Abstract: In March 2017 Salam Shalom Barcelona started as an initiative aimed at enhancing interreligious relations and dialogue between Jews and Muslims living in the city. This initiative followed the steps of a former one that was established in Germany in 2013 called Salam Shalom. Despite Salam Shalom Barcelona’s short history, the promoted activities have shown that it can be a successful project with a high future potential. However, establishing interreligious dialogue is not an easy endeavor. It has to take into account different historical, political and social issues that impact the religious groups and communities. Therefore, this chapter aims to explain the Salam Shalom Barcelona initiative within the historical and social context of Spain, in order to enhance our understanding of its complexities and challenges. On the one hand, it presents a short introduction of the historiographical discussion regarding interreligious relations during the medieval period in Spain, considered by many historians to be exceptional and to serve as a model of culture of tolerance and convivencia. On the other, the chapter describes the main characteristics of the Jewish and Muslim communities in Barcelona. Broadly speaking, the chapter aims to show the importance of analysing and identifying the complexities, difficulties and challenges of the Muslim-Jewish dialogue in the current Catalan context, as well as contributing to future perspectives of this dialogue.
Abstract: Während seiner zweieinhalbjährigen Laufzeit sammelte das Dialogprojekt des Zentralrats der Juden in Deutschland „Schalom Aleikum“ Stimmen aus der deutschen Gesellschaft zum jüdisch-muslimischen Dialog. Jedes Jahr fanden, in Zusammenarbeit mit forsa. Gesellschaft für Sozialforschung und statistische Analysen mbH, bundesweite Online-Umfragen statt. Die Ergebnisse werden nun als Buch präsentiert. Es sind Zahlen und Statistiken, die nachdenklich stimmen – manche optimistisch, manche ambivalent, einige pessimistisch. Gleichzeitig sollen sie als essenzieller Impulsgeber für Politik und Gesellschaft fungieren.
„Ich hoffe, dass das Buch hilft, ein realitätstreues Bild von der deutschen Gesellschaft im Hier und Jetzt zu erhalten – in all seinen positiven, wie auch negativen Facetten. Meine Hoffnung ist auch, dass in Zukunft die Menschen offen, respektvoll und voller Neugierde miteinander umgehen und aufeinander zugehen.“ Josef Schuster, Präsident des Zentralrats der Juden in Deutschland
Abstract: Berlin is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora community and one of the world’s largest Israeli diaspora communities. Germany’s guilt about the Nazi Holocaust has led to a public disavowal of anti-Semitism and strong support for the Israeli state. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Berlin report experiencing increasing levels of racism and Islamophobia. In The Moral Triangle Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in Berlin to explore these asymmetric relationships in the context of official German policies, public discourse, and the private sphere. They show how these relationships stem from narratives surrounding moral responsibility, the Holocaust, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and Germany’s recent welcoming of Middle Eastern refugees. They also point to spaces for activism and solidarity among Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians in Berlin that can help foster restorative justice and account for multiple forms of trauma. Highlighting their interlocutors’ experiences, memories, and hopes, Atshan and Galor demonstrate the myriad ways in which migration, trauma, and contemporary state politics are inextricably linked.
Abstract: In this deeply personal essay, Leora Tec, the daughter of Holocaust survivor and Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec from Lublin, Poland, examines the causes of past and present divides among many in the Polish Jewish community, both Jews and non-Jews. She shows how factors such as: silence (both personal and institutional or governmental); ignorance; an overemphasis on Polish rescue; a competition of victimhood; and an overemphasis on the separation between Jews and non-Jews before the war, have all deepened this chasm. And she demonstrates—using her own experience encountering the memory work done by those at Brama Grodzka-NN Theatre Centre as an example—how these divides can be bridged by collective, artistic, and individual remembrance. This remembrance holds space for what is absent or incomplete, while valuing the “fragments” of history. Most of all, she shows how forging human connection in the present, continues the work of remembering the past with reverence, and has enabled her to find a connection to Poland. Ultimately, she concludes that the human beings building the bridges are themselves the bridge.
Abstract: This article has a twofold aim: historical and practical. First, it conducts a brief historical review of the Jewish community in Serbia, addressing the ways in which this community has contributed to country’s culture, history, sciences, politics, and social life. It focuses especially on Jewish life in Serbia after the Holocaust, and the various difficulties of assimilation and emigration. Second, the essay investigates the practical realities of interculturalism in Serbia, weighing these realities against concerns about preserving Jewish identity. The article stems from three interviews: Stefan Sablić, theater director, musician, and founder of Shira U’tfila; Sonja Viličić, activist and founder/director ofNGOHaver Serbia; Dragana Stojanović, anthropologist and scholar of cultural studies. Taken together, the responses of these speakers offer novel approaches to multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue in an area with a complex history and cultural makeup.
