At Interfaith Dinner, Empathy and Understanding Are on the Menu

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This story was condensed from a feature in the Cornell Chronicle.

By David Nutt

Planners of a recent community dinner aiming to bring together Jewish and Muslim students, as well as those of other religions, thought they might get 40 people to attend. Instead, they drew twice that many.

“We had to start setting up extra tables and chairs, because there were so many people who hadn’t registered who heard about the event from their friends and wanted to tag along,” says Alexander Burnett ’25, an interfaith coordinator with the Office of Spirituality and Meaning-Making (OSMM) in the Division of Student and Campus Life, which held the “community care dinner” in Anabel Taylor Hall in early December.

“My biggest takeaway is that more events like this are needed. People, I think, have a desire to talk to people who, like on the news and social media, you get alienated from or are distrustful of, or you’re just unsure of how to communicate with them.”

The event sought to help students escape the escalating rhetoric around the Israel-Hamas war and instead bond over the common experiences of their faith, their passions, and daily life at Cornell.

“There was a lot of thought put into it,” says Laila Salih ’25, a computational biology major in CALS who helped plan and host the dinner. “We really wanted to make sure that it was an event where all felt included, while also trying to balance the intense political climate on campus.”

The solution was to create a space for students to engage with each other without any agenda besides understanding everyone’s shared humanity.

“There’s been healing spaces for Jewish students and healing spaces for Muslim students, but there hasn’t really been a space for both of them to speak together,” says Salih, who grew up in Sudan and Seattle and is a member of the Muslim Educational Cultural Association and the Pan-African Muslim Student Association.

There’s been healing spaces for Jewish students and healing spaces for Muslim students, but there hasn’t really been a space for both of them to speak together.

Laila Salih ’25

“I know from the Muslim side, we wonder like, ‘Oh, what’s going on? What are they thinking?’ And I’m just as sure that from their side as well they were probably wondering the same thing. … I think a lot of students on campus want that space. It’s just been so tense and nerve-racking to ask for it or to seek it.”

The idea for the dinner grew out of brainstorming sessions led by Ivy Breivogel, assistant director of OSMM, who was inspired by a curriculum called “Bridging the Gap” that she discovered at an annual Interfaith America conference. The brainstorming sessions pulled together a diverse group of students, joined by Rabbi Talia Laster from Cornell Hillel and Chaplain Numan Dugmeoglu from Cornell Muslim Life.

“We really want to equip students to have these conversations and to build these relationships in this community,” Breivogel says, “so that the next time something like this happens in the world—and there’s a lot of tension and pressure on campus, and conflict building—our student leaders would be equipped and aware and already have the community to lean into.”

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We really want to equip students to have these conversations and to build these relationships in this community.

Ivy Breivogel, assistant director, Office of Spirituality and Meaning-Making

Even the food was inclusive, with lasagna, salad, vegetarian dishes, and pies and cobblers—all kosher and halal. Students were urged to sit with people they didn’t know, six or seven per table.

Salih and Micah Sher ’25, an environmental sustainability major in CALS, gave brief introductions that were threaded with insights from their own faiths.

Salih explained how, according to Islamic belief, Jews, Muslims, and Christians are all “Ahl al-kitāb” (“people of the book”)—meaning they share a common spiritual heritage.

Sher was inspired by Salih’s anecdote—“it allowed people to come into the space looking for spiritual meaning, not necessarily political divides,” he says—so he referenced a portion from the Mishnah, which is the oral tradition of Jewish law, that was suggested by Rabbi Talia Laster.

Sher and Salih also delivered a very modern edict: they encouraged everyone to put away their phones.

“Something that I was very acutely aware of was how social media contributes to the current polarization that we’re seeing,” Sher says. “I specifically wanted people to be distanced from their online personas when they were in person, talking to each other.”

To help spur meaningful dialogue, the organizers provided the attendees with prompts: “Share about a moment on campus when you were acutely aware of your religious (or other) identity” and “How have the events of the world (and on campus) affected your spiritual life this semester?”

Then representatives from each table gave a summary of what they’d discussed.

At the end of the dinner, the students were given cards on which they each wrote a message of love and kindness.

Then they shuffled the cards, exchanged them, and carried them off into the night.

All photos provided by Student and Campus Life.

Published December 13, 2023

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