Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement Founded in Los Angeles

This is hot off the presses. Rabbi/Professor Reuven Firestone of Hebrew Union College(pictured here) deserves kudos for helping launch this important endeavor.

USC Launches New Online Resource for Muslim and Jewish Engagement


LOS ANGELES, February 28, 2008 -- USC’s Center for Muslim-Jewish
Engagement proudly announces the launch of its website,
www.usc.edu/cmje. This new website provides important resources for
scholars, groups, community leaders and individuals working to develop
interfaith partnerships between Muslim and Jewish communities in the
United States and beyond.

The website includes the following resources:

• Scholarly and community-based resources to address critical
issues in Muslim-Jewish engagement
• Best practices to foster and enhance community partnerships
• Articles, videos, and links to interviews with world-renowned
scholars on important topics such as;
Abraham and his sons, women in Islam and
Judaism, and dietary laws from a Muslim and Jewish Perspective.
• Links to dialogue groups and organizations that facilitate
interactions and scholarship
• A calendar of national and international events

The Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement (CMJE) is a community resource
for training in inter-religious outreach, an online resource center for
materials on Jewish-Muslim relations, and an academic resource for
journalists, scholars and community leaders. CMJE works to promote
dialogue, understanding and grassroots, congregational and academic
partnerships among the oldest and the newest of the Abrahamic faiths
while generating a contemporary understanding in this understudied area.

The Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement is a partnership between three
institutions: the Omar Ibn Al Khattab Foundation, Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and USC’s Center for Religion and
Civic Culture at the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. The
collaboration of a Muslim Foundation, a Jewish seminary, and a secular
university is itself an example of the types of partnerships that CMJE
envisions and hopes to promote locally and internationally.

Q: What do these two men have in common?

A: Read this article from the Los Angeles Jewish Journal and find out.

Students at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) were surprised to learn last month that for the first time their professor for a course in contemporary Islam was, in fact, a Muslim.

Ismail Bardhi had arrived as a refugee a few weeks before through the college's Scholar Rescue Fund. The former dean of the faculty of Islamic Studies in Skopje, Macedonia, Bardhi was beaten and stripped of his title because he refused to cede to the vision of Kosovar nationalists, who in rising to power were marginalizing secular Muslims and "Islamic humanists" like Bardhi.

"In 1939 and 1940, Hebrew Union College had a program to rescue a number of scholars from Europe," said Rabbi David Ellenson, president of HUC-JIR. "One of these men was Abraham Joshua Heschel. I thought of that when I received [the] initial request to find a place for professor Bardhi. I recalled how HUC had done this for Jewish scholars who were in this kind of situation 50 years ago and felt there really was a Jewish imperative to provide refuge in this case as well."

Reuven Firestone, an Islamic studies professor at the Los Angeles campus and at USC, brought Bardhi to Ellenson's attention, and his efforts went beyond convincing administrators to create a visiting professorship for Bardhi and ensuring that the U.S. government grant him entry. Firestone also needed to secure the funding.

HUC-JIR's scholar's fund matches whatever funds Firestone raises for Bardhi's income, up to $20,000. Some of the needed funds will be provided through honorariums for speaking at a number of Los Angeles congregations, including IKAR, Valley Beth Shalom and Temple Isaiah.

Firestone first met Bardhi in Macedonia six years ago, when the latter was helping organize an international conference on religion and peace, the first to bring together the country's Muslim Albanian and Orthodox Christian Slavs.

The conference coincided with a violent build-up between the two ethnic groups -- including shootings, retaliation shootings and torchings of churches and mosques -- that put the young nation on the brink of civil war. But the dialogue that began with Bardhi and his Orthodox Christian counterpart helped dissolve the tension, and the conflict fizzled.

"In Skopje, Mr. Bardhi was the voice of Muslim moderates who greatly promoted in a nonpolitical manner the process of reconciliation between Albanian Muslims and Macedonian Orthodox," Paul Mojzes, organizer of the conference and co-editor of The Journal of Ecumenical Studies, wrote in a letter of recommendation. (Last March, in an essay titled, "Orthodoxy and Islam in the Balkans," Mojzes identified Bardhi as "the best Muslim proponent of inter-religious dialogue in the Balkans.")

