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Before Oct. 7, a rabbi and imam at Syracuse were building bridges. After the attacks, more students joined them.
At Syracuse University, Adam Baltaxe held an unlikely role: the Muslim Student Association’s lone Jewish member.
Baltaxe, who graduated last spring, was a fixture at the Muslim group’s events — eating at potlucks, attending religious services, even giving a speech at the group’s Eid celebration — while also serving on Hillel’s executive board.
His interest in interfaith dialogue began while studying abroad in Chile, where conversations with his Palestinian host mother after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel left a lasting impression. Back at Syracuse, Baltaxe set out to recreate those exchanges.
“I started off just talking to individual Muslim or Palestinian students on campus, one-on-one. And there were a lot of times it would start pretty hostile,” he said. “And then, through conversations, actually a lot of those people ended up becoming my friends.”
Baltaxe was also a Jewish representative on Syracuse’s Student Assembly of Interfaith Leaders; an interfaith librarian at Hendricks Chapel, where he assisted students in discovering books on various religions; and a founding member of the Jewish-Muslim Dialogue Fellowship, a group of 10 Jewish students and 10 Muslim students that met weekly starting in spring 2024.
In the two years since Oct. 7, headlines have cast colleges as battlegrounds: places where Zionists are excluded from parts of campus, pro-Palestinian encampments are broken up by police, and ideological “safe spaces” shield students from encountering anyone with whom they disagree. It would be easy to assume most students have grown jaded about communicating across divides.
Yet at Syracuse, students like Baltaxe are bucking that narrative, taking part in a campus culture that embraced interfaith dialogue before Oct. 7.
Baltaxe was “one of the bridges between the Muslim students and the Jewish students. It felt really nice to have his company,” said Mian Muhammad Abdul Hamid, who was a member of the Muslim Student Association and Student Assembly of Interfaith Leaders before graduating last spring. “It just goes to show that we can model the world that we want to live in, rather than mirroring what’s going on with the rest of the world.”
That culture, some students say, began with faculty. Rabbi Ethan Bair, Syracuse Hillel’s former rabbi, and Imam Amir Durić, a Muslim chaplain now serving as assistant dean for religious and spiritual life, became fast friends when Bair arrived at Syracuse in 2022. That year, they organized joint events like an Iftar dinner at Hillel, the evening meal that breaks the daily fast for Muslims during the month of Ramadan. By the summer of 2023, the two envisioned hosting dialogue sessions between Muslim and Jewish students, and they received a grant from Interfaith America to make it happen.
But after the attacks of Oct. 7 and Israel’s ensuing military strikes on Gaza, Durić said he questioned whether it was the right time. During such a tense moment, he wondered who would participate, and could constructive dialogue even happen?
They decided to move forward, guided by their motto to “model rather than mirror” — a choice that proved to be the right one, Durić said.
“That friendship was the key,” Durić said of his relationship with Bair. “What helped, regardless of all the challenges, was us still being friends.”
“Imam Durić sent a strong signal, saying that, ‘Well, this is the most important time for dialogue,’” Bair said. “And of course, I agreed.”
The program began as a way to share culture and religion, not to debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Durić said. The students discussed their faith practices — from Shabbat to Muslim daily prayer — and bonded over the challenges of keeping kosher and halal. But as students got to know one another, conversations naturally shifted to politics.
One evening, after a dinner during which the group heard presentations from experts about antisemitism and Islamophobia, the students stayed behind for over an hour to talk about the conflict in Gaza, Durić said.
“We built this family of Jews and Muslims who could talk about anything. We disagreed a lot,” Baltaxe said. “But we all came together.”
‘A little more understanding’
Syracuse was not immune from the kinds of clashes causing turmoil at other universities. But when events threatened to deepen campus divides, connections between Muslim and Jewish students offered a path to navigate the tensions.
In October 2023, the University cited “safety concerns” in cancelling an event titled “Teach In: The Occupation of Palestine”; students held the gathering off-campus instead. The next month brought the first in a series of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, with a “Shut it Down for Palestine” rally held on Nov. 9.
