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Raquel Ukeles says she's no "fan of dialogue" - which is surprising,
since she spends a great deal of time engaging in and advocating for encounters between Jews and Muslims. But she scorns most
dialogue as just open-ended conversation that serves to make participants feel good, rather than educating them and creating
alliances for action.
A tall, articulate woman in her 30s, Ukeles is a religious- studies doctoral student at Harvard
whose academic work compares Jewish and Islamic law. An observant Jew from New York City, she became interested in building
bridges between the two faiths during a year of study in Cairo in 1993-94. After the September 11 attacks, her involvement
deepened, because she felt "that my experience could be of service to my community."
That led Ukeles to the belief
that American Jews must engage more with the American Muslim community, whose numbers are estimated at 2 to 6 million. To
Ukeles, dialogue is worthwhile "when there's a beginning, middle and end," meaning that the engagement starts with a heavy
dose of Muslims and Jews learning about each other, moves on to discussion of issues and ends with a tangible plan for action
or continued cooperation.
Both 9/11 and four years of intifada chilled relations between American Jews and Muslims,
which had warmed notably during the Oslo period. Now dialogue is showing new signs of life. "And as the situation in the Middle
East improves - which I think it will do now, please God," says Rabbi David Rosen, director of Interreligious Affairs for
the American Jewish Committee, "there will be a greater willingness on the part of the Jewish community to take more risks."
Rosen
and Ukeles admit those risks are real. There is a danger in giving credibility and implicit support to organizations or individuals
who could exploit them, the goodwill and political connections dialogue might bring. But, Rosen says, "There's inevitably
a price to pay for caution, just as there is a price to pay for taking risks."
Not everyone agrees. When the intifada
began in 2000, many American Islamic and Arab groups "took even more radical positions than some groups in the Middle East,"
laments Ken Jacobson, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League, underlining what Rosen means by "risks."
After the September 11 attacks, Jewish groups became further disillusioned when many American Muslim leaders failed to denounce
terrorism in Israel, as they had condemned attacks in America. "We learned it was futile" to talk to the major Muslim-American
groups, concurs Yehudit Barsky, director of the American Jewish Committee's Division on Middle East and International Terrorism.
Barsky
is a critic of last November's Summit for Interfaith Understanding, which brought a group of Mideastern imams and Muslim religious
scholars, including some who had condoned suicide bombings in Israel, to New York and Boston to talk with Christian and Jewish
clergy and laypeople. Participants visited synagogues and churches, learned Talmud, compared halakhah to Muslim shari'a ,
and attended Conservative Shabbat services. But Barsky objected to the inclusion in the program of proponents of violence
against Israelis. "Until there's a serious change in policy within these groups," she says, "there isn't a lot we can do with
them."
The summit and similar current efforts have renewed debate among Jewish seekers of dialogue over which Muslim
groups are appropriate partners - and whether dialogue is even worthwhile right now. The issue is whether Jewish organizations
can expect Muslim leaders to denounce all terrorism and voice support for a Mideast peace process that recognizes the legitimacy
of Israel as a Jewish state. "We're not looking for miracles, just for certain basic things," says the ADL's Jacobson, for
whom mainstream American Muslim organizations still do not pass the test. (Salam al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public
Affairs Committee, one of the largest American Muslim organizations, who commented after 9/11 that Israel should be "on the
suspect list" because the attacks diverted attention from Israeli "aggression and occupation and apartheid," did not return
repeated requests from The Report for response to this article.)
Nonetheless, dialogue has resumed, often sparked by
individuals or groups not in leadership positions in either community. After Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was
killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002, his father, Judea Pearl, began a series of unscripted public dialogues with Akbar
Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, D.C. Since an initial dialogue in Pittsburgh in
October 2003, the two have appeared at gatherings around the United States and the United Kingdom, with Canada and several
U.S. cities on the schedule for this year. Audiences are typically one-third Muslim and most of the rest Jewish, according
to Pearl, an Israel-born professor of computer science at UCLA.
"My main agenda is to convince Muslims that we are
not their enemies," he says. "We try to stress the commonalities, though we don't shy away from friction." Whenever Ahmed,
a native of Karachi, where Daniel Pearl was killed, dissociates Islam from terrorism, "I ask him why not a single fatwa has
been issued against Bin Laden," Pearl says. Their dialogues have been covered by Al-Jazeera and in newspapers as far away
as Riyadh, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Beirut.
A more off-beat example of dialogue, the Children of Abraham organization,
was co-founded by a Jewish man and a Muslim woman last year in New York and London to offer "internships" to Jewish and Muslim
young people around the world. Their task: to photograph Jewish and Muslim life in their communities and then dialogue with
each other via the Internet. The first group of 60 interns from 27 countries took about 2,000 photographs last summer and
posted 3,000 messages on the organization's website in discussions that continued after the internships ended.