The Macedonian peace, however, was short-lived, and two years ago, when Bardhi was nominated to become president of the Islamic Religious Union of Macedonia, he discovered that the problems had bled into his own religious community. After a former student who had become affiliated with the Muslim nationalists smashed Bardhi's face with the butt of a gun, Bardhi spent weeks secluded in his home, withdrew from the political race and eventually lost his job for political reasons, he said.

"During the latest elections within the Islamic Religious Union of Macedonia, professor Bardhi has been the most prominent and trusted candidate," Ahmet Sherif, a professor at Macedonia's Institute of National History, wrote in a letter to the Scholar Rescue Fund. "But unfortunately, due to the threatening and sinister actions toward him and his collaborators he chose to withdraw his candidacy as an act of protest."

Bardhi's problem was an unwillingness to politicize his faith. He is, as Firestone described him, an "Islamic humanist," a religious progressive willing to see Islam as "the perfect expression of the divine will," but not alone and superior on the world stage.

"My topic is quranic exegesis and how we have to be more open between the Quran and Torah, to see how they could speak together," said Bardhi, 50. "We have spent too long using religion against each other. This is not good for religion or for human beings."

A slight man with light skin, gray hair and a pointed goatee, Bardhi speaks four unrelated languages -- South Slavic, Albanian, Turkish and Arabic -- and is quickly learning conversational and professorial English. HUC-JIR Dean Steven Windmueller said Bardhi will expose students to a different version of Islam, and Los Angeles' most prominent Muslim organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), was pleased to hear of his arrival.

"For there to be this visiting professor from the Balkans, which has experienced a lot of ethnic tension, obviously, could be very eye-opening for students at HUC," said MPAC spokeswoman Edina Lekovic, whose family is from nearby Montenegro. "To look at ethnic tensions in unfamiliar settings can sometimes shed new light on old conflicts. His experience of ethnic tensions in the Balkans might allow people at HUC to step back and add another dimension to their approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

"If we want people to get a more three-dimensional aspect of faith in the modern world," she added, "especially these days when it comes to Islam, there is no better place to get it than the horse's mouth. Everybody asks, 'Where are the moderate Muslims?' Well, it's great that there is one right at HUC."

Bardhi plans to stay through the spring semester, which ends in May, and then return home. Why? So he can teach his compatriots how to live in an ethnically and religiously diverse community, something he hopes to learn a lot about in Los Angeles.

"We have to clean up religion to get it back to what it should be," he said, "a spiritual endeavor."

Muslim Scholars Address the Jewish Community

CMJR(see post below for more information about the group) with the support of Muslims scholars throughout the world facilitated the following letter to the international Jewish community.

This letter is intended as a gesture of goodwill. Its aim is to build upon existing relations in order to improve mutual understanding and to further the positive work in building bridges between Muslims and Jews.
Full letter (in pdf)

The letter was introduced by Prof. Tariq Ramadan(see photo) at CMJR in Cambridge on Monday 25 February.

This is an important letter. Perhaps even historic. I hope it will form the basis for many good conversations between Jews and Muslims.

Controvesy amongst Jews over the Latin Mass

Not all Jews are of one mind concerning the latest development in Catholic-Jewish Relations. This article gives a good summary of the different points of view.

