For Jews and Muslims, Interfaith Work Helps With Decade-Old Feelings
Indiana University, Bloomington—
Judah Cohen felt like he was living in a different world when he heard the news Sept. 11, 2001. Then teaching at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, he said his scare began the moment he turned on the TV, and continued throughout the next couple of weeks as he saw missing persons’ pictures plastered everywhere on the streets of Manhattan.
His wife, Rebecca Nash, a fourth-year student at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, went to the emergency room of Elmhurst Hospital, where people were lining up to give blood. But Nash told Cohen that most of the blood ended up going unused.
“The most terrifying reality was there were very few injuries there,” he said. He shook his head and mouthed a few words. “Almost everyone died.”
It was three days after 9/11 attacks. As one of many Jewish Americans who were trying to bring Jewish tradition to the way they confronted these events, Cohen went to Central Synagogue, a congregation in Manhattan that had been just restored after a fire in 1998. That morning, instead of celebrating its renovation, Jews assembled there to mourn.
For a long time after 9/11, American Christians, Jews and Muslims found it hard to reach out in the spirit of interfaith understanding among each other. While enduring suspicion from their neighbors, many Muslims in the United States have been struggling to forge an American identity separate from the images of violence of the 9/11 attacks.
Jews, however, were scared to be targeted again, both by radical Islam and by conspiracy theorists who believe in Jewish power and its manipulation of American society.
Unlike Americans who used to be pride themselves on living their lives free from fear of attacks, Jews have absorbed many horrors through their traumatic history. For them, what it means to be vulnerable and unsecured as a nation or a community is not something that is taught just in the classroom.
“The 9/11 attacks may have intensified this sense both on the American and Jewish side,” said Dina Spechler, Indiana University associate professor of political science, who also teaches in the I.U. Jewish Studies program.
“Nobody knew what was going to happen next,” said Cohen, who is currently working as I.U.’s Lou and Sybil Mervis Professor of Jewish Culture. “There was a fear at that time that something horrifying could happen again when people went to religious services.”
Even though 10 years have passed since the 9/11 attacks, Rabbi Sue Laikin Silberberg, executive director of Helene G. Simon Hillel Center at I.U., said, “The attempt to define so many different people as the ‘other’ after 9/11,” still makes her feel uncomfortable.
This week, Silberberg helped organize a panel discussion called Remembering 9/11, with panelists from Catholic, Jewish and Muslim communities. Like Bloomington Sharing Heart 2 Heart, an ice cream social activity held at the Islamic Center, kicking off the city’s 9/11 memorial events, Remembering 9/11 also aimed to reflect upon the ramifications for interfaith understanding and diversity of community over the past decade.
“I can remember that we were talked about America being a melting pot as we grew up,” Silberberg said, “but now, we have to be very careful of those groups when media say something bad about them.”
“Being Jewish means you are identified as the ‘other.’ That is just the reality,” she said.
Yet, for those now college-aged American Jews who consider themselves very much a part of this country, this reality seems to be too vague to be visible.
“What 9/11 means to us is probably very similar to what it means to any other American,” said Melody Mostow, a political science major at I.U. Between high school and college, Mostow a year in Israel, where she studied Hebrew and volunteered as an English teacher. As co-chair of I.U. Hillel’s annual Israelpalooza event, Mostow calls for more receptiveness and tolerance from the Jewish side.
“Islamic community is just another minority group that has been discriminated unfairly and it really hits home for me,” she said, placing her right hand over her heart.
“That’s why Jewish community, even more than any other community, should try to work toward a broader awareness of supporting them.”
Faisul Yaseen argues, “American Muslim community needs to become more involved in and work with a broader community.” As a Muslim student from Kashmir, he has always been happy to sit in the lounge and talk with people of different faiths about their childhood dreams, their religions, their experiences or even their beliefs about death.
“The mutual understanding is not just a matter of wearing a veil or not,” Yaseen said. “It is about to stop being afraid from this moment and to understand their world where we had never set foot before.”
Silberman expressed a similar sentiment. “Reaching out to many different people who are not Jews helps you better understand yourself,” she said. In the decade since 9/11, that is how she has moved forward. “And the more you know about yourself, the more comfortable you are with who you are,” she said.
Jun Chen is a journalism graduate student at Indiana University. She is a Chinese girl, a news junkie and music snob who believes there is inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. She is a New Voices Magazine National Correspondent and this is her first piece for New Voices.
