Jewish-Muslim Unity: JAM on it! October 31, 2007

First of all, I wanted to thank and sent out my heartfelt acknowledgements to everyone who I met on the PLP conference I was attending in Santa Monica, California this week. A city whose beauty is surpassed only by its warm inhabitants, the beach and sun served as the perfect backdrop for the conference of idea exchange and bridge building among Jewish leaders and professionals. I thank G-d for giving me the merit to be part of such an event.

Speaking of meritorious events, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, a group of students at Yale University had the foresight to realize that there was a need for dialogue with Muslims, especially between Jews and Muslims, and that bridges needed to be built after the towers fell. A group of undergraduate students formed JAM (Jews And Muslims) to bridge gaps and unite communities. Now, six years later, JAM has launched its own blog, as the Yale Daily News tells us:

Yale students with opinions about the relationship between Jews and Muslims now have an online forum in which to air their thoughts.

On Sunday night, Jews and Muslims at Yale (JAM) launched a new blog called “Jews, Muslims and Dialogue” that members said they hope will be a vehicle for discussion about issues ranging from the concept of justice in Islam and Judaism to student reactions to Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz’s LAW ’62 visit to Yale earlier this month….

The blog should be an online meeting place for people of all ideological views to listen to each other and their opinions, Blau said.

“I don’t want people leaving feeling like ‘Oh, now I see,’ ” Blau said. “[But at least] they can see why their colleagues would think something like that.”

Altaf Saadi ’08, a JAM member who served as its co-head last year, said she hopes the blog’s dialogue will serve as a model for discussion of controversial issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“We are such a diverse body of students at Yale, with such varied thoughts and opinions, that there needs to be constructive forums like JAM where all those ideas can be exchanged in a respectful way,” Saadi said in an e-mail. “Our hope is to try to bridge those gaps and points of misunderstanding, real or perceived,” Saadi said.

Jeremy Avins ’10, one of the current co-heads of JAM, said both the Jewish and Muslim communities feel threatened. This reciprocal fear has led members of each group to “dehumanize” members of the other, making mutual understanding difficult, he said.

“It’s too easy to dehumanize a people you either don’t know or feel threatened by,” Avins said in an e-mail. “JAM is one of many efforts to bring the human back into the equation.”

Battling mutual fear with open and respectful idea exchange. May this be the way all of humanity begins to cope with its fear of communities and ideologies.

JAM’s blog can be found at jewsandmuslims.blogspot.com.

Like JAM say, “Peace, Shalom, and Salaam.”