The Christian Science Monitor Feb 21, 12:00 PM EST Religion Today
NEW YORK (AP) -- The Anti-Defamation League was "deeply troubled" by the prayer. Conservative Jewish rabbis said they were "dismayed and deeply disturbed" by its language. But some veteran interfaith leaders - Jewish and Roman Catholic - say there's no evidence that a revised Good Friday liturgy approved this month by Pope Benedict XVI is as threatening as some Jewish groups fear.
"Rather than overreact, we need to look to the future of the Jewish community and this pope," said Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, U.S. director for interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, a leader in building Jewish ties with the Vatican.
The prayer fueling the tension is infamous among Jewish leaders, but little known by the overwhelming majority of Catholics and Jews worldwide. It had historically been used as an excuse for violence and discrimination against Jews.
The prayer is from the old Latin rite, also known as the Tridentine rite. The church had put tight restrictions on celebrating the rite following the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. A New Mass emerged from the council, which was celebrated mainly in local languages.
But Benedict last year relaxed the rules on the old Latin rite, partly to mend ties with traditionalists and Catholic schismatics who had objected to the council's reforms.
But the old Latin rite contains a Good Friday prayer that asks God to lift "the veil" from Jewish hearts and deliver them from "blindness" and "darkness" so they might accept Christ.
Earlier this month, Benedict answered Jewish concerns about
the prayer. In a reformulation, he eliminated the most offending language, while still asking God "to enlighten their hearts" so that Jews - and all humanity - can be saved through the church.
Many Jewish leaders reacted angrily. They feared it signaled a rollback in the church's commitment to Nostra Aetate, the 1965 document that revolutionized Catholic-Jewish ties.
Philip Cunningham, a member of the U.S. bishops' Advisory Committee on Catholic-Jewish Relations, said he understands why Jews are upset. In his many talks with Jewish audiences, he is almost always asked whether the improvements in the church's relationship with Jews are temporary.
"My response is that there's a body of teaching there that's difficult to reverse," he said.
Regarding the revised Good Friday prayer, Cunningham said that "99 percent of the Catholic world" uses the New Mass, which has "no mention of Jews coming to faith in Jesus the Savior. There's not even a hint of it."
Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a training institute and think tank based in New York, was more blunt.
"The Catholic Church, unlike some religions in the world, has come through its murderous period and is neither violent nor dangerous, so Jews should chill out," he said.
Some of the anxiety stems from the fact that Benedict is a relatively new pope.
He was elected three years ago and Jewish leaders are only at the start of their relationship with him. His predecessor, John Paul II, did more than any other pope to build Catholic- Jewish ties during his 26-year pontificate, including praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest site.
Benedict has made his own significant gestures. He became only the second pope, after John Paul, to enter a synagogue,
visiting a Cologne, Germany, synagogue in 2005 during his first trip abroad as pontiff. He also visited Auschwitz the next year, although some Jewish leaders said they were disappointed that Benedict, a German who lived through World War II, didn't make a more explicit reference to German responsibility for the genocide.
Greenebaum said Jewish groups need to consider Benedict's broader goals in reviving the old Latin rite: helping restore a strong sense of Catholic identity and promoting Catholic unity.
"I think the Jewish community needs to always keep things in context," Greenebaum said. "This is a pope who has a very strong sense of his own beliefs and his own philosophy and I know that he has made positive statements about Jews."

Institute for Muslim-Jewish Relations in Cambridge, England

I recently learned about the work of an institute in Cambridge, England that is addressing the issue of Muslim-Jewish relations. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of England, is involved with the group as is Professor Tariq Ramadan, a leading scholar in the Muslim world.

To find out more about this group, check out their website at


www.woolfinstitute.cam.ac.uk

RRC Grad in New Orleans on Interfaith Venture

Faith unites Jewish, Muslim students
They bond while planning U-M spring break trip to help New Orleans rebuild
Gregg Krupa / The Detroit News

ANN ARBOR -- Even on this famously liberal campus, some University of Michigan students wonder what Muslims wearing head scarves and beards are doing hanging out with some of the Jews wearing yarmulkes. Why are they spending so much time together? Are they supposed to be doing that?

I mean, like, is it even allowed by your religions, the students say they have been asked.

The group of 16 Muslims and Jews says it has been an object of curiosity on campus, as members have met together for months to plan their spring break together, beginning Sunday, to help rebuild New Orleans. But they say that what unites them is the very thing that might appear, to some, to divide them: their faiths.

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"Giving of yourself to others is one of the Five Pillars of Islam," said Afrah Raza, a 19-year-old freshman from Sterling Heights. "I feel like, as a Muslim, whatever is in my capability to do good, will help others. So, there is a Jewish community on campus and Muslim community on campus, but we don't interact at all. This is just a way to get to know each other."

Miriam Liebman, 21, of Farmington Hills says she was driven by her faith to be active in community groups."It's just something I have thought about, as part of me being Jewish, since high school," said Liebman, a senior, who has taken Arabic classes, spent a semester in Egypt and joined the Union of Progressive Zionists, a student group that seeks peace and justice in the Middle East.

