“Since 2013, dozens of young US Muslim leaders have traveled to Israel to learn about Judaism, Zionism and Israel. This is the full story of their high-risk, taboo-shattering initiative — a vital step, they hope, toward Muslim-Jewish healing in America and beyond.”
“The Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative is a case of an irresistible force meeting a temporarily inanimate object. The irresistible force is Imam Antepli, who was born in Turkey, was raised an unremarkable anti-Semite, was self-motivated to seek out and promote a better Islam, and became only the second full-time Muslim chaplain on a US university campus. The temporarily inanimate object, now somewhat reanimated by Antepli’s zeal and zest, is Yossi Klein Halevi, a Brooklyn-born former teenage Jewish Defense League activist turned Israeli journalist who, when their paths first crossed post-9/11 and in the midst of the Second Intifada in 2003, was the deeply disillusioned author of a book on the possibilities of interfaith relationships between Judaism, Christianity and Islam.”
Read the full article in the Times of Israel