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Synagogues are joining the ‘effective altruism’ movement. Will the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal stop them?
(JTA) — A few years ago, Adam Azari was frustrated over how little he could do to alleviate suffering in the world with his modest income as a writer and caretaker for people with disabilities.
He kept thinking about a set of statistics and ideas he had encountered during his graduate studies in philosophy. For example, he remembered reading that for the price of training a guide dog for the blind in the United States, one could prevent hundreds of cases of blindness in the developing world.
This hyper-rational way of thinking about doing good was called effective altruism, and it was growing into a movement, known as E.A. for short. Some proponents were even opting to pursue lucrative careers in finance and tech that they otherwise might not have chosen so they would have more money to give away.
Azari, meanwhile, had become a believer who was stuck on the sidelines. Then, one day, he had what he calls a “personal eureka moment.” Azari would return to his roots as the son of a Reform rabbi in Tel Aviv and spread the word of E.A. across the Jewish denomination and among its millions of followers.
“It suddenly hit me that the Reform movement has this crazy untapped potential to save thousands and thousands of lives by simply informing Jews about effective giving,” he recalled.
He badgered his father, Rabbi Meir Azari, and, for a moment, thought of becoming a rabbi himself. But he abandoned the idea and focused on pitching E.A. to the Reform movement’s international arm, the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Azari found an ally in WUPJ’s president, Rabbi Sergio Bergman, and the organization soon decided to sponsor his efforts, paying him a salary for his work.
Over the past year, Azari’s Jewish Effective Giving Initiative has presented to about 100 rabbis and secured pledges from 37 Reform congregations to donate at least $3,000 to charities rated as the most impactful by E.A. advocates and which aid poor people in the developing world. Per E.A. calculations, it costs $3,000 to $5,000 to save a single life.
“Progressive Judaism inspires us to carry out tikkun olam, our concrete action to make the world better and repair its injustices,” Bergman said. “With this call we not only do what the heart dictates in values, but also do it effectively to be efficient and responsible for saving a life.”
This charitable philosophy appears to be gaining traction in the Jewish world just as one of the figures most associated with it, who happens to be Jewish, has become engulfed in scandal.
Sam Bankman-Fried built a cryptocurrency empire worth billions, amassing a fortune he pledged to give away to causes such as artificial intelligence, combatting biohazards and climate change, all selected on criteria developed by the proponents of effective altruism.
A few weeks ago, Bankman-Fried’s fortune evaporated amid suspicions of financial misconduct and revelations of improper oversight at his company, FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that was worth as much as $32 billion before a run of withdrawals ultimately left it illiquid. The situation has drawn comparisons to the implosion of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and authorities investigating the situation have said Bankman-Fried could face criminal penalties over his role.
In the wake of FTX’s collapse, Bankman-Fried has suggested that his embrace of E.A. was insincere, a tactic to bolster his reputation.
But Azari and the organizer of another initiative, a growing reading and discussion group called Effective Altruism for Jews, are undaunted and don’t believe the scandal should taint the underlying principles of the movement.
“Whether you call it E.A. or just directly donating to global health and development, it doesn’t matter,” Azari said. “The basic idea is to support these wonderful charities, and I don’t think the FTX scandal changes any of that. Malaria nets, vitamin A supplements and vaccine distribution are still super cost-effective, evidence-based ways of helping others.”
Azari added that he has had several meetings with rabbis since the news about Bankman-Fried broke and that no one has asked him about it.
“I don’t think people are making the connection,” he said. “And to me, there is no connection between us and FTX.”
When talking to rabbis about why E.A. would make a good fit with their congregation’s charitable mission, Azari cites the Jewish value of tikkun olam, a mandate to “repair the world” often used to implore people to care for others. He explains that donating to charities with a proven track record is a concrete way to fulfill a Jewish responsibility.
That kind of thinking proved attractive to Steven Pinker, the prominent Harvard psychologist, who has endorsed Azari’s initiative. In a recorded discussion with Azari and others last year, Pinker recalled his Reform upbringing, which included Hebrew school, summer camp and synagogue services.
“The thing I remember most is how much of my so-called religious education was like a university course in moral philosophy,” Pinker said. “We chewed over moral dilemmas.”
