- published: 02 Aug 2012
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Dean Obeidallah (born December 17, 1969; Arabic: دين عبيدالله) is an American comedian of Palestinian-Italian descent.
He was born in Lodi, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Paramus. His father was born in Battir, Palestine]] prior to the creation of the State of Israel; his mother's parents were born in Sicily.
Obeidallah received a J.D. from Fordham Law School and practiced law from 1993-1998 with the firm of Beattie Padovano. He then left the practice of law and was accepted into the prestigious NBC Page program in 1998. Thereafter from October 1999 through May 2007 he was a rights and clearance researcher for Saturday Night Live.
Obeidallah is part of a small but growing number of Arab-American comedians who have increasingly received media attention in the past few years, as they use comedy to both retain and dispel negative stereotypes of Arab-Americans and Muslims.
He and other Arab-American comics have been compared to the groundbreaking minority comedians of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s who have used comedy to raise political and social issues in an effort to change them as noted by The Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik:
Samuel Benjamin "Sam" Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist. Harris is the co-founder and chief executive of Project Reason, a non-profit organization that promotes science and secularism, and host of the podcast: Waking Up with Sam Harris. As an author, he wrote the book The End of Faith, which was published in 2004 and appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for 33 weeks. The book also won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005. In 2006, Harris published the book Letter to a Christian Nation as a response to criticism of The End of Faith. This work was followed by The Moral Landscape, published in 2010, in which Harris argues that science can help answer moral problems and can aid the facilitation of human well-being. He subsequently published a long-form essay Lying in 2011, the short book Free Will in 2012, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion in 2014 and Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue in 2015.