Abstract: Both engaging in and researching interreligious dialogue initiatives after the 2015 Paris attacks among people who associate strongly with Jewish and Muslim communal structures provides a valuable framework for considering one of the central puzzles in the sociology of religion, namely, social transformations that apply not only to the observed but also to the observer. However, scholarship on interreligious dialogue does not have any well-established research episteme from which to proceed analytically. Academic doxa places interreligious dialogue initiatives in the realm of the “practical” and at times doctrinal, but not the rigorously analytical. These initiatives are often referred to in the English-speaking world as “interfaith,” a word which encompasses a vast array of voluntarist encounters across time and space. The underlying assumption of the academy is that researching dialogue initiatives is a form of “action-research,” a results-oriented mode of scholarship constrained by the necessity to obtain “best practice,” which is of little prestige or value to academics and intellectuals (Bielo 2018: 28). Moreover, since these initiatives have thus far often involved top-down practices, receiving their impetus from the state or dominant religious structures, they have lacked societal legitimacy and therefore have been of little interest to sociology.
Abstract: Interpreting culture as symbols, stories, rituals and values, the thesis explores the culture of a Jewish and a Catholic secondary school in a dialogical way. The survey of the literature in Chapter 1 identifies relevant school-based research and locates the chosen case-study schools within the context of the British 'dual system'. Chapter 2 draws on the theoretical and methodological literatures of inter-faith dialogue and ethnography to develop and defend a paradigm for the research defined as open-inclusivist and constructivist. The main body of the thesis (Chapters 3-5), based on field-work undertaken in 1996 and 1997, presents the two schools in parallel with each other. Chapter 3 describes the details of the case studies at 'St. Margaret's' and 'Mount Sinai' and my developing research relationship with each school. In Chapter 4 many different voices from each school are woven into two 'tales' about the schools' cultures. This central chapter has a deliberately narrative style. Chapter 5 amplifies the cultural tales through the analysis of broadly quantitative data gained from an extensive questionnaire administered to a sample of senior students in each school. It is the only place in the thesis where views and values from the two schools are directly compared. The final two chapters widen the horizon of the study. Chapter 6 presents voices which were not part of the original case studies but which relate, in different ways, to the culture of the two schools. Chapter 7, with theoretical ideas about Jewish schools and education, and Catholic schools and education, provides resources for further dialogue about culture within Judaism and Catholicism and for Jewish-Christian dialogue. The thesis ends with some reflections on possible implications of the two cultures for discussions about the common good in education.
Abstract: Читателю предлагается сборник интервью, записанных на протяжении последних лет, для того, чтобы показать участников исторических событий нашего времени. Среди них ученые, публицисты, диссиденты и общественные деятели. Они представляют свое видение украинско-еврейских отношений, формулируют актуальные вопросы сегодняшнего дня. Авторы не обходят «горячие точки» отношений, наиболее острые для украинцев и евреев.
Упомянутые в книге факты, а также опыт поиска взаимопонимания украинских и еврейских лидеров в последние десятилетия, по мнению авторов, достойны всеобщего обозрения.
Читачеві пропонується збірник інтерв’ю, які записані впродовж кількох останніх років, аби показати учасників історичних подій нашого часу. Cеред них науковці, публіцисти, дисиденти і громадські діячі. Вони представляють своє бачення українсько-єврейських відносин, формулюють актуальні питання сьогодення. Автори не обминають «гарячі точки» взаємин, найбільш болючі для українців та євреїв. Зазначені у книзі факти, а також досвід знаходження порозуміння українських та єврейських лідерів в останні десятиліття, на думку авторів, варті всебічного висвітлення.25 жовтня 2011 року в Києво-Могилянській академії відбулася презентація книги. Свої думки про важливість видання висловили Є. Сверстюк, М. Маринович, Я. Грицак, Й. Зісельс, К.Сігов, Ж. Ковба. Модератором зустрічі виступив директор Центру юдаїки і керівник проекту Леонід Фінберг.3 листопада 2011 р. Ізабелла Хруслінська, Петро Тима та Леонід Фінберг стали гостями програми “Вечір з М. Княжицьким” на телеканалі ТВі. Творці книги розповіли, чому вони зацікавилася українсько-єврейською темою, в чому особливість цієї збірки, зокрема, та міжкультурних взаємин загалом.
