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A New York Jewish childhood at the Dalton School where privilege met progressivism
I am what is called “a Dalton lifer.” I was born in Manhattan on Dec. 1, 1943, at Lenox Hill Hospital and was a New Yorker all my life before I married and moved away. For 14 of those years, from when I was 3 (going on 4) until I was 18, I attended the Dalton School.
My parents chose Dalton because it was a progressive school that was comfortable for Jewish children, who made up about one-third of the school’s population, and it admitted Black students. There were a number of such schools in Manhattan at the time; influenced by the educational philosophy of John Dewey, they believed learning should be taught by doing, and that education should include active inquiry and problem solving. (My father, in fact, had attended the University of Chicago Lab School that Dewey created in 1896.)
When I was little, I often walked with my older brothers from our apartment at 81st and Park Avenue to 89th where Dalton was located between Park and Lexington. On the way, we would pass a stationery store where adults would put down some change on top of the newspaper pile and take one or two of the papers that the shopkeeper had neatly arranged on a wooden bench outside of the store front. As a child, I sometimes stole some of that change and to this day I am horrified at myself.
By the time I was eight, I would walk back home by myself on Lexington Avenue, which formed the western boundary of Yorkville between 72nd Street and 96th. Yorkville was then populated by Germans and German-speaking immigrants such as Hungarians and Czechs. During the 1930s and World War II, it had been the headquarters of the German Bund. It was less than a decade after the end of World War II, and as Jews, my parents were keenly aware of Yorkville’s past. While they shopped on Lexington, they warned us it could be dangerous, and indeed, one of my brothers got held up there. My parents were reluctant to allow me, as a girl, to walk east of 86th and Lex – where there were still dance halls and beer parlors and clubs that seemed to me both alien and alluring.
Nevertheless, I strode down Lexington by myself, entranced by the wonderful shops. There was a fabulous marzipan store; I loved that candy, molded into tiny figurines small apples and lemons, hand-sculpted dogs and statuettes, and seasonal Christmas and Easter pieces. Near 82nd Street, there was a drug store with a soda counter that sold sandwiches and drinks where my mother would always order an egg salad sandwich and a coffee milkshake. There was an old-fashioned health-food store that sold specialty items such as nut bread, yogurt and whole grains.
Lexington was still a two-way street, and the bus price had recently gone up from a nickel to a dime. Later, when we were in high school, we would cheat on both the bus and subway and shove a whole bunch of us through without paying for everyone. But fixed in my memory is that contrast between the still-living fear of American Nazis that my parents embodied and the richness of store life on Lexington Avenue.
A privileged childhood
Of course, memories are tricky, and mine are probably filled with biases and mistakes. We misremember to be sure. And we imagine our childhood recollections through the prism of who we were. I was from a privileged German-Jewish family. At the time I did not think of myself as especially fortunate. It was just who I was.
When I went to college, I encountered the wonderful post-Civil-War writer, Henry Adams. Near the beginning of his masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, he tells the story of being about 5 or 6, and playing on the grounds of his grandfather John Quincy Adams’ house. Adams’ gardener declared that young Henry probably believed that he would grow up to be president too. Henry recalled that it had never occurred to him that he would not become president; that’s what his family did.
Not only are my recollections filtered through an unconscious perception of privilege, they are also intertwined with my identity as a young Jew. When I was a student in Dalton’s lower school, I don’t remember if I was aware of the double luck of having been born into money and what we then called culture; and into an America with no close relatives who had been murdered in the Holocaust. My grandmother worried about some of her family back in Europe; she’d been told some of them were still alive, but she could not find them.
In the 1940s and 1950s, America was still a country made up largely of white European nationals and Blacks whose grandparents or great-grandparents had been born into slavery. The distinctions between European nationalities defined much of my world. I knew I was not Irish, Italian, or Polish Catholic, nor was I German-Lutheran or Scandinavian Most of the white children — other than the Jews — who attended Dalton were WASPs and I wasn’t one of those either. I remember only one boy who was Catholic, Fitzhugh Seamus MacManus Mullin whose father’s family was Irish and whose mother’s family was Spanish. His grandfather would come to Dalton, sit on a chair in our wonderful theater, and enrapture us by reciting Celtic tales. I assume that he was Seumas MacManus, who according to Wikipedia was considered by many to be the last great seanchaí, or storyteller of the ancient oral tradition.
