TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Nathan Guttman
Published March 04, 2009,

Washington — The Jewish community’s main umbrella organization for domestic policy has struck a significant blow against internal resistance to dialogue with Muslims.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs adopted a resolution March 2, calling for local and national Jewish groups to build coalitions with Muslim Americans and to oppose anti-Muslim bias.

The resolution comes 18 months after Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism — America’s largest Jewish religious denomination — broke new ground by addressing a major Islamic organization, despite strong criticism from some quarters of the Jewish community.

Previous attempts at engaging with the Muslim community have left some Jewish activists bruised and scarred by skepticism and harsh criticism from their fellow Jews.

One such activist is Rabbi Michael Paley of New York, who warned a room filled with community leaders, “It’s a dangerous conversation.” The danger, Paley said, is not from what is being said inside the room, but rather from how it will be perceived by other Jews.

In August 2007, after already being deeply involved in dialogue with the Muslim community, Paley spoke out in defense of the principal of a planned Arabic-language middle school in Brooklyn who had come under fire mostly from Jewish scholars. The critics accused her, wrongly, of being a “9/11 denier”— someone who rejected Muslim or Arab responsibility for the World Trade Center attack.

Following his public comments on the principal’s behalf, Paley, a scholar-in-residence and director of UJA-Federation of New York’s Jewish resource center, was ordered not to speak on the issue anymore. He told communal activists attending the plenum that pursuing Jewish-Muslim ties requires some courage.

Rabbi Jack Moline of Agudas Achim Congregation in Arlington, Va., also encountered criticism when trying to promote dialogue between Jews and Muslims. He said that each attempt to raise the issue brought about challenges from congregants “who believe Islam is essentially anti-Jewish.”

The issue boils down to the question of what makes a legitimate partner on the Muslim side.

But Rabbi Schneier noted that at the behest of Jewish groups, ISNA president Sayeed Syeed intervened with the King of Saudi Arabia last year to convince him to disinvite the Jewish anti-Zionist group Neturei Karta from a high-profile international gathering of religious leaders the monarch was sponsoring.

“This was unprecedented,” he said in an interview last October. “This is the kind of relationship we have been working for.”

A recent Gallup Poll of Muslim Americans, the largest ever conducted, suggested another possible common ground for Muslim and Jews — political affiliation. Both groups have similar voting patterns: Half of the Muslims identify as Democrats, a third as Independents and only a small minority as Republicans. The survey also found American Muslim women to be more highly educated than women in every religious group except Jews.

The JCPA plenum supported the pro-dialogue resolution by a large majority.

The Reform movement’s Mark Pelavin, who presented the resolution, stressed that many local Jewish communities across the country are “looking for guidance” on how to go about reaching out to Muslims.

But the American Jewish Congress’s acting co-executive director, Marc Stern, voted against the resolution and argued that guidance is exactly what it lacks. “It talks only about the easy issues,” he said, noting that the resolution does not address the problems of choosing Muslim interlocutors and setting the agenda for a dialogue.

Labels: American Muslims, dialogue, interfaith, Jewish-American, Judaism, Nathan Guttman