Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Will Trump Bring Jews and Muslims Together To Fight Back Against Bigotry?

Jews and Muslims have sometimes encountered difficulty working together due to splits over issues like Israel-Palestine. But after the election of Donald Trump, the American Jewish Committee and the Islamic Society of North America have announced a new advisory council to fight both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

“We have to show the administration that as American Muslims and Jews — people of the faiths of Abraham — we are uniting to help the administration navigate in the proper constitutional manner, to uphold freedom of religion and constitutional rights for all American citizens,” Eftakhar Alam, ISNA’s head for interfaith and community alliances, told the Religious News Service.

Planned since before the election, the body’s formation has taken on new urgency in the wake of last week’s results and this week’s appointment to a senior White House position of Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News who has faced charges of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Stanley Bergman, the chief executive officer of the medical products company Henry Schein, and Farooq Kathwari, the president of the furniture manufacturer Ethan Allen, will head up the council. Big name participants on the Jewish side include the Holocaust researcher Deborah Lipstadt, Los Angeles Rabbi David Wolpe and outgoing Congressman Steve Israel. On the Muslim side, there will be D.C. imam Masjid Muhammad, Suhail Khan of Microsoft and Daisy Khan of the Women’s Islamic Initiative.

AJC leaders hailed the development, in comments to RNS.

“The Council’s formation shows that American Muslim and Jewish leadership are now working together, focused on domestic developments,” Robert Silverman, the group’s director of Muslim-Jewish relations, told the publication. “This is a first and is good news for the entire country.”

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.