I knew there were barriers between Jews and Christians, but they never impeded upon my sense of self. Park Avenue apartment buildings were either Jewish or gentile, and my building, 941 Park Avenue, was occupied entirely by Jewish families. The only non-Jews with whom I interacted in my building worked for one the families who lived there, or for the building itself; they were maids and supers and doormen, and they were white and largely Irish.
When I was little and in the lower school, I did not think about religion. Most of my family had come from Germany and had been in America since before the Civil War. They were not observant, in fact quite the opposite. My parents believed that religion was the opiate of the masses, and we ate shellfish and ham. My father banned uncured pork as in pork chops, so my mother often served lamb chops, which was unusual in the America of that time. Both of my parents grew up in Chicago, my mother in the northern suburb of Kenilworth, my father on the south side of the city near the University of Chicago. My mother’s family was wealthy and lived in a very large house where I happily played as a child and where my best companion there was the son of my grandparents’ chauffeur, whose family lived in an apartment above the garage.
Their world was German-Jewish, and my grandfather was one of the founders of that communities’ local country club. My grandparents, seeking spiritual meaning in their lives, followed Christian Science, but they still considered themselves Jewish, though as members of the upper-class German-Jewish world they would never have considered joining a Conservative or Orthodox community.
My father’s family was split between Eastern and Central Europe. His father was Lithuanian and Orthodox, his mother was German and reform, and that divide contributed to my paternal grandparents’ divorce. After my parents had married and moved to New York, our father would take us on excursions to the Lower East Side where we would buy challah, which we never ate on Friday night. I understood — without knowing the word — that we were part of what the larger Jewish world called Yekke. That is, we were of German and Central European descent and our grandparents and their parents before them did not speak Yiddish. This was in contrast to the Jews from the areas of Eastern Europe where Jews did speak Yiddish, who had not yet assimilated into American culture and language as we had, were often poorer, and were looked down upon by the Yekke.
My parents may have disliked organized religion, but they certainly felt Jewish. In the late 1930s, my mother and her mother sponsored Jews trying to get out of Germany. My mother had a letter from Albert Einstein, written in German and addressed to Fraulein Spiegel (her maiden name) thanking her for trying to help a Jewish family of mathematicians. And in retrospect, their Jewish identity must also have been reinforced in 1948 by the establishment of Israel, then a small, scrappy, underdog state. Like most American Jews, they thought of Israel as a symbol of survival: Hitler had not wiped us off the face of the earth.
Later I learned that my parents’ largest contribution every year was to the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). But this was true of the vast majority of Jews of their generation, and I would guess was so for the parents of virtually every Jewish child in Dalton’s lower and middle school. One of the girls in my Dalton class was Elizabeth Rosenwald (Varet), the daughter of William Rosenwald (and granddaughter of Julius Rosenwald) who, along with much of his family, helped found the UJA. Another was Ruth Slawson, daughter of John Slawson, who was director of the American Jewish Committee from 1943 to 1968. But, in the lower school I felt simply part of my environment, and a very large part of that environment was Dalton.
A world of progressives and universalists
When we were in kindergarten, our schoolroom had its own sandbox: Dalton allowed us to play and simply grow. When we started 1st grade, however, we were meant to learn how to read. But I had no interest in reading except for comic books, especially Tarzan. Not knowing how to crack the code to read all those words contained in the bubbles attached to each character’s head, I happily made up my own stories. A group of us remained illiterate until the fall of 3rd grade, when we attended a remedial class and I learned how to decode letters and symbols. When we each finally conquered the art of literacy, we were given a very small penknife clad in mother of pearl. Comics were never the same.
Each lower school grade was split into two classes, each with its own teacher. The lower school teacher I remember best was Ellie Seeger, a fabulous storyteller who regaled our class with stories until the other second grade class got so jealous she had to stop. Her husband was John Seeger, brother of Pete Seeger. John Seeger taught middle school geography where we made papier mâché maps, something I adored doing. He would sing for us sometimes, and although I became a great fan of Pete Seeger, I think John was just as good.
School at Dalton would frequently begin with a morning assembly. We would march into our wonderful proscenium theater with red-covered theater seats to piano music. It was there that John Seeger sang for us. It was there that we put on plays and made costumes in a wonderful anteroom space. And it was also there that Dalton held its Christmas Pageant, a re-enactment of the birth of Jesus and the story of the wisemen from the east, to which none of our Jewish parents objected.
