Building Bridges Across Faiths

The daughter of a Palestinian Muslim father and a white Methodist mother from the Midwest, Aziza Hasan was raised in Amman, Jordan, and then Halstead, Kan.

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“I always felt like I was straddling different worlds,” Ms. Hasan says. Some people asked questions out of curiosity, she says, but fear and misperceptions motivated others. “I always felt like I was playing defense and countering this narrative that somehow Christians and Muslims couldn’t possibly get along.”

After studying the civil-rights movement in graduate school, Ms. Hasan was asked in 2006 to be the Muslim co-leader and executive director of NewGround, a new effort to encourage dialogue between Jews and Muslims in Los Angeles. The heart of the nonprofit’s work is an intense fellowship program. For eight months, an equal number of young professionals from each faith meet every two weeks for three-and-a-half-hour sessions and also join in two weekend retreats. They learn about one another’s religions and talk about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, all leading to multiple sessions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including one that lasts more than two days.

“It takes a while to build up the conversations,” Ms. Hasan says. “We’re intentionally making people as comfortable as we can so we can push them as far into discomfort as possible, because that’s where we grow and where we can build resilient relationships that can weather the storm.”