedians known as Comedy for Peace, an international, interfaith comedy project that brings together Jewish, Muslim and Christian comedians. On Saturday, Saleem, along with fou