Called “Brave and Bawdy” by Time Out Chicago and “Righteous and Chipper” by the Times-Picayune, Jessica Halem was raised by hippie Jewish artists from the East Coast which was anything but normal – or easy – in small-town Ohio, but did help to foster this funny “on-your-face” stand-up comic and social justice activist.

Jessica received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and studied improv at Second City in Chicago. She earned her chops as a social justice activist working for Bella Abzug at the Women’s Environment & Development Organization.

Sitting through hundreds of tedious meetings and conflict-ridden attempts at coalition building or rallies that included too many guitar playing depressives and speakers who neither entertained nor mobilized made Jessica want to poke her eyeballs out. Driven to the brink of boredom and frustration, she merged her two loves – comedy and activism.

Jessica uses humor to get at the heart of difficult issues and to simplify complicated ideas. For the past ten years, she has done stand-up comedy for any Jewish, Queer, or Feminist gathering that needed a jolt, a break from the struggle, or just a good laugh. She was nominated Best Female Comic at the Chicago Comedy Awards and has performed with everyone from the Indigo Girls to Margaret Cho. She regularly performs for college groups, Pride festivals, and non-profit fundraisers.

For five years, she was the Executive Director of the Lesbian Community Cancer Project in Chicago where she successfully integrated comedy into her leadership style and was named one of the “21 Leaders for the 21st Century “ by Women eNews and an “Unsung Heroine” by the Cook County Commissioners. Her comedy and activism have been featured in Fast Company, The Advocate, and The Wall Street Journal. She knows what college life is like today from her work in Career Advising at both the University of Chicago and Tulane University

Based on her twenty-plus years as a queer activist, stand-up comedian, emcee and host, Jessica developed the following programs:

Comedy as Social Justice Activism - In this 45-minute lecture, participants will gain a deeper understanding of why a sense of humor matters in our daily lives and in our vision of a more just future. They will learn how comedy reveals the cracks in structures of power and allows for the truth to be spoken in transformative ways. Comedy, like other forms of passionate speech, matters to social justice work and should be fully integrated into our advocacy and communities.

Joke Writing for the Formerly Marginalized and Other Leaders - In this 45-minute workshop, participants will discuss why comedy matters in our daily lives and how we can use it to help others understand us better. We will discuss how to deal with sensitive and personal topics in an ethical way and how to engage and uplift audiences. They will break down the structure of a joke to see how it works and write their own original jokes in class. This workshop is perfect for any student who wants to find the funny in their experiences!

One-Woman Show “Everybody Likes You” - Jessica has performed her 45-minute show from San Francisco to Provincetown and in small towns in the middle. She talks about feminism, sex, growing up Jewish, and all things queer.

“Awesomely hilarious and desperately needed comic for our gay age." ― Margaret Cho, Comic

"With quick wit, feminist ways, and humor that penetrates, Jessica offers a refreshing spin on activism! Students were talking about her weeks after her visit.” ― Robin Matthies, Director LGBT Campus Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison

“Jessica Halem is devilishly brilliant. Her irreverence toward conventional social clichés marked by her vehement disregard for politically correct semantic abstinence is matched by her uncanny ability to weave her own biography, Yiddishkeit (“Jewishness”), the social and economic criticism of Karl Marx, three decades of feminism, into an iconoclastic call for social justice in a new age.” ― Ben Saks, Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, Virginia Tech