In 1951, we went on a trip to Otis, a farm in Massachusetts. We crossed over a gully or a stream on a log. I still have a photo of myself milking a cow into a metal bucket
I was friends with a Black girl named Judy Walker and we had sleepover dates. She would come with us to our summer house in Connecticut, and I went with her to the vacation home her family was building, and to her home in Harlem. Her father was a chemist and one morning at her house I woke up to music, thinking it was the theme to the Lone Ranger. Her parents must have liked classical music because it was the William Tell Overture.
The biggest event of 5th grade was the Greek Festival — a very Dewey-inspired production. Tessie Ross was our teacher, and we loved her. She taught at Dalton for 43 years beginning in 1944 after she had fled to the U.S. from Belgium and she led the Greek Festival, which took place in the gym and had carriages and spears and shields and armor. We played at being Greeks — Athenians against the Spartans, with parents as our audience.
In high school, I had one other teacher who was a refugee from Europe, our history teacher Nora Hodges. Mrs. Hodges was born in 1899 as Nora August Warndorfer, from Vienna. She came from a family of wealthy Jews, and fortunately she got out of Vienna many years before the Anschluss. She went back to Austria in the mid-1930’s and told us how she had listened to the radio, and, hearing a magnetic voice come over the air, felt captivated — until she learned that it was Adolph Hitler.
In the lower school, girls got to wear pants on Fridays. That was a big deal then because girls still wore skirts and dresses. Always. I remember mine as being corduroy with an elastic waist. I believe that going casual on Fridays, however, was not simply a symptom of Dalton progressive philosophy, but an indicator that it was populated by well-off families. Of course, the America of the 1950s was not as divided between rich and poor as it is now, and those who were upper middle class, or even rich, were not inclined to be ostentatious. But many families had either country homes or were members of country clubs. So, the school allowed girls to sport trousers on Fridays so they would be dressed to go to their second homes.
Not that all families were wealthy. Robert Newman, whose daughter Hila was a class or two above me, was a radio-drama playwright turned children’s book writer. Wally Shawn’s father WIlliam was the editor of The New Yorker, so he was very well-known but wasn’t paid a banker’s salary. Bettye George Dockery’s father was a dentist. Michael Lerner’s father, Max Lerner, was a writer, professor, and public intellectual, and also famous, but not wealthy. Pebble Baker’s father was a journalist for Time.
We ended our school year with a festival called “Arch Day.” Each class went through an arch on the auditorium stage. We went in as part of one grade and exited as part of the next. There were skits as well. My brother Paul finished 8th grade in 1954, when so many Americans were obsessed with the McCarthy hearings, so Paul’s class put together a skit entitled “Point of Order.”
Most Dalton students, and I assume most of the teachers, were liberal, but establishment liberal. We all assumed Alger Hiss was innocent. His son Tony went to Dalton and was a few years ahead of me. One of his lawyers was Helen Buttenweiser. The Buttenweiser children went to Dalton. She and her husband Benjamin were wealthy German Jewish New York philanthropists..
But while we were all aware of Joseph McCarthy, of the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC), and of Alger Hiss, we never talked about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Ethel Greenglass was a secretary and a member of the Young Communist League. Julius’ parents were immigrants from Russia who grew up on the Lower East Side and he also was a communist. Alger Hiss was accepted by much of German Jewish Yekke Manhattan, though he himself was not Jewish, but the Rosenbergs were not. They were the wrong kind of Jews — the ones who would never have sent their sons to Dalton.
That divide, between Hiss and the Rosenbergs, perhaps illuminates my Dalton world in the 1950s. We were comfortable progressives and post-World War II universalists. We believed in Civil Rights and the future of Blacks in the United States. We supported John Lindsay for congress and mayor. My father once chaperoned me and a friend to a Pete Seeger concert, and he was terrified by how Pete Seeger could whip up a crowd — it reminded him too much of Adolph Hitler.
In the 7th or 8th grade, I read The Diary of Anne Frank. I devoured it one summer when I was at my parents’ vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard. There was a great tick scare that summer, so I lay in my bed, clenching my teeth to ward off any ticks, reading Anne Frank and refashioning my identity.
By middle school, questions of my own identity began to intertwine with my Dalton childhood. My mother once told me that some of the girls whose parents sent them to Dalton in the lower and middle school did so in order to provide their children with a diverse environment but then put them elsewhere for high school so that they would not become romantically attached to a Jewish boy or too acculturated into Jewish (or at least Yekke) life.
