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.

Though, to some, it may seem impossible to have a respectful public discourse on issues related to Israel and Palestine, that is exactly what Associate Professors Sven-Erik Rose and Mairaj Syed set out to do.

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

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.

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.

Neither Rose nor Syed had taught this specific subject before, nor had they ever taught alongside another professor, but both were motivated to help bridge divisions and biases that have resurfaced alongside the conflict. 

“We’ve become so pitched in our rhetoric and our viewpoints that we can’t even sit next to someone who thinks differently,” Rose said. 

Instead, the two agreed, we should be having these difficult discussions and asking: “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. 

As expected, there was tension in the air, Syed said. Tension, discomfort, anxiety — these are normal feelings when grappling with difficult topics or having difficult conversations, he said. 

“The world didn’t end,” Rose said. “People didn’t get in fist fights. The speakers had rapport and palpable respect for each other even though they had very adamant differences of opinion on some fundamental issues. It was a very successful event.”

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

The class went beyond the current Gaza conflict to examine the histories of Judaism and Islam, as well as perceptions of these religions.

Syed explained that stereotypical images and narratives about the two religious groups are often created and used by powerful people, groups and institutions. Their framing makes it appear that people who identify with either the Islamic faith or the Jewish faith are all the same. 

But they’re not. Both groups contain diversity. People disagree with one another about their shared faith, cultural norms and levels of piousness. 

“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 like 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.

“And similarly,” Rose added, “the massive Islamophobia after 9/11, that has everything to do with the breakup of the cold war block. 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,” Syed said. “This is more about land and resources and control.”

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 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. 

Even when Syed and Rose were most concerned about a heated classroom environment, their fears were unfounded. Even when class was the day after Election Day and the topic was how each party engaged with — or didn’t engage with — antisemitism and Islamophobia in their campaigns and rhetoric. Even when they took the Israel-Palestine conflict head on alongside the topic of genocide. 

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

But had conflict in the classroom erupted, Rose and Syed don’t think it’s their job to shy away from it. 

“Even if things do get disrupted, it’s important to try again, perhaps in a different way,” Rose said. “I think we need to keep trying to work at it and, in the good faith that if we do it in an open way, that is a mutually respectful way, that there will be a path forward to having conversations."

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 history, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, comparative literature as well as 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."

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