That spring, pro-Palestinian protesters camped out on the quad for two weeks before voluntarily disbanding, while pro-Israel demonstrators rallied in response.
But while tensions flared, students in the fellowship quietly got to work. They helped serve as liaisons between encampment protesters and administration, contributing to a peaceful resolution, Baltaxe said.
Having connections on both sides, he said, made that work possible.
“The core of this is that people don’t have empathy because they don’t know people on the other side,” he said. “It’s much harder to empathize with people who you don’t know.”
Sadie Meyer, student president of Syracuse Hillel, also credited friendships as helping to ease conflict. As part of Hillel’s programming, she had organized a day of volunteer work with the Muslim Student Association in November 2023 and a Passover seder with the Student Assembly of Interfaith Leaders in spring 2024.
“I actually have really good friends who took part in a lot of different protests,” said Meyer, who did not participate in any. “But I respected their opinions. I heard a lot more — because they were my friends — about what they truly were trying to get out of it, and I had a lot of respect for what they did.”
Still, clashes escalated off campus when an individual unaffiliated with the University reportedly made a Nazi salute toward a group of Syracuse students and punched one. The student who was punched declined to press charges. The next day, Syracuse parent and public relations executive Ronn Torossian was arrested after confronting a pro-Palestinian protester and refusing to leave campus, according to University officials.
“There must be an emergency meeting to discuss the safety of Jews at Syracuse University,” Torossian wrote to the Daily Orange, saying it was “reprehensible” that protesters held signs with slogans such as “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea.”
Most recently, two Syracuse University students were charged with hate crimes after authorities say one of them tossed a bag of pork into a Jewish fraternity house during this year’s Rosh Hashanah celebration.
“We are heartbroken and outraged by this hateful crime committed against our fraternity,” the fraternity posted to Instagram. “This was an attack on our home, our values, and our safety, as well as every Jewish student on campus.”
At times, Baltaxe also felt campus becoming hostile: He recalled being simultaneously called a “fake Jew” by pro-Israel students and a “violent Zionist” by pro-Palestinian students. Still, he said Syracuse stood out for the students who remained committed to reaching across divides.
“I think we were way ahead of the curve when it came to addressing this stuff,” he said. “Obviously, there’s always going to be individual incidents, but I never felt truly unsafe.”
Duncan Green, a Jewish junior and another member of the Jewish-Muslim Dialogue Fellowship, said interfaith engagement offered him a more nuanced lens through which to process the campus unrest.
On a campus with a large Jewish population — roughly 2,500 students, or 16 percent of the student body — and about 200 students who identify as Muslim, the fellowship helped him step outside his bubble, he said.
“We didn’t solve any geopolitical age-old problems,” Green said. “But I do think that we came away with a little more understanding.”
During one of their final meetings, Green noticed the fellowship was meeting while pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests played out just down the block.
“I thought it was sort of symbolic that while that was all going down, we were together just having a nice lunch,” he said. “We were paving the way for a different way of going about all this.”
Durić echoed that not all 22,000 students at Syracuse were ready for dialogue. But for those who were, the fellowship offered a model. “It did serve as an alternative,” he said. “An alternative to how we can approach things that are uncomfortable, where we may disagree.”
Beyond Syracuse
The Jewish-Muslim Dialogue Fellowship continued on campus for two semesters. Its third cohort, in spring 2025, expanded beyond Syracuse University, meeting at Interfaith Works of Central New York and including students from Hamilton College, Le Moyne College, and several Palestinian American young adults who were not enrolled in college.
A few months ago, Rabbi Bair — eager to dedicate more of his time to interfaith work — left Syracuse to help develop a “bridge building” curriculum for Hillel International, which he said has already been used on several dozen college campuses. His departure means the dialogue fellowship won’t continue at Syracuse this semester.
Even so, Durić, who was promoted to assistant dean, said he expects the new imam and new rabbi to continue fostering connections between Jewish and Muslim students. This fall, they kicked off the semester with a program called “Salaam Shalom,” exploring Arabic and Hebrew words that share similar roots.