A story worth preserving
When I went through the arch in June of 1957, I entered as an 8th grader and emerged as a high school student. Four years later, in 1961, I graduated — 65 years ago. America was a different world then. The gap between rich and poor was not as yawning, and the wealthy were not as excessive. For Jewish children today, the memory of the Holocaust is often a nearly untouchable past that they learn about in Hebrew School; the story of Anne Frank is recalled from a school assignment; and secular Jews like my family have left the emotional ghetto in which my parents still lived. Our public and private contexts have changed. And so I have decided to tell my story of one German Jewish child living in Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s, attending one progressive grade school, during one slice of time that I feel is worth preserving.
The post A New York Jewish childhood at the Dalton School where privilege met progressivism appeared first on The Forward.
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I was born after 9/11. I still carry the memories of that day.
Earlier this week, I was talking with my mother over the phone about her experience on 9/11. She walked me through the familiar parts — how she was in our Upper West Side apartment when she learned about the attacks from a relative, how she went to the garage to get the car so they could drive to a friend’s house upstate once she realized the attacks were acts of terror. There were still hijacked planes in the air, and she worried New York City might be targeted again. Then, she said, “This part is going to make me cry.”
I hadn’t remembered what came next, but suddenly it came back to me. “Oh no, me too,” I said.
While she waited for my father to come back uptown from his office in the Financial District, she stopped inside a fire station across from the garage. Inside was a lone firefighter, who’d stayed behind to man the station while the rest of his company was inside the towers. He was watching the news on television, and my mom stood next to him, watching too, when the towers fell.
“We just lost so many men,” he said.
I wasn’t there when it happened; I wasn’t even alive. But I’d heard this story before, I’d walked dozens of times past that same fire station, which now has a plaque commemorating the seven firefighters who died on 9/11. Hearing the story again on the phone, I found myself walking down the streets of Washington D.C., bawling.
I’m 23, born a year-and-a-half after 9/11. Most Americans my age learned about the attacks in school, as history. I’m part of the 16% who learned through family or friends.
The discovery happened by accident, when I was in kindergarten. My mom and I were in a children’s store on the Upper West Side, when we started flipping through a picture book about the history of New York City. Most of the book was unremarkable, but the end was unexpected: a scene of the smoldering twin towers.
I forget what exactly happened next, but here’s what I do remember: My mom was upset that the shop hadn’t provided a warning about the book’s end, and I was confused about why she was upset. I was five, too young to understand the image and never one to let a question go unanswered; I must have pestered her until she offered up an explanation.
She hadn’t been prepared to tell me about terrorism. She’d been evading the topic for some time, telling half-truths to avoid it. When I’d ask her why we had to take our shoes off in line at the airport, she’d just say it was to make sure no one had anything dangerous, leaving out the part about how a man had tried to get on a flight with bombs hidden in his shoes.
“9/11 is a huge thing for a parent to have to tell a kid about,” my mom told me this week. “You were a happy kid, and I didn’t want you to get scared or traumatized.”
The events, and impacts, of that day slowly unfolded for me as the years passed. I learned that my father had watched from Battery Park as the South Tower fell; he ran westward as plumes of smoke billowed toward him. I learned that my parents had friends who’d died in the towers, one of whom was the father of a boy I grew up with. I remember going to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum when it opened in 2014, feeling sick as I watched footage of people jumping out of the towers.
The New York Times recently interviewed dozens of Gen Z Americans about 9/11. I was struck by how disconnected many felt from the event. “It’s hard to feel sad about something that you don’t remember,” said Annika Heegaard, a 25-year-old now living in New York.
But for me, 9/11 doesn’t feel quite so far away. By now I’ve lived through other mass casualty events, like the Parkland shooting and the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. But 9/11 is the only tragedy that my family members had such a direct connection to. “It was devastating,” my mom said.
I think the reason I can remember the exact moment I found out about 9/11 is because it changed my view of the world. I remember being almost unable to comprehend that anyone would do what the hijackers did. I wasn’t, as my mom feared, traumatized by learning about the attacks; I didn’t fear for my safety each day. But the knowledge was in some ways a loss of innocence — a discovery that people could do awful things and that the world wasn’t as safe a place as I had assumed.
The post I was born after 9/11. I still carry the memories of that day. appeared first on The Forward.
