Shireen Quaizar was wracked with doubt. For years, the school psychologist has been active in Muslim-Jewish interfaith dialogue, but the Israel-Hamas war left her reeling.“What are we doing with talking to each other?” she recalled thinking, frustrated by a conversation about the exact number of Palestinians killed in an Israeli airstrike. “This doesn’t work.”
But she decided to fight that thought and tackle the hard discussions once again. Later, Quaizar, who is Muslim, met with women like Aviva Seltzer, the daughter of a rabbi and a Jewish school principal who was raised with the belief that “but for the existence of Israel, we’d all be dead.”
The two had come together for a conference in New Brunswick, New Jersey, convened by the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, an organization seeking to build trust and friendships between Muslim and Jewish women.
These conversations are becoming increasingly difficult, with the war and its polarizing reverberations in America testing and straining some interfaith relationships more than ever. For many, the losses are too personal, the emotions too raw.
The latest violence, triggered by the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, is prompting some to question the point of these conversations — and how to have them — while steeling the resolve of others to keep going.
“We’re very courageous, you and I, because we don’t stop talking,” Seltzer told Quaizar. “The minute we stop talking, there’s no hope.”
Quaizar nodded and said, “We’re doing the hardest work right now.”
At the event, Sisterhood co-founder Atiya Aftab, a Muslim, told participants that simply showing up was an achievement. Next to her, Roberta Elliott, who’s Jewish and the nonprofit’s president, said she couldn’t have gotten through the previous weeks “without my M …
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But she decided to fight that thought and tackle the hard discussions once again. Later, Quaizar, who is Muslim, met with women like Aviva Seltzer, the daughter of a rabbi and a Jewish school principal who was raised with the belief that “but for the existence of Israel, we’d all be dead.”
The two had come together for a conference in New Brunswick, New Jersey, convened by the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, an organization seeking to build trust and friendships between Muslim and Jewish women.
These conversations are becoming increasingly difficult, with the war and its polarizing reverberations in America testing and straining some interfaith relationships more than ever. For many, the losses are too personal, the emotions too raw.
The latest violence, triggered by the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, is prompting some to question the point of these conversations — and how to have them — while steeling the resolve of others to keep going.
“We’re very courageous, you and I, because we don’t stop talking,” Seltzer told Quaizar. “The minute we stop talking, there’s no hope.”
Quaizar nodded and said, “We’re doing the hardest work right now.”
At the event, Sisterhood co-founder Atiya Aftab, a Muslim, told participants that simply showing up was an achievement. Next to her, Roberta Elliott, who’s Jewish and the nonprofit’s president, said she couldn’t have gotten through the previous weeks “without my M …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]