Bair also sees the fellowship as an example to be replicated. His long-term vision is an off-campus residential house shared by Muslim and Jewish students — modeled after Moishe House — where student leaders commit to hosting interfaith programming in exchange for subsidized rent.
“Jewish-Muslim bridge dialogue was not the norm in the wake of October 7 on campus,” he said. “My prayer is that this kind of work will continue more and more on college campuses — so that what we did is not an outlier, but is maybe the beginning of a culture shift.”
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PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
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Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide
(JTA) — The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.
The document is titled “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide” and is also known as Kairos II, after the Palestinian Christian movement Kairos Palestine that produced it. It describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide, states that Israel is a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” and says decades of “occupation,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vote on Monday does not adopt the accusations as church doctrine but says the church should hear the documents as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” and to engage with them in order to better understand the conflict.
Ahead of the debate in York, several Jewish organizations expressed concerns, and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis asked Synod members to reject the amendment. Mirvis called Kairos II “deeply concerning” and that it “risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building” between Christians and Jews.
“It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood,” he said.
Afterwards, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, issued a statement calling the passage of the motion “highly problematic.”
“Kairos Palestine may come from a place of genuine pain, but the falsehoods and distortions of Kairos II, including its erasure of Jewish identity and experience, is a prescription for more division and not the answer to conflict in the Middle East,” he said.
“This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people. As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers — a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she said.
She added, ”I also hear the concerns of the chief rabbi, the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Board of Deputies, and I thank them for their honesty.” She said the church remained opposed to antisemitism and committed to safety for Israelis as well as Palestinians.
The Synod debate followed Mullally’s visit to the West Bank in June, where she met Palestinian Christian communities in Birzeit. During the visit she said, “I will use my role as Archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”
The debate marks the ascendance of Israel-related issues in another major church, after the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV angered Jewish groups soon after being elected last year by endorsing an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
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Mike Pence denounces alleged arson of Israeli flag in his Indiana hometown
(JTA) — Former Vice President Mike Pence has weighed in against antisemitism after officials in his Indiana town say a costly fire may have been caused by arson to an Israeli flag displayed on a local barn.
The alleged arson broke out early Friday morning, damaging a historic home in Zionsville, Indiana, where Pence lives, and causing an estimated $150,000 in damages, according to the Zionsville Police Department.
Zionsville Mayor John Stehr said during a press conference on Friday that officials believed the fire began when an individual set fire to an Israeli flag that had been displayed outside the building alongside an American flag. The town later announced that the FBI had joined the investigation and that officials were examining whether the arson “may have been motivated by bias” but said no determination had been made.
“Absolutely despicable,” Pence tweeted on Sunday. “There can be no tolerance in America for Antisemitism or political acts of violence, and it is heartbreaking to see in our adopted hometown of Zionsville, Indiana. We thank God no one was hurt and urge anyone with information to contact law enforcement.”
Pence has long cast himself as a staunch supporter of Israel, including after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, and has also repeatedly spoken out against antisemitism in the conservative movement and beyond.
Republican Indiana Sen. Jim Banks also condemned the alleged arson in a post on X Saturday. “Antisemitism will not be tolerated. Not in Zionsville. Not in Indiana. Not anywhere,” Banks wrote. “Thank you to the federal, state, and local officials working to bring the perpetrators of this despicable arson attack to justice.”
On Sunday, the Jewish community in central Indiana hosted a rally condemning the alleged arson attack, chanting, “We will stand up,” according to local outlet Fox 59. While Zionsville does not have a large Jewish community of its own, other suburbs of Indianapolis have significant Jewish populations, and Zionsville is also the longtime home of a Reform movement summer camp, the Goldman Union Camp Institute, which is in session now.
“The founding fathers founded a country where we have the ability to resolve differences among each other; we don’t do it by firebombing homes,” rally organizer David Schiller told Fox 59. “It’s inexcusable and unacceptable.”
The Zionsville Police Department did not respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the status of the investigation on Monday.
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