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The DSA’s latest win was not about Israel — and it hurts the Jewish community to insist it was
When Democratic socialist David Morales defeated the incumbent mayor of Providence, Brett Smiley, in a historic primary win this week in Rhode Island, the election quickly became part of a narrative that has been coalescing around progressive political wins in the last year — the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win in Michigan, the sweep of DSA-backed candidates in New York City’s recent primaries. The idea is that this race was all about Israel — that it turned on a struggle between Zionists and pro-Palestinian activists.
A Jewish Telegraphic Agency story on Morales’s win features a quote from the founder of the Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative that Morales’s campaign was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.” The founder of the far-right Rhode Island Coalition for Israel called some of Morales’ stances “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.” Jewish Insider published a story the day before the primary headlined, “Antisemitism roils Providence mayoral race.” The Times of Israel’s story on the election is titled, “Jewish mayor of Providence loses Democratic primary to anti-Israel challenger.” (Smiley converted to Judaism in 2024, and made a controversial visit to Israel in 2025.)
But this narrative is false: Israel did not play a decisive role in this election. In reality, Morales was laser-focused on affordability, and — like most progressive candidates this year — rarely, if ever, brought up Israel unprompted. Indeed, the defining issue for the Morales campaign was not Israel, but rent stabilization.
Last April, Smiley vetoed legislation passed by Providence’s City Council to cap annual rent hikes at 4%. This ordinance is desperately needed: A recent study found that Providence is the least affordable city for renters in the country. Longtime residents are getting priced out, and essentially everyone who rents — and renters comprise 59% of the households in the city — understands that our trajectory is simply not sustainable.
By vetoing the most significant-ever attempt to bring this crisis under control, Smiley made this a race about a challenger fighting to make Providence affordable and an incumbent prioritizing his corporate donors, who gave Smiley a historically large $1.3 war chest for his campaign. (Morales had less than $300,000, largely from individual donors.)
This issue served as precisely the kind of defining contrast that pro-Israel Super PAC spending became in recent congressional elections elsewhere. Support from AIPAC has provided an impossible-to-obscure contrast to Democratic primary voters in races such as Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, New York’s 10th Congressional District, and Michigan’s Senate primary. But in Providence, the scandal wasn’t AIPAC donors — it was the wealthy developers and corporate landlords who funded Smiley’s campaign.
It is true that Morales criticized Smiley’s active participation in the Combat Antisemitism Movement, a project so Trumpian that the Jewish Federations of North America and Jewish Council for Public Affairs both left the group after it released a video claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are antisemitic. Morales also came out in support of a ballot initiative that would require the City of Providence to divest from the debt of foreign countries “conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide,” as determined by U.S. and international law. Some of Morales’s supporters — and in particular some portion of his army of campaign volunteers — were undoubtedly motivated by an appreciation for Morales’s willingness to take a moral stance. But it simply wasn’t a top five, or even (by my estimation) a top 10 issue in this race.
And I don’t understand the inclination to claim otherwise. Certainly it doesn’t make sense for members of the Israel lobby; after all, having another election be lost due to voters’ anger over a politician’s fealty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not good for their political project. But more importantly, these allegations — particularly the false claim that this race was somehow “roiled” by antisemitism — are harmful to Rhode Island’s Jewish community as a whole.
Take, for example, the “antisemitism” referenced by Jewish Insider, which consisted, in total, of a few instances in which a Hitler mustache and devil horns were drawn on Smiley’s campaign signs. Of course, defacing political signs is never good, and Morales immediately condemned the vandalism. But as a Jewish former elected official who experienced actual antisemitism over the course of my time in Rhode Island politics, I have to laugh at the idea that this graffiti was antisemitic.
To compare someone to Hitler is basically to say they’re the worst person ever. It’s often a problematic comparison (because almost nobody is actually as evil as Hitler), but it’s not antisemitic to say, in effect, “Hitler was bad, and so is this other guy.” And vandals were drawing devil’s horns on pictures of Smiley years before he converted. In fact, I don’t think the average Providence voter even knows Smiley is Jewish; it’s certainly not an important part of his political identity, given that he literally wasn’t yet Jewish when he first won election to the mayor’s office in 2022, or during his prior run for the seat in 2014.
Antisemitism is a real and growing problem — in our country, and here in Rhode Island. Just a few years ago, dozens of swastika-brandishing neo-Nazis rallied a block from my home. Every time that cynical politicians cry wolf on this threat, they are minimizing its danger in the eyes of most people, making our community less prepared to respond to actual incidents of antisemitism when they occur.
