10 | JANUARY 13 • 2022 

opinion
Jews and Muslims Can Work Together
A

long-simmering 
conflict between 
CAIR, the Muslim-
American civil rights organi-
zation, and the 
Anti-Defamation 
League has now 
reached the 
boiling point: A 
Bay Area CAIR 
leader dismissed 
the ADL and 
groups like it 
as “polite Zionists” who could 
not be trusted as allies. ADL’s 
CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, fired 
back, calling her comments 
“textbook vile, antisemitic, 
conspiracy-laden garbage.”
It would be a mistake to see 
this as a mere spat between two 
organizations. It reflects what 
could be an alarming turn-
ing point in Jewish-Muslim 
relations in America, and a 
symptom of how polarization 
can undermine civil society. 
All of us who care about what 
Muslims and Jews could do 
together should take note and 
work to repair the damage that 
is being done.
In late November, Zahra 
Billoo — CAIR’s San Francisco 
director — delivered a blister-
ing address at the conference 
of American Muslims for 
Palestine. First, Billoo drew a 
straight line between support 
for Israel and a wide array of 
American social ills, includ-
ing the killing by police of 
innocent Black and Brown 
Americans. Those charges play 
on tropes that have become 
commonplace in far-left crit-
icism of Israel and the Israel-
America relationship.
But Billoo went much fur-
ther, directing her listeners 

to be cautious about “polite 
Zionists” — naming Jewish 
federations, “Zionist” syna-
gogues and Hillel chapters 
whose civil society world she 
said masks an Islamophobic 
agenda. Similarly, American 
Muslims for Palestine had just 
published a report that neatly 
divides the Jewish community 
between those to avoid — 
including the organizations 
listed above, as well as my 
organization and others — and 
those it was “safe” to work 
with. Both AMP and Billoo 
placed Jewish Voice for Peace 
and IfNotNow as the only 
Jewish organizations on the 
“good” list.

THE DANGERS OF 
‘GROUPING’
For those of us familiar with 
interfaith work, this separation 
of “good” and “bad” groups is 
a familiar and pernicious rhe-
torical and political strategy. It 
happens to American Muslims 
all the time, especially since 

9/11, when others who are 
suspicious of them and their 
motives demand they pass lit-
mus tests. Such tests are under-
standable: It is hard to engage 
with “the other,” so we often try 
to understand others through 
the prism of our own commit-
ments and categories. Interfaith 
engagement, meanwhile, can 
be a strategy for building 
political power. And when the 
goal is to amass power, it is not 
surprising that groups would 
instrumentalize “the other” 
toward that end.
Doing so is very, very dan-
gerous. To divide American 
Jews this way — between the 
vast majority of American Jews 
who identify with Israel and 
are thus characterized as dan-
gerous and duplicitous, and the 
small dissident minority who 
are “kosher” — has two major 
problems. The first is that 
Jews, no less than anyone else, 
should have the right to narrate 
the complexities of our own 
identities. We American Jews 

do overwhelmingly support 
Israel in one way or another, 
and most of us are comfortable 
with identifying as Zionist. Yet 
we exhibit enormous diversity 
concerning what those attach-
ments mean to us and how 
they obligate us.
The overwhelming majority 
of Jews in the world see the 
emergence of a Jewish state as 
something that changes the 
meaning of being Jewish, and 
see ourselves attached to that 
story in one way or another. 
Our interfaith friends need to 
approach this aspect of Jewish 
identity with curiosity, rather 
than dismissing it out of hand 
through a predetermination 
of what Judaism is “supposed 
to be.”
Secondly, this caricature 
of American Jews and our 
commitments strips us of the 
capacity to build relationships 
with our Muslim friends and 
neighbors — relationships that 
could be rooted in compas-
sion and could even lead to us 

Yehuda 
Kurtzer
JTA.org

PURELY COMMENTARY

Protesters at San Francisco International Airport condemn then-President Donald Trump’s executive order 
barring travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, Jan. 29, 2016. 

KENNETH LU/FLICKR COMMONS