As an adult, Pinker returned to Jewish teachings on charity and, in particular, those of the medieval philosopher Maimonides, examining these ideas through the lens of E.A. He began to wonder about the implications of Maimonides’ focus on evaluating charity based on the motives of the donor. That focus, he concluded, doesn’t always lead to the best outcomes for the beneficiary.
“What ultimately ought to count in tzedakah, in charity, is, are you making people better off?” he said.
Also on the panel with Azari and Pinker was the man credited with authoring the foundational texts upon which E.A. is built. Peter Singer, who is also Jewish and whose grandfather died in the Holocaust, teaches bioethics at Princeton. Starting in the 1970s, Singer wrote a series of books in which he argues for a utilitarian approach to ethics, namely, that we should forgo luxuries and spend our money to save lives. The extremes to which he has taken his thinking include suggesting that parents of newborn babies with severe disabilities be permitted to kill them.
From Bankman-Fried to Singer, the list of Jews who have either promoted E.A. or lead its institutions is long. With their estimated fortune of $11.3 billion, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna have eclipsed Bankman-Fried as the wealthiest Jews in the field. There’s also popular philosopher Sam Harris and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, who have each dedicated episodes of their podcast to the topic.
The website LessWrong, which defines itself as “a community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality,” is seen as an important early influence; it was founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial intelligence researcher who grew up in a Modern Orthodox household but does not identify religiously as a Jew anymore. Two other Jews, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, left the hedge fund world to establish GiveWell, a group whose research is considered the premier authority on which charities are deserving of E.A. donations.
The prevalence of Jews in the movement caught the attention of E.A. enthusiast Ben Schifman, an environmental lawyer for the federal government in Washington, D.C. About two years ago, Schifman proposed creating a group for like-minded individuals in hope of helping grow the movement. In an online post, he laid out the history of Jewish involvement and wrote a brief introduction to the topic of Judaism and charity.
Today, Schifmam runs a group called Effective Altruism for Jews, whose main program is an eight-week fellowship involving a reading and discussion group with designated facilitators. Schifman said about 70 people spread across 10 cohorts are currently participating. There’s also a Shabbat dinner program to bring people together for informal meetings with funding available for hosts.
Participants discuss how ideas that are popular in E.A. might relate to Jewish traditions and concepts, and also brainstorm ways to popularize the movement in the wider Jewish community, according to Schifman.
“There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit with regards to the Jewish community and sharing some of the ideas of Effective Altruism, like through giving circles at synagogues or, during the holidays, offering charities that are effective,” Schifman said in an interview that took place before the Bankman-Fried scandal broke.
Asked to discuss the mood in the community following the collapse of Bankman-Fried’s company and an affiliated charity, FTX Future Fund, Schifman provided a brief statement expressing continued confidence in his project.
He said, “While we’re shocked by the news and our hearts go out to all those affected, as an organization EA for Jews isn’t funded by FTX Future Fund or otherwise connected to FTX. We don’t expect our work will be impacted.”
Even if Schifman and Azari are right that their movement is robust enough to withstand the downfall of a leading evangelist, a debate remains about what impact E.A. can or should have on philanthropy itself.
Andres Spokoiny, president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, wrote about the question with skepticism in an article published more than two years ago. He argued against “uncritically importing the values and assumptions” of effective altruists, whose emphasis on the “cold light of reason” struck him as detached from human nature.
In a recent interview, Spokoiny echoed similar concerns, noting that applying pure rationality to all charitable giving would mean the end of cherished programs such as PJ Library, which supplies children’s books for free to Jewish families, that may not directly save lives but do contribute to a community’s culture and sense of identity.
He also worries that too strong a focus on evidence of impact would steer money away from new ideas.
“Risky, creative ideas don’t tend to emerge from rational needs assessments,” he said. “It requires a transformative vision that goes beyond that.”
But Spokoiny also sounded more open to E.A. and said that as long as it does not try to replace traditional modes of philanthropy, it could be a useful tool of analysis for donors.
“If donors want to apply some of E.A. principles to their work, I’d say that is a good idea,” he said. “I am still waiting to see if this will be a fad or buzzword or something that will be incorporated into the practice of philanthropy.”
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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.
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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.
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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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