Even worse, when some partisans of Israel claim that everyone who dares to say Israel is committing genocide and apartheid is an antisemite — that is, someone who hates all Jews — the implication is that Israel’s wars and violence against Palestinians are somehow projects undertaken by all Jews, rather than the crimes of a specific far-right government and its supporters. And if you repeat that message often enough, some people are going to start believing it — which certainly does not make me or my young Jewish sons safer.
David Morales ran on a pledge to build a Providence for all. “All” includes members of the Jewish community, many of whom — including myself, and Morales’s campaign manager and field director, to name just a few — are excited to support his vision. It is to no one’s benefit — least of all Providence’s Jews — to try to seed conflict and distrust in what should be a moment of profound hope and possibility for our whole city.
The post The DSA’s latest win was not about Israel — and it hurts the Jewish community to insist it was appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish and Muslim leaders avoided the hardest interfaith topic for years, and now face a ‘massive fault line’
It’s been a quarter century since a wave of distrust and violence against Muslims swept across America in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. But in some pockets of New York City and across the U.S., Jewish neighbors extended a hand of friendship and an interfaith movement was reborn.
Dialogues turned into dinners. Dinners spawned theatrical collaborations. Collaborations turned out volunteers to feed the homeless and sent interfaith teams to Capitol Hill.
Still, as the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada continued to unfold in the Middle East, even the most promising partnerships avoided the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We deliberately parked it on the side,” said Daisy Khan, the former executive director of American Society for Muslim Advancement and founder of the Women’s Islamic Initiative. “We called it the elephant in the room that none of us could handle.”
Now, 25 years after the terrorist attacks that inspired a movement, leaders realize that silence was a critical mistake.
As this year’s Jewish High Holidays, a time of remembrance and repentance, begin at sundown on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, American Jewish leaders are reflecting on mistakes made and words they wish they could take back, confronting rising antisemitism, and along with their longtime Muslim partners, asking: Where do we go from here?
“Rosh Hashanah is known as Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembrance,” said Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El, adding that remembrance usually refers to the hope that God will remember the covenant with the Jewish people. “When you talk about a day of remembrance, you also talk about the experiences that have shaped us into who we are. 9/11 certainly is an experience that has shaped us into who we are. Anyone who lived in New York is forever changed by that day.”
Interfaith bridge-building
On Sept. 11, 2001, Davidson was a young associate rabbi at another Manhattan institution, Central Synagogue. Feeling otherwise helpless that morning as the towers fell, he headed straight to the nearby mosque on 55th Street to assure his Muslim neighbors that they would not be judged by the actions of the terrorists – his instinct born from years of interfaith dialogue already underway.
The same instinct led President George W. Bush to the Islamic Center of Washington D.C., a week later to proclaim, “Islam is peace.” But that perspective did not prevail in all corners.
Prominent evangelical figures condemned Islam as “evil and wicked.” Mosques were set ablaze, and the Justice Department in the three months after the attacks labeled nine murders as “possible hate crimes.” Despite the community’s fear, the term “Islamophobia” was not widely embraced, as if it was a product of Muslims’ imaginations.
“So many American Muslims were experiencing the anxiety that President Bush recognized right away,” Davidson told the Forward. “So 9/11 crystallized for many the importance of the work of interfaith bridge building … We can learn from one another. When the world becomes complicated and your own community is in jeopardy or is being targeted, you realize how valuable it is to have those friendships.”
Those existing friendships and the ground rules that had sustained them laid the foundation for the aftermath of Sept. 11 and propelled many individuals and groups working behind the scenes to publicly counter what seemed to be an anti-Muslim zeitgeist. While the previous approach to interfaith work had been intimate Shabbat dinners, Ramadan iftars, and discussion groups, the new approach involved rallies, live performances and large-scale programs.
On the morning of Sept. 12, Israeli cellist Udi Bar-David called someone with whom he had collaborated a few times – Majid Alsayegh, an Iraqi-born Muslim engineer and architect in Philadelphia. Determined to offer a constructive response, they formed a team and in Spring 2002 launched a nonprofit for creative intercultural exchanges.
“Because of the tensions of Muslim and Jewish, Arabic and Jewish communities, because of the violence, we felt we needed to speak up and do more,” Alsayegh told the Forward, “to help them understand that dialogue in many forms, including music, is much more powerful than shooting each other.”
