From Hate to Hope
Fifty Children in New York and the Jewish–Muslim Future
In the months since October 7, 2023 — and now since the Iran War of 2025 — the discourse on Jewish–Muslim relations in America has hardened around a familiar geometry. Communities are defined by what they oppose, by whom they grieve for, by which encampment they cheer or condemn. On most days, "Jewish–Muslim relations" means a panel on campus antisemitism, a press release on Islamophobic hate, or a contested vigil where rival processions talk past each other on the same sidewalk.
That is not the only story. It is not even the most important one.
In the spring of 2025, while the louder story was being written, fifty fourth- and fifth-graders in New York City — twenty-five from Elhaam Academy and twenty-five from Kinneret Day School — quietly wrote another. Across six gatherings between January and June, supported by Save the People USA and the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, Muslim and Jewish children visited each other's sacred objects, prayed in two languages, broke an iftar together, and produced more than 120 works of art. They called it Hate to Hope, and I met one of the organizers last week at the One America conference in Chicago as part of the Muslim Faith cube cohort.
I want to tell you what is in it, why it works, and what it could become.
What Happened
The arc was deliberate. On January 14, the children met for the first time at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, walking the *Living Memorial to the Holocaust* together with gallery educators trained for cross-tradition facilitation. On February 25, they reconvened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the Elhaam students guided their Kinneret peers through the Islamic galleries — jaynamāz, tūpī, calligraphic Qur'an folios, the kiswah fragments — turning the Met into a shared classroom rather than a venue.
On March 5, in the middle of Ramaḍān, Kinneret families came to Elhaam Academy for an interfaith ifṭār. Children lit candles together, recited blessings in Hebrew and Arabic, and broke fast over shared plates. On April 3, students were asked to bring "personal treasures" from home — a tasbīḥ from an uncle, a Kiddush cup from a grandmother, an Eid cap, a Magen David worn since birth. They sat in circles and told the stories the objects carried.
By May 20, the children were no longer presenting to one another; they were drawing with one another, producing collaborative gallery panels on shared themes — prayer, memory, modesty, family. The closing ceremony on June 11 included an exhibition, certificates, and three student speeches that I will return to in a moment.
By the numbers: 50 students, 15 chaperones, 30+ hours of programming, 70+ student writings, 120+ artworks, 40+ shared faith artifacts (from dhikr beads and Qur'an covers to shofars and menorahs), and one curriculum that Save the People USA is now positioning as a scalable national model.
Listen to the Children
Three students spoke at the closing ceremony. Their words deserve close attention, because they reveal something the adult discourse has lost.
Eden Jaffe, fifth grade, Kinneret Day School, opened her speech by admitting that before the program she had never met a Muslim, and assumed Jews and Muslims were too different to interact. She closed by reciting Oseh Shalom. Pause on that data point: a Jewish day school student in the Bronx, in 2025, had never met a Muslim. The geography of American religious life is more segregated than we admit, and the conditions for cross-tradition friendship rarely create themselves.
Muḥammad Sudais, fourth grade, Elhaam Academy, framed his remarks around Ahl al-Kitāb — the Qur'anic concept of "People of the Book" — and described how it transformed the way he encountered his Jewish classmates. Hear that again: a fourth-grader, unprompted, deployed Qur'anic theology to articulate a politics of recognition.
Isaac Rose, fifth grade, Kinneret, spoke about Abrahamic descent — Isaac and Ishmael as brothers — and located the friendships forged in that genealogical fact. His closing line: this program is "a step in the right direction," and there should be more like it.
Three children. Three traditions of moral vocabulary — Oseh Shalom, Ahl al-Kitāb, the Abrahamic brit — converging on the same conclusion.
Why It Works
There is now seventy years of social-psychological evidence on why programs like Hate to Hope function. Allport (1954) proposed the contact hypothesis: prejudice diminishes between groups that meet under conditions of equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support. Pettigrew and Tropp's (2006) meta-analysis of 515 studies confirmed the effect across an enormous range of group categories, finding that contact reduces prejudice with even stronger effects when the four Allport conditions are present. The Hate to Hope design — co-led by educators of both traditions, structured around shared museum tasks, mediated by trained gallery facilitators — meets all four.
But contact theory alone undersells what happened in those galleries. Patel (2012, 2018) has argued for two decades that interfaith youth engagement is qualitatively distinct from adult dialogue: when religious literacy and cross-tradition friendship are formed early, before identity calcifies around grievance, the architecture of the adult is permanently different. Halafoff's (2013) work on the multi-faith movement frames such initiatives as instances of "everyday cosmopolitanism" — small-scale, repeated practices that build a civic religious infrastructure invisible to mass media. The Hate to Hope curriculum is precisely this: not a campaign, not a statement, not a press conference. A practice.
There is also a deeper register. The Qur'an's most-cited verse on pluralism, 49:13, declares that humanity was made into "peoples and tribes" so that they may know one another — li-taʿārafū. The Medinan mīthāq — the Constitution of Medina — formalized the Prophet Muḥammad's covenant with the Jewish tribes of Yathrib as a single political community of mutual obligation. The Hebrew *brit* — the covenant at Sinai and its Noahide universal — names the same theological structure: relationship as bond, difference as the precondition for, not the obstacle to, recognition. Hate to Hope is covenantal pluralism in the body of a fourth-grader.