Because
of the relative anonymity of Internet discussion, says the project's Jewish co-founder Ari Alexander, participants feel a
sense of freedom to explore their deepest feelings "without the pressure and tensions of looking your dialogue partner in
the eye." In one particularly sharp exchange, filled with the typos, spelling errors and sentence fragments typical of the
teens' online discussion, Nazeer Jamal of Durban, South Africa, wrote that living in Israel "means you are accepting all the
killings and rapings... and terrooriseng... done by the Zionists." Other participants, including a South African Jew, jumped
in quickly to object, debating political issues, terrorism and the interns' hurt feelings at some of the opinions expressed.
In the end, Jamal concluded, with a change of tone if not a full conversion: "I think that we never going to accomplish anything
major in this projek if we carry on fighing about... whos army is humaneor or who is riht or wrong... but rather focus on
how we can come to a fair... equal... understandabel and simple agreement acceptable by both sides."
Many advocates
of dialogue believe American Jews are needlessly reticent about engaging with Muslims. "We have to have contact with the people
who are going to affect the nature of the culture and the education of the next generation," says Stephen P. Cohen, a leading
voice for reconciliation between Arabs and Israelis. Cohen, a New Jersey resident and social psychologist by training, founded
the Institute for Middle East Peace & Development, which organized last year's Summit for Interfaith Understanding. Raquel
Ukeles, who helped run the summit, calls such activities "aleph-bet baby steps" in a necessarily long-term effort to change
Muslims attitudes toward Jews. Says Cohen, "Jews should not treat this with fear. We have much to teach and much to learn."
Proponents
of dialogue object that Jews are expecting too much from Muslims when they demand support for Israel as a Jewish state but
reject Muslims who affirm Israel's existence but won't explicitly support Zionism. In this category is Prof. Khaled Abou El
Fadl of UCLA Law School, who has been critical of both Muslim extremism and Israeli policy toward the Palestinians in articles
in the Muslim periodical The Minaret, which publishes anti-Zionist pieces. Because of his connection to The Minaret, many
mainstream Jewish organizations will not dialogue with Fadl.
Ukeles says that many American Jews have a "binary paradigm"
that divides Muslims into "good or bad," missing the nuances of Muslim positions. Back from Cairo, Ukeles says she realized
the Jewish community had no "intelligence" on Muslims in America. So she began to compile just that. In two studies last fall
for Mosaica, a Jerusalem-based research center, Ukeles surveyed the Muslim American landscape, describing a community that
is diverse ethnically, religiously and in how long its members have been in this country. She found a "silent majority" that
is significantly more moderate than its leadership, including an increasingly influential group of younger Muslims who emphasize
American values and the compatibility of Islam and democracy. (See "The Americanization of Islam?" November 29, 2004.)
In
her studies, Ukeles called for American Jews to go beyond exposing Muslim extremism and reach out to moderate Muslim organizations
and individuals, including some deemed unacceptable by mainstream Jewish groups. The American Muslim community is growing
in numbers and clout, she points out. When the younger generation, born and raised in the United States, is ready to assume
leadership positions, they will be well positioned to advocate successfully for their agenda, so it is in Jews' interest to
build relationships with them now. "This isn't a luxurious let's-be-friends situation," she cautions, but a form of communal
self-defense.
Ukeles emphasizes the diversity of new Muslim organizations with moderate stances on terrorism and Israel,
such as the Washington- based Center for Islam and Democracy. Both she and the AJC's Barsky speculate that the future of Jewish-Muslim
relationship in the United States lies with such groups.
Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix-area physician and Navy veteran, started
one such group in 2002. Called the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, it strongly opposes Islamic extremism, believes in
the compatibility of Islamic and American values and supports a secure Israel. After speaking at a local synagogue in 2000,
Jasser helped found an informal Jewish-Muslim dialogue group. A year and a half of getting-to-know-you meetings that focused
on commonalities between the two faiths led to discussion of more difficult topics such as politics, stereotypes, terrorism
- a path typical in dialogue.
In the Boston area, Judith Obermayer, a retired mathematician, hosted the first meeting
of a Jewish-Muslim dialogue group about a year and a half ago. From a handful of organizers, brought together by the head
of the local branch of the American Jewish Committee, the group - which includes academics, doctors, businesspeople and ordinary
Muslims and Jews - has grown to the point where 75 people attended a recent dinner. Obermayer is a veteran of two previous
interfaith dialogue efforts, one between Catholics and Jews in the 1970s, the other between Jewish and Palestinian-American
women in the 90s. The group has focused on social and cultural issues, in order to establish relationships, puncture misconceptions
and educate one another and has now gone on, with some basis of understanding and trust, to tackle difficult topics that divide
their communities.
"The Talmud," concludes the AJC's Rosen, "asks, 'Who is a hero?' and answers: 'He who makes his
enemy into a friend.' In other words, our sages recognized that it's possible to change people's attitudes and desirable to
strive to do so."
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