Abstract:
Skąd się wzięli Żydzi w Polsce? Dlaczego Polacy zgodzili się na budowę obozów koncentracyjnych w swoim sąsiedztwie? Dlaczego Izrael ostrzeliwuje dzielnice ludności cywilnej? Odpowiedzi na te i inne pytania można znaleźć w książce Trudne pytania w dialogu polsko-żydowskim.
Książka Trudne pytania w dialogu polsko-żydowskim (www.trudnepytania.org) powstała dzięki współpracy Forum Dialogu oraz American Jewish Committee. Jako pierwsza, w Polsce, buduje mosty porozumienia pomiędzy polskim i żydowskim sposobem postrzegania świata. Historia, której uczy się w szkole młody amerykański Żyd czy Izraelczyk, jest inna niż ta, którą poznaje Polak. Trudne pytania chcą pokazać punkt widzenia obu stron.
Praca nad książką rozpoczęła się od przeprowadzenia ponad tysiąca ankiet w Polsce, USA, Izraelu, Kanadzie, Australii. Młodzi Polacy i Żydzi wymienili w nich pytania dotyczące przeszłości, teraźniejszości i przyszłości, które wydają im się najbardziej drażliwe. Redaktorzy książki wybrali z nich pięćdziesiąt najważniejszych, a odpowiedzi udzielili eksperci stosunków polsko-żydowskich.
Na kartach Trudnych pytań spotykają się autorytety tej miary co Władysław Bartoszewski,
Israel Gutman, Leszek Kołakowski, Shlomo Avineri, Antony Polonsky.
Trudne pytania to obowiązkowa lektura dla każdego, komu nie są obojętne stosunki polsko-żydowskie.
Abstract: Where did Jews come from to Poland? How could it be that Poles let the Germans build concentration camps in their neighborhoods? Why has the Israeli army shelled districts where Palestinian civilians live? The answers to those and other questions can be found in the book, Difficult Questions in Polish-Jewish Dialogue.
The book, Difficult Questions in Polish-Jewish Dialogue (www.difficultquestions.org), is a joint effort of the Forum for Dialogue and the American Jewish Committee. It is the first publication available in Poland that tries to bridge the gulf between Polish and Jewish perceptions of the world. The history taught to American or Israeli students differs from that offered in Polish schools. Difficult Questions aims at showing both perspectives.
Work on the book started with a survey carried out among a thousand students from Poland, the USA, Israel, Canada, and Australia. Young Poles and Jews listed questions that seemed the most sensitive to them. They concerned the past, present and future. The book's editors chose 50 of the most representative issues. The answers were provided by experts in Polish-Jewish relations.
Among the authors are Władysław Bartoszewski, Israel Gutman, Leszek Kołakowski, Shlomo Avineri and Antony Polonsky.
Abstract: In the context of both the incredible diversity of the societies in which we now
live and the volatile political situation of the last few years, there have been
renewed levels of tensions between religious communities and in particular
between Jews and Muslims. At the same time Jews and Muslims find themselves
not only as perceived enemies but also as possible partners because of
the threat of radical political views gaining strength in the broader community.
In 2005, CEJI – a Jewish contribution to an inclusive Europe - began an initiative
to foster and promote dialogue and understanding between our two communities,
seeing it not only essential for our own well-being but also to strengthen
the vision of a diverse world to which we aspire.
Much work has been going at the local level on the ground but ideas and practices
are rarely shared. The people involved at a local level often feel isolated,
and lacking in support, at times feeling that they are operating in a vacuum, as
they try to generate dialogue between the two communities. The production of
these Mapping Reports for the 5 partner countries involved in the project
(Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and United Kingdom) intends to
begin to address these issues by publicising and promoting existing dialogue initiatives.
The Mapping Reports led to the First European Jewish Muslim Dialogue
Conference, which was held in April 2007. This event aimed to facilitate the
exchange of information and to gather positive experiences from the five partner
countries. Out of the conference came the recognition that dialogue is not
enough and that cooperation is also needed, and as a result the European
Platform for Jewish Muslim Cooperation was set up. The Platform is made up
of Jewish and Muslim organisations involved in local and national level dialogue
initiatives, and who are committed to developing cooperative actions between
their communities.