What Muḥammad Sudais was doing when he invoked *Ahl al-Kitāb* was not theological window-dressing. He was performing *taʿāruf*. What Isaac Rose was doing when he placed Isaac and Ishmael in the same sentence was not Sunday-school metaphor. He was reactivating brit. The children's vocabulary outran the adult discourse because the children inherited a richer tradition than our public arguments have lately permitted us to remember.
Beyond Gaza, Beneath It All
The thirteen centuries of Jewish-Muslim civilizational coexistence — in Andalus, in Cairo, in Baghdad, in Aleppo, in Sarajevo, in Bukhara, in Salonika, in Tehran — are the longer story beneath the present moment. That story includes pogroms and dhimmī indignities. It also includes more than a millennium of Geniza-documented neighborliness, of Jewish viziers and Muslim physicians, of shared liturgical poetry and shared maqām modes, of Maimonides writing in Judeo-Arabic and Jewish craftsmen embroidering the kiswah of the Kaʿbah. Gaza is not the whole of Jewish-Muslim history. It is not even the whole of the present.
What the *Hate to Hope* initiative recovers, in miniature, is a memory we are at risk of losing precisely because the post-October 7 discourse has rendered it nearly unspeakable in adult company: that Jewish and Muslim Americans are not natural antagonists. They are co-heirs of the Abrahamic covenant, co-tenants of the Western Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, co-builders of the moral grammar. They are two halves of the same sentence. Children are showing us this because adults have forgotten how to say it.
Positive Possibilities
A single program in two New York schools is not a movement. But it is a template, and templates scale. Five things now seem possible from here.
First, the Hate to Hope curriculum can be packaged. Save the People USA has the rudiments — the six-event arc, the museum partnerships, the artifact-sharing pedagogy, the closing ceremony architecture. With modest grant capitalization and a teacher-training infrastructure, this becomes a national curriculum that any Muslim and Jewish day school pair, in any metro area, can adopt. The country has Islamic schools and Jewish day schools in Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Detroit, Minneapolis, the Bay Area, and South Florida. Twenty replicating partnerships in two academic years is not an unrealistic ceiling.
Second, the museum component is the secret ingredient. The Museum of Jewish Heritage's gallery educators were not improvising — they were running a structured pedagogy. The Met's Islamic galleries did the same in reverse. Replication will require pairing day-school partnerships with anchor cultural institutions: the Skirball in Los Angeles with the Islamic Center of Southern California, the Illinois Holocaust Museum with the American Islamic College, the Holocaust Museum Houston with the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU with one of South Florida's Islamic schools. The institutions exist. The pairings have not yet been brokered.
Third, the Iftar is the load-bearing event. Iftar is liturgically Muslim, but hospitably universal — it asks the Jewish guest to enter a Muslim sacred time as a guest, not a spectator. Few interfaith forms generate equivalent intimacy in three hours. A national initiative could plausibly aim at one hundred Jewish–Muslim school iftārs in Ramaḍān 1448 (March 2027), each followed by a reciprocal Shabbat dinner in the spring.
Fourth, the curriculum needs a textual layer. Children should know not only that they share artifacts but that they share Scriptures. TThere is space for grade-leveled curricular materials drawing on the Qur'an's covenantal vocabulary, the Mishnah's reverence for Noahide law, and the Gaonic and Geniza traditions of inter-tradition correspondence.
Fifth, and most important: the funders who care about Jewish–Muslim relations should fund this. The major Jewish-Muslim philanthropy of the last decade has focused, understandably, on adult convening — fellowships, dialogue cohorts, scholar networks. These are essential, and I have benefited from many of them. But the marginal philanthropic dollar in 2026 is more productively spent on fourth-graders than on fortieth-floor convenings. Fourth-graders have forty more years of marriage, parenting, voting, hiring, and storytelling ahead of them than the adult dialogue cohort does. If we want a different American Jewish-Muslim future in 2065, we should be funding fifty children in 2026, and fifty thousand in 2030.
A Closing Image
In the Hate to Hope publication (download below), there is a photograph of two girls — one in a hijāb, one in braids — leaning over the same gallery panel, drawing together. Neither is performing for a camera. Neither is making a statement. They are coloring.
The child in the hijāb is doing what the Qur'an asks of her: taʿāruf. The child in braids is doing what the Sh'ma asks of her: hearing. Neither knows she is enacting a thirteen-century theology. Both are.
The work of the next decade is to make sure that what those two girls did at one folding table at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in May 2025 becomes ordinary — not extraordinary — in American Jewish and Muslim childhood. Hate to Hope has shown that it is possible. The rest is on us.
Save the People USA is at stpusa.org. The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is at mjhnyc.org. If you are interested in learning more about this project, please email Imam Muhammad Shahidullah at imam@dawahusa.org.