"It's all culminated in the point that I feel the need to do something like this," Liebman said, "to make those things be more a part of my own Jewish community, to do something within that framework of cooperation with Muslims."

These have not been the best years for relations between Jews and Muslims in Metro Detroit, as generations-long disputes and new spasms of war wracking the Middle East emphasize the divisions between the two large religious communities. But the New Orleans-bound students say that is all about politics and international affairs. What they are about is religion.

For a journey inspired by faith, they have been planning the intimate necessities of life together for six days. They will live, eat and travel with each other, visit a mosque and synagogues, and spend several days working on reconstruction and reclamation projects still under way after Hurricane Katrina. They will even abide by Jewish dietary restrictions, keeping Kosher, part of the time -- a new experience for the Muslims and some of the Jews.

The Muslim and Jewish students began approaching each other on the basis of their faith last year and earlier this academic year. Their willingness to eschew the divisive politics and cling to their shared values led to thoughts of memorializing the effort by leaving some physical legacy -- the work they intend to do in New Orleans. The months-long planning efforts have drawn notice on campus, where fellow students are curious and perhaps concerned that Jews and Muslims are meeting.

While volunteerism has increasingly been part of spring break on campuses for a decade or more, this is believed to be the first formal group of Muslims and Jews from U-M uniting to do the work.

Along the way, they are trying to raise money for the trip. They have received support from the Jewish Federation of Detroit, the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Muslim Student Association, the Jewish student organization Hillel and the American Muslim Center in Dearborn.

Rabbi Nathan Martin of Hillel in Ann Arbor strongly encouraged the students to participate in work in New Orleans, and Imam Mohamad Mardini of the American Muslim Center, a mosque in Dearborn, also will travel with the students and participate.

"We started meeting as a group in October, when we sort of had a meet and greet," said senior Sakina Al-Amin, 22, of Ypsilanti. "From then, we probably have been meeting biweekly and doing little icebreakers and things to get to know each other more on an individual level, to get people to be more comfortable around Muslims or Jews, if they have never done it before."

The students often pray together, and they will visit two synagogues and a mosque in New Orleans, and witness a bar mitzvah and Shabbat (Sabbath) services. They often begin meetings by gathering in pairs, a Muslim with a Jew, to talk and reflect about events in their lives since their last meeting.

There is no talk about things like the Second Lebanon War of 2006, or the siege of Gaza. And the students explain it simply: There are a myriad of other forums to delve into the roiling political milieu of the Middle East.

These students say they are about faith.

"In Islam, I learn that Jews, along with Christians, are what Muslims refer to in our holy book as 'People of the Book,' " Al-Amin said. "This is the status they are given, an honorable and notable title that we use to refer to them."

Lizzie Lovinger, a 19-year-old sophomore from Farmington Hills, says the motivation from her faith is clear.

"There is a pretty big idea in Judaism: You should love your neighbor as you love yourself," Lovinger said, first using the Yiddish words for the phrase and then translating. "In the Detroit area and in Ann Arbor, Muslims are definitely our neighbors, in every sense of the word and it is important that we remember that it is our duty in life to be treating people as we would want to be treated."

The students say they also have found they learn nearly as much about their own faith as the other.

"Someone will ask me a question, like, why do you guys do that?" Raza said. "And sometimes I say, 'Oh, I never thought of why we do it that way.' So, you sort of explore your own faith, as well as other traditions."

The preparations have been intense, and scholarly -- right down to the computerized print-out of their meals cross-referenced by ingredients, so that all will be comfortable with any dietary restrictions.

"This is not the norm," Mardini said, watching students interact at a meeting. "You don't normally see these things. But it is going to be the norm, one day. We really will do away with some of these obstacles that keep us apart."

Jewish Educators Seeking Knowledge About Christianity

Today's Boston Globe carried the following article.
I would count this in the "good news" column.

Jewish educators seek information on Christianity


NEWTON - The library walls are lined with books about Judaism and Israel, but the dozen or so Jewish day school and Hebrew School teachers gathered around the table have copies of the New Testament at their elbows and Jesus on the brain.

