In this new era of the Trump administration, many American Jews have pledged not to abandon American Muslims who have been threatened with a Muslim Registry and harassed with an uptick of xenophobic hate crimes.
Jonathan Greenblatt, Chief Executive of the Anti-Defamation League, recently declared this: “Jews know what it means to be identified and tagged, to be registered and pulled aside. It evokes very deep emotions in the Jewish community.” At a conference last month, he received a standing ovation when he firmly stated that if Muslims were ever forced to register “that is the day that this proud Jew will register as a Muslim.”
Since then, the Anti-Defamation League is among many other institutions and advocacy groups which has increased its work against anti-Muslim bigotry.
The Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council is a new initiative whose co-chairmen are both Fortune 500 chief executives: Farooq Kathwari, of the furniture company Ethan Allen, who is Muslim, and Stanley Bergman, of the medical products distributor Henry Schein, who is Jewish. The council includes both Democrats and Republicans, and was created by leaders of the Islamic Society of North America and American Jewish Committee with a mandate to influence public policy, oppose a Muslim Registry, support immigrants and refugees, and push for accommodating religious practices in the workplace.
The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom is the first national network of Muslim and Jewish women. The organization recently hosted an interfaith Shabbat dinner which Vaseem Firdaus, a manufacturing manager at Exxon Mobil who is Muslim, attended. The discussion of Nazi Germany in the ‘30s was brought up and Ms. Firdaus asked one of the Jewish women, who had said her relatives fled Nazi Germany, when they knew it was time to leave. The woman responded, “The ones that didn’t leave were the ones who went to Auschwitz.” Another Jewish woman, Mahela Morrow-Jones, assured her new Muslim friend, “If Muslims have to register, we’re all going to register.”
