In a nondescript room in the Bell Memorial Union, a small group learned about the political engagement of Jews and Muslims in America, marriage practices and tensions within each community, and the abundance — or lack of — secular cultural infrastructure in the country, presented by Jewish and Muslim educators.
The session on April 24 was the fourth —and last — in a series of workshops facilitated by Isma/Shema, and was taught by educators Ramish Nadeem and Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon. Additional members of the campus community listened in on Zoom.
Lee Altier, a recently retired faculty member in the agriculture department, noted his attendance was connected to a recent viewing of the Palestinian-Israeli film “No Other Land” at the Pageant Theatre.
“It was so dramatic, and so it portrayed such an existential threat to the existence of Palestinians in the West Bank,” Altier said. “It was really disturbing, so coming to this series has been really helpful to understand more the history of Judaism and Islam.”
In the three workshops he attended, Altier hoped to learn about common ground between Jews and Muslims.
“The presenters demonstrated that there is a lot of common ground, and a lot of common needs for security and open expression of ideas,” he said.
The months-long project of curating this educational content for the Chico State community followed last year’s sessions that involved building literacy on antisemitism, Islamophobia and Israel–Palestine, Ungar-Sargon explained in a previous interview.
“And something that he [Joseph Morales] thought would be really useful is if we went a little more in-depth on some of these subjects,” Ungar-Sargon said. “We sort of let some of the material breathe a little bit, and mapped out aspects of Jewish and Muslim identity as they were relevant to, and as they related to, Americans today and people who would be coming to the workshop.”
Jessie Raeder, the staff council office coordinator on campus, saw the sessions as a way to expand her education.
“The war in Gaza, the events of October 7, Jewish and Muslim relationships and conflicts are not a topic that I’m super familiar with,” Raeder said. “And what I noticed is that I started avoiding having those conversations in my political spaces out of concern that I was doing more harm than good by having them.”
One impactful takeaway for Raeder was learning to have better conversations by listening more and not pretending to have answers.
“I have a whole lot more nuanced understanding of Jewish and Muslim history, of Jewish and Muslim populations, of different nuance within those communities. That’s just a much more whole complex perspective that reduces the instinct to stereotype or to fall back on stereotypes,” she said.
Raeder also attended the sessions last year, which covered topics such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, conflict resolution and crisis communication.
“What I noticed was that we managed to have very civil, interesting, worthwhile conversations, even though there were strong feelings with multiple differing perspectives in the room, a valuable thing,” she said.
Raquel Frohlich can be reached at [email protected]