Over the course of two hours, they ask questions that are simultaneously basic and profound: How can Christians say they believe in one God but also a Trinity? What exactly is salvation? If Jesus hadn’t been crucified, would Christianity still be a religion? And are newborn babies really tainted by something called original sin?

The session is a reversal of the 16-year-old New Directions program, unique to Eastern Massachusetts, that has been training Catholic school and religious education teachers about Judaism, in the hopes of countering centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.

Now, after years of one-way education, the sponsors of the program - the Archdiocese of Boston and the Anti-Defamation League - are testing the possibility that Jewish teachers would be interested in, and could benefit from, knowing something about Christianity.

Previous attempts at engaging Jewish educators in learning about Christianity have failed. But interest in Christianity among Jewish educators has been growing in part for one simple reason: the high rate of interfaith marriages. Many Jewish educators now teach children who have a Christian parent or grandparents.

"In the last 10 years, we’ve seen the populations in our Jewish schools become more diverse," said Daniel J. Margolis, the executive director of the Bureau of Jewish Education of Greater Boston. "We should try to educate our educators, so they feel more comfortable when these issues arise normally in the classroom."

The world’s largest faith is often mentioned in Jewish schools largely in negative contexts - the Crusades and the Holocaust. But the advocates of the New Directions program are arguing that Jewish teachers should be able to answer questions about Christianity accurately and respectfully both for moral reasons - because it’s the right thing to do - and practical ones - because many children in Jewish schools have Christian relatives, and most live in predominantly Christian communities.

"It’s quite startling to see how little Jews know about Christianity, and I think the sense is there has not been much desire to learn," said Celia Sirois, the Catholic educator who, with Naomi Towvin, a Jewish educator, runs the program. "They’ve been very concerned that Catholics confront their own biases about Jews, and with good reasons, because those biases have been lethal."

Jewish officials offer an identical analysis.

"What has struck me, and I include myself in this, is how little Jews know about Christianity," said Diane Rosenbaum, the senior associate director of the Anti-Defamation League’s New England region. "As Jewish educators, it is important to know about other traditions so you can teach about them with the same respect you want Judaism taught with."

The decision to test a new program was sparked last year, when a local Catholic priest, speaking at an interfaith awards ceremony, suggested that maybe it was time for Jews to address their perceptions of Christianity.

"There is a corresponding history - not without reason - of mistrust and misunderstanding by Jews toward Christians and Christianity," said the priest, the Rev. David C. Michael, associate director for interreligious relations at the Archdiocese of Boston. "And we look forward to the day when Jewish religious educators will also participate in the New Directions program so that, when they speak of Christianity in their classrooms, they will also be able to do so with accuracy and respect."

Margolis was in the audience, and offered to host such a program. He said the initial response from Jewish educators has been positive - a group of teachers from Jewish day schools and synagogue-based after-school programs rapidly volunteered to take part - but that the sponsors will have to assess whether the program is making a difference before determining whether to continue it.

The pilot program this winter was scheduled to have four seminars, at which the Jewish educators would learn about the emergence of Christianity as a separate religion from Judaism, the Jewishness of Christianity, the conflicts over Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter and Passover, and the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the Catholic Church.

But the Jewish teachers had so many questions, they added a fifth session just for questions about Christianity.

"How do you understand some of the atrocities that happened?" asked Ronit Ziv-Kreger, the Judaic Studies coordinator at MetroWest Jewish Day School in Framingham. Ellie Goldberg of Congregation B’nai Shalom in Westborough asked about the Catholic belief that Jesus is present in the wine and bread of Communion. And on it went - about confession, and resurrection, and the nature of salvation for non-Christians.

Sirois, who fielded the questions with a copy of the catechism by her side, acknowledged the topics are difficult, even for many Catholics.

"I teach Catholics, and many of them will say, ‘We know we’ve been saved, but we don’t know what that means,’ " Sirois said during the session, which took place over coffee cake and orange juice in the library of the Bureau of Jewish Education in Newton. And, during her 45-minute answer to the question about the Trinity, she said, "Catholics themselves ask this."