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‘I felt I couldn’t talk about the war’: Jewish and Muslim teens make space for tough conversations
For Jewish student Maxanne Wallace-Segall and Muslim student Nabila Rahman, the months after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel were filled with a tense quiet.
Then freshmen at Stuyvesant High School, a public school on Manhattan’s southern tip, the two girls had only been friends for a few weeks. As their social media feeds became inundated with polarizing content from across the spectrum, neither of them knew how to bring up what had happened.
“I felt like I couldn’t talk about the war with one of my closest friends in the world, just because I was terrified about what I would say and what she would say,” Wallace-Segall said.
That tension ended when Wallace-Segall interviewed Rahman for an article in their high school paper about the pain many students were experiencing in the first months of the Israel Hamas War. Broaching the subject for the first time, they realized that — despite coming from different perspectives — both were primarily concerned that their friends were OK.
“It wasn’t a question of ‘do you support Israel or Palestine?’. It was a question of [if you were] OK; if your family was OK. That was what mattered at the moment; her opinion didn’t matter, even if it differed from mine,” Rahman told Wallace-Segall for the article.
Now rising high school seniors, the duo runs The Together Project, a citywide organization dedicated to dialogue between Muslim and Jewish teens — Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. This summer, that dialogue has deepened and the reach has widened with the launch of a twice-weekly program called the Ohel/Ahl Fellowship, named after Hebrew and Arabic words for friendship. Since June, Jewish and Muslim teens from public, private, religious, and secular schools in the New York area have come together around sacred texts, swapped stories, consulted experts and explored each other’s neighborhoods and perspectives.
Emboldened by their first conversation, Wallace-Segall and Rahman began speaking about the conflict with Muslim and Israeli friends. But, when starting the organization, those friends opted not to participate. The Muslim friend’s family refused to let them talk to people who supported Israel, while the Israeli friend wasn’t allowed to talk to anti-Zionists. The organization continues to face this challenge, with some criticizing its inclusive nature. On one Instagram reel posted by the project, a user commended the concept, but pointed out the number of Palestinian deaths and disagreed with participants working alongside Zionists.
“i was like yessss this is what we need!!” they wrote at first. “only for u to include zionists 💀absolutely not. none of you are truly anti-zionists if you agree to work closely with zionists, especially at this time.”
But that misses the point, Wallace-Segall said. “To exclude the Zionist narrative would be to exclude the issue itself.” That widespread opposition toward dialogue highlights “the necessity and urgency of starting it even more,” she added.
To expand citywide, the girls drew upon their previous connections — someone with whom Wallace-Segall often debated about the subject, another who had written poetry about her religious identity. Currently, the organization has branches at four public high schools in three of the city’s five boroughs.
The Together Project also established a partnership with the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a social activism organization that offers meeting space for several grassroots organizations and hosts all branches of the Together Project, and other interested students, for a citywide conference three times a year in winter, spring and summer.
At those seasonal meetings, students go over historical timelines, read books, articles, sacred texts, and poetry and push themselves to grapple with hard topics. The conversation subjects range from comparisons of the Torah and Quran to what Muslim and Jewish teachings say about queerness, and how being a member of the LGBTQ community informs support for Israel, given its comparatively tolerant culture, and support for Palestinians in Gaza, given the nature of their collective struggle.
Wallace-Segall’s favorite conversations are those that question “why do you believe what you believe?”
“It really gets everyone to think about the specific moments with their families and their friends and reading the news in which different aspects of their opinions have been shaped,” she said.
Last November, members of the group attended a United Nations conference on establishing a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction. As she listened, Wallace-Segall was inspired by those “dedicating their lives to committing to peace.” At the end, four of The Together Project members were given the opportunity to speak about their organization and share their thoughts on the solutions that had been presented.
“So often in the UN, when we see discussions of rebuilding communities … it’s decades or years after the conflict happened,” Wallace-Segall said in her speech. “I think the time to start rebuilding communities is now.”
At Ramaz Upper School, a Jewish day school in Manhattan, now rising senior Gabriel Flatto-Katz found himself in a Jewish bubble. Amidst the tensions of the New York City mayoral election, he realized that he “didn’t have any Muslim person that I could call a friend,” and sought to start an interfaith student organization.
Despite reaching out to many Muslim organizations, however, he wasn’t able to find any interested partners. Then he discovered the Together Project and helped Wallace-Segall and Rahman develop this summer’s Ohel/Ahl Fellowship.
The fellowship has enabled students who were already involved, along with many new ones like Flatto-Katz, to engage more deeply with meetings twice a week. So far, the fellows have hosted speakers from the Rose Castle Foundation, which helps equip leaders to navigate conflict; explored the Islamic wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and analyzed poetry by Israeli and Palestinian writers.