Seeking to help audiences listen with less anger, more empathy, artists from B’nai Jeshurun, a synagogue on New York’s Upper West Side, teamed up with Methodists and Muslims to present hard truths gathered from more than 100 New Yorkers. The project titled “Same Difference” later became a documentary.
In the years that followed, connections became more purposeful and direct. In 2008, Rabbi Marc Schneier’s Foundation for Ethnic Understanding launched an annual Weekend of Twinning, which paired scores of synagogues and mosques to explore the parallels and similarities within their traditions. It also enabled them to compare notes about the discrimination each faced as religious minorities and band together to fight the hatred that targeted both.
Khan cherishes the time she spent in synagogues and the friendships she formed there.
“We had such deep ties and such deep relations we weren’t afraid to go to bat for one another,” Khan said. “I think those relationships have even served us to this day.”
‘A massive fault line’
Still, cracks began to show. In 2010, Khan and her husband at the time, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, proposed Cordoba House, a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan. Modeled after JCCs across the country and named for a city in Spain that once had been a center of peaceful coexistence, the proposed facility would offer prayer space, a wedding venue and a swimming pool.
Opponents focused on the location: two blocks from Ground Zero. Many Jewish leaders endorsed the project. Abe Foxman, longtime leader of the Anti-Defamation League, did not.
“We believe that in this place of tragedy and pain and anguish … if you want to heal, the best way to heal is not to do it in your face.”
Foxman, who died in May, never apologized for his remarks, but his successor Jonathan Greenblatt later acknowledged “we were wrong, plain and simple.”
In 2011, when U.S. Congressman Peter King of New York, then-chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, held hearings on Capitol Hill denouncing the radicalization inside American mosques, Jewish friends showed their support by helping to organize a “Today, I am Muslim too” rally in Times Square.
Those shows of solidarity grew throughout the years. Jewish partners joined crowds at airports to protest the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration. Congregations helped each other pick up the pieces when their houses of worship or sacred sites came under assault. But the tougher conversation, probing where people stood on the Middle East conflict and why, remained largely untouched.
As anyone in interfaith relations or diplomacy of any kind will tell you, constructive conversations are best had before there’s a crisis. That crisis arrived on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, murdering more than 1,200 and taking 250 hostages. The war that followed in Gaza sparked virulent protests on college campuses and in public squares and a spike in antisemitic incidents. It also created a chasm of grief too deep and wide for many partnerships to survive.
“When Gaza happened, it created a massive fault line,” Khan said. “For Jews it reinforced existential fears about Jewish safety. For the Palestinians: ‘It’s our existential thing too. We feel we’re getting wiped out.’”
But because many conversation partners had for years avoided the hardest topic of all, they missed the opportunity to feel the emotional weight carried on both sides and hold that tension. When the grief, trauma and fear of Oct. 7 was thrust upon them, leaders could not adequately navigate the emotional landscape to offer moral clarity or comfort, Khan said.
“We could have called for calm,” she said. “We could’ve said that human loss is terrible. We could’ve said a lot of things that calmed people down. None of that happened. It became very tribal.”
Laboratory phase
Dr. Ari Gordon, director of Muslim Jewish Relations for American Jewish Committee, said while some Muslim partners have walked away from their joint advocacy work, some have stayed in touch. Khan and Alsayegh remain committed and hold out hope that their Muslim peers will return and give it another try.
“Everyone in this space has had the hits they’ve taken after Oct. 7,” Gordon said. “Relationships are a long-term investment. They can take dips and turns, peaks and valleys. On a personal level, as a friend, you have the right to say I want to engage with a person. I don’t want to. As a Jewish community we have a responsibility to keep our doors open.”
But it’s also important to keep the trajectory and time frame in perspective. The transformation of Christian-Jewish relations offers a lesson in that regard.
“The idea that a relationship can be beset by conflict and challenges for centuries and undergo transformation,” he said, “is one that I carry in my mind all the time.”
Gordon calls the past 25 years a “laboratory phase of Muslim-Jewish relations.” The Shabbat dinners, iftars, dialogue groups, coalitions, concerts – they all have fortified a connective tissue between American Muslims and Jews that did not exist 25 years ago.
“That trust may not have been sufficient to meet the stress test of October 7 and the continued war but it was definitely there and it didn’t go away,” he said. “After October 7 we entered a new phase and it’s one where we’re not going to go back to the way it used to be, but build something new.”
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