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Celebrating Judaism and Islam in America

What happens when Jewish and Muslim leaders set their minds to engage in dialogue, and then move beyond dialogue to social action, prayer and friendship?
[additional-authors]
November 19, 2014

What happens when Jewish and Muslim leaders set their minds to engage in dialogue, and then move beyond dialogue to social action, prayer and friendship? When we first met in February 2008, another question asked in good humor was, “What took so long for us to meet?”

 Six years ago, the Jewish Theological Seminary’s (JTS) Chancellor Arnold M. Eisen and Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky, director of the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue of JTS, sat down with Dr. Sayyid Syeed and Dr. Mohamed Elsanousi of the Office of Interfaith and Community Alliances of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), to discuss plans for our future. We set an ambitious list of goals: matching 10 Conservative Jewish congregations with 10 mosques, surveying Conservative rabbis to see whether they were engaged in Muslim-Jewish dialogue, and developing a series of academic workshops to further Muslim-Jewish relations on campus and in the community.

We continued to talk throughout 2008, even as we matched congregations, discovered that more than 50 Conservative synagogues already had dialogue programs with the Muslim community, and planned the workshops we envisioned. With lead funding from the Carnegie Corp. of New York, we undertook a series of workshops on “Judaism and Islam in America.” The first of these was in fall 2010 at JTS, and the next at a partner institution, Hartford Seminary. We turned to Hartford, a Christian seminary, because it was already training Muslim leaders in its chaplaincy program, since there was no ordaining institution for imams in America. Hartford’s interfaith-relations program was then being run by Dr. Ingrid Mattson, then president of ISNA. She and Hartford’s President Heidi Hadsell rounded out the inner group to plan a project that answered the question that seemed to us so urgent: how can we take two similar American minority religious communities, Jews and Muslims, and get them to know one another?

It was as though the Quran (49:13) spoke to us: “O humanity! We created you from a single male and female, and made you into tribes and nations, that you might know one another.” Of course, this parallels the foundational rabbinic document, the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5), which teaches: “Thus was humanity made from a single being … to promote peace among God’s creatures, that no one may say, my ancestor was greater than yours.” It was this tenet from both faiths — that we might come to know one another without presuming that one of us was better than the other — that drove and continues to drive the alliances and friendships we have forged for half a decade and more.

All in all, we held three workshops. The first two, at JTS and Hartford, yielded academic fruit; last month, Hartford Seminary published Volume 104 of the scholarly journal The Muslim World. For the first time in more than a century of publication, this special issue was dedicated to Judaism and Islam in America, containing articles by both Jews and Muslims. Two of us also did a one-day colloquium on Muslim and Jewish oral literature at Georgetown University. Scholars who were formerly wary of one another now eagerly traded footnotes. While the scholars wrote their articles, the fruits of our third workshop also blossomed. We met in fall 2012 in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. Jews and Muslims toured the White House together as a group, engaged in a briefing with the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships there, and discussed at length how to take the bonds we had forged from classroom to community.

To achieve our goals of broadening and strengthening ties among the various Jewish and Muslim communities, we oversaw four pilot projects on the Eastern seaboard in synagogues and mosques, in local community centers, and on college campuses. These added to the already lengthy list of programs for Jews and Muslims taking place across North America. In fact, in addition to our pilot programs, we collated a list of other dialogue and social-action programs that had been successful promoting Muslim-Jewish interaction. 

We commissioned a new book, “Sharing the Well: A Resource Guide for Jewish-Muslim Engagement,” edited by Kim Zeitman and Mohamed Elsanousi. “Sharing the Well” is designed to assist and enhance Jewish-Muslim interactions at the community level. It includes a guide to dialogue; 18 articles by Jewish and Muslim leaders on topics such as caring for others, family and heritage, and religious life; questions for discussion; the sampling of 24 successful Jewish-Muslim engagement programs from across America; and a glossary of Jewish and Muslim terms. The 150-page book will be available beginning in November 2015, as a free PDF download at www.jtsa.edu/sharingthewell. On that date, hard copies will also be available via order form.

It continues to be our hope that advancing the dialogue between Muslims and Jews in such an important way might also be an asset in helping build confidence toward a just solution in the Middle East. We do not expect to change decades of enmity overnight, but we do believe that building a strong alliance between the Muslim and Jewish communities for the purpose of fighting Islamophobia and anti-Semitism benefits us all, even as it also strengthens the fabric of the great patchwork quilt that is America.

Since we began the “Judaism and Islam in America” project, Jews have visited Muslim-majority countries, while Muslims have visited Holocaust sites in Europe and studied in Jerusalem. In the past half decade, we have moved from dialogue to action: working together to feed the hungry, providing free medical treatment to the uninsured and building housing for those in need. Sharing our stories with one another, asking after each other’s families, breaking bread together, jointly celebrating our holidays and expressing our condolences has become the daily round of what is now friendship. Each of us has been enriched by the other, better knowing our own religion and appreciating the beliefs and customs of the other. As the Quran (5:48) teaches, we “race with one another to do good works.”

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