Rather than jump right into sensitive political discussions, students explored each other’s religious identities and established trust in initial meetings, so they have felt more comfortable sharing sensitive opinions in the latter half of the fellowship.
According to Gershon Rozenberg, a rising senior at SAR High School, a co-ed modern Orthodox yeshiva in Manhattan, that turning point arrived during a recent discussion the students had about war. Participants shared conflicts that felt most personal to them and their families and how this might impact their thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some mentioned the Vietnam War, the Bangladesh Civil War and the Holocaust.
Rozenberg called it “the most vulnerable conversation we’ve had among fellows.”
For Rahman, this conversation helped her realize just how personal the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for Jews. “For people like Gabi who literally have family in Israel, there was so much more at stake,” said Rahman, who doesn’t know anyone who is Palestinian.
Along with speakers, the fellowship has a board of mentors from Jewish and Muslim organizations, including Rose Castle, the Tannenbaum Foundation, Jewish Theological Seminary, and a Palestinian representative from Debate for Peace.
“We’re still kids running a kids’ program,” Flatto-Katz said. Mentors provide necessary guidance on how to run an interfaith organization, advise on ground rules during sessions and recommend texts to study. To build a consistent base of students at each meeting, mentors also have helped recruit teenagers they had worked with previously.
Flatto-Katz recruited Rozenberg after reading Rozenberg’s piece in SAR’s campus newspaper arguing that the school “should do a better job of understanding the Palestinian perspective.”
To complement the students from private Jewish day schools, leaders have been reaching out to private Muslim schools. But they’ve encountered difficulty.
“A lot of the kids have never met a Jewish person before, so it’s hard for them to make that first step,” Rahman said.
Many of the students from private Jewish schools say they have been moved by the contributions of Muslim participants, including rituals like chanting from the Qur’an or talking about their religion. “People have enjoyed the ability to hear something so different than what they’re used to,” Flatto-Katz said.
Within Jewish youth spaces, Flatto-Katz said students strongly support Zionism, but also crave hearing new perspectives. It’s not always easy for Flatto-Katz to “have really hard conversations,” as he has family in the region, but he senses and shares a “hunger for understanding.” Agreement or consensus is not required, he said.
“This is my friend Nabila who doesn’t agree with me on 99% of things, and I think it’s really cool that we get frozen yogurt together,” Flatto-Katz said.
To Rahman, the diversity of high school environments and the formative teenage years are what makes the work they are doing now so significant.
“Making sure younger people are involved in this kind of things is so important,” she said, “because they are the ones who are going to be shaping the future.”
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so.
A group of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students are suing a California school district, alleging that a high school program’s field trip to a mosque — and no other houses of worship — violated the First Amendment.
The suit, brought forth by Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, focuses on two trips that were part of a social justice program at Palo Alto High School.
According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California on August 7: “The district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”
Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools nor the Palo Alto Unified School District immediately responded to requests for comment.
The trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses “through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.” Palo Alto High started the program in 2014.
Field trips around the Bay Area are a hallmark of the program, including travels to Angel Island, where many Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Students also have heard from a variety of speakers, including a Holocaust survivor and a Cambodian refugee.
The field trips to the mosque happened in 2022 and 2025. The plaintiffs include three Jewish Palo Alto High students, at least one of whom took part in the Social Justice Pathway.
The parent plaintiffs allege that the school had not fully informed them that their children were going to participate in “religiously inflected activity.”
According to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were “taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,” the suit says.
“[The plaintiffs] belong to religious traditions that practice social justice,” the suit says. “The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”
The plaintiffs allege that the visit violated the First Amendment, since the public school was promoting a specific religion, and the 14th amendment, for elevating one religion over others.
A student at Palo Alto High who is part of the Social Justice Pathway disagreed, describing it as part of a broader religion unit.
“There was never a point on this trip where I felt in any way that the mosque or the school was trying to even suggest conversion,” he wrote in an Instagram comment on a local news post about the lawsuit. “The goal was obvious to us: Learn about an underrepresented religion present in our community.”
But plaintiffs also objected to the history of one of the speakers. Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has faced allegations of antisemitism.
In 2019, Billoo was removed from the board of the Women’s March for past remarks she had made. She faced criticism for a 2021 Facebook post, where she warned against “polite zionists” like Hilllel and the Jewish federations, saying “they are not your friends.” A tweet of hers from October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, also has faced scrutiny: “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization,” she wrote.
In an emailed statement to the Forward, Billoo wrote, “Public schools have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but neutrality does not mean shielding students from learning about religion or religious communities.”
“Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam,” she wrote. “We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”
But plaintiffs said allowing Billoo to speak with the students demonstrated negligence on the part of the school.
“Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”
The school also allowed photos of the high schoolers to be taken at the event without parents’ permission, the suit says.
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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found
(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.
Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.
Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.
Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.
For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.
Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”
Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.
On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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