To have a conversation, said Naftali Brawer, Jewish chaplain and executive director of Tufts Hillel, you must be face to face with someone, and not just physically. 

“You have to look at the other person … and not see an opponent, but a person in all their complexity,” he said. The other important piece, he continued, is that “you are doing as much listening as you are talking—otherwise you’re preaching.”

Conversation, as Brawer and others told a Tufts audience this week, is key to fighting antisemitism and its harms. 

Brawer spoke as part of an August 30 workshop for all incoming students on understanding and combating antisemitism, built into their orientation to Tufts. It was the first of a series of student-focused anti-bias programs to be presented this year by the office of the vice provost for institutional inclusive excellence. The series is designed to equip students with the knowledge and tools to confront and mitigate bias and prejudice.

Each workshop in the Tufts Inclusive Education Series will be followed by a dialogue session, where students can continue the discussion with their peers. Learning to dialogue, sometimes with those on another side of an issue, is the centerpiece of the programming, said Monroe France, vice provost for institutional inclusive excellence. 

“Engaging across difference doesn’t mean we agree,” France said. “It doesn’t mean that we always hold the same perspective or get to the point where we have the same perspective, but it does mean that we see each other’s humanity bound with our own sense of who we are engaging across difference.”

The antisemitism workshop was facilitated by Rabbi Or Rose, the founding director of the Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership of Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and Graie Hagans, chief vision officer at Bend the Arc, a national Jewish organization focused on social change in the United States. 

In sharing their personal stories of navigating discrimination, Rose and Hagans emphasized the need for conversation and avoiding assumptions.

Hagans defined antisemitism as hostility, prejudice, hatred, or violence against Jews and Jewish people that often takes the form of religious prejudice, cultural stereotyping, political scapegoating, and racist pseudoscience. 

“Antisemitism views Jews as a nefarious and corrupting presence within society,” Hagans said.

Like all other forms of oppression, Hagans said, antisemitism tells a story that dehumanizes a group. In particular, it depicts Jews as “responsible for other people’s suffering. It primarily acts as a conspiracy theory.”

Rose said the first and last defense against antisemitism is to cultivate relationships with actual people. “Learning about is not the same as learning with and from,” Rose said. “You are a part of an excellent educational community. Please take full advantage of the opportunity to be in community with a diverse range of teachers, mentors, and peers.” 

Rose asked that people not wait for the next crisis to happen before starting the “sacred work of developing relationships.”

“By that point, people tend to be so inflamed, so angry, feeling as if they’re unheard and unseen, that it’s very hard to sit at the table and to have an honest, thoughtful, and compassionate conversation,” Rose said.

At the event, France said that students submitted more than 100 questions for the facilitators, some of which would be addressed at the related dialogue session on September 4. One of the questions asked how to support Jewish students while acknowledging the pain of Palestinians in this time.

“Those are not mutually exclusive activities,” Hagans said. Being able to do both, they said, comes from “not accepting the idea that any group of people is a monolith, not assuming or presuming that you know what someone believes because of a part of their identity.”

Rose asked the students to challenge antisemitic behaviors when they see them. “Don’t ignore them, don’t minimize them,” Rose said. “If these things are left unattended, they fester, they metastasize, they grow in ways that are destructive” to the whole community. 

He recalled an experience many years ago as basketball player at Yeshiva University, when his team played a game at a Catholic college. “Some of the fans started to throw pennies onto the basketball court, and it was clearly an expression of one of these antisemitic tropes about Jews and money,” he said.

The fear and anger he felt on the court are as clear to him today as the gratitude he felt afterward, when leaders of the other team and school apologized for what had happened and asked how they could address it and make things better.  

France said the story is a reminder that “there’ll be times we won’t know what to say, but one of the most important things we can do is to show care for each other.”

The next session of the Tufts Inclusive Education Series, “Strategies and Tools for Addressing Anti-Palestinian and Anti-Muslim Bias,” will be offered on September 16. Sessions on racial inequality and political polarization will follow in October.