It was still early days of the recent conflict between Israel and Gaza when, seeing strong emotions and division erupting on their campus, two scholars at UC Davis decided to come together and take action. To some, it may seem impossible to have a respectful public discourse on issues related to Israel and Palestine, but that is exactly what Associate Professors Sven-Erik Rose and Mairaj Syed set out to do.

Rose is the director of the Jewish Studies program in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. Syed is the director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies program. Given their backgrounds and fields of study, they thought that, together, they could help provide important context and facts that might otherwise be missed.

We both agreed that it’s not good when students are getting the majority of their information from advocacy groups. We thought there should be some sort of academic component that isn’t really advocating or lobbying for one viewpoint over another.” — Rose

Since collaborating, their respective programs have co-hosted multiple events, bringing together different experts on the conflict and related topics. In fall 2024, they co-taught a course on antisemitism and Islamophobia. The two professors agree that difficult conversations are important to have in order to help answer the question of “where can we go from here?”

Modeling dialogue about hidden diversity

The first event that came out of this collaboration, "A Conversation about Antisemitism and Islamophobia," featured scholars Sahar Aziz, Rutgers Law School, and Ethan Katz, UC Berkeley. The February 2024 event was a packed house with representation from both Jewish and Muslim communities. 

Rose and Syed decided they could continue this conversation and model this type of dialogue in a humanities class. By the 2024 fall quarter, their course, “Humanities Forum: Antisemitism and Islamophobia,” was in full swing.

“That’s something we wanted to stress throughout and hope that students could take away as they think about other groups,” Rose said. “You can’t characterize Muslims or Islam as one thing, and same thing with Jews. It’s a much smaller demographic but equally diverse — there's not one political view.”

Critical thinking to find humanity

Both professors pointed to how prejudices such as antisemitism and Islamophobia “other” entire groups of people, setting the stage for an “us vs. them” mentality by relying on convenient, simplified stories and stereotypes, even if those stories don’t align with facts or logic.

“The Jew in modern European history is both projected as the ultra-socialist communist and also the ultra-capitalist — two completely opposing descriptions yet ‘Jewishness’ and the ‘Jew’ is imagined as both simultaneously, often by the same people,” Syed said. “This is a projection. This has nothing rooted in reality.”

Instead, he said, it has everything to do with how the strongest social groups in Europe during that period dealt with its anxieties about the radical social transformations that were happening.

"Similarly, the massive Islamophobia after 9/11 — that has everything to do with the breakup of the cold war block," Rose said. "We needed another enemy to fill the void: it became the Islamic threat.”

The current conflict between Palestine and Israel is often framed, largely, as a matter of religious difference, as if something intrinsic in each religion prevents both sides from living harmoniously together. But, the scholars agreed, this isn’t true.

This is not a conflict caused by differing theological and religious convictions. This is more about land and resources and control.” — Syed

The faculty encouraged the students to think for themselves and to reflect on and challenge what they thought was true.

 “We’ve been telling the students 'notice patterns,'” Syed said. “These are empty biases and prejudices that are so superficial. Any time you’re seeing them in the media or in the description of groups, you ought to be very skeptical of their truth, regardless of which group is being given this label.”

Hope for the future

In their course, Rose and Syed split their lecture time, each taking about half the class to focus on their related curriculum, showing both similarities and differences in how each religious group has been portrayed and perceived throughout history. They drew from scholarly research as well as primary source documents, legal definitions, international laws and cultural commentary. 

“Nobody has interrupted our classes, nobody has misbehaved, nobody has tried to hijack the class,” Syed said. “It’s been a very collegial experience.”

Beyond the classroom, Syed and Rose's respective programs are still holding events and encouraging discourse among experts and students. 

They’ve also partnered with other departments and programs, including those in history, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, and comparative literature. They've also teamed up with the Muslim Faculty Staff Association and the California History Social-Science Project at UC Davis.

They hope that, by bringing thought leaders together and have these tough discussions, they can help work towards solutions for peace.

“There's nothing essential about the identities of these communities that means it’s always going to be conflictual,” Syed said. “If the past was different from what we see right now, then the future can also be different from what we see right now."

Read the full article  UC Davis Scholars Tackle Antisemitism and Islamophobia