/ Muslim Leadership Initiative

How an American Imam and a Skeptical Israeli Bridged the Muslim-Jewish Chasm

Dozens of young US Muslim leaders have traveled to Israel to learn about Judaism, Zionism and Israel, a vital step toward Muslim-Jewish healing in America and beyond.
Photo: DH/ Times of Israel staff
Photo: DH/ Times of Israel staff
Yossi Klein Halevi is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Jennifer Raskas, he co-directs the Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative. Yossi is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor and co-host with Donniel Hartman and Elana Stein Hain of the Institute’s award-winning podcast, For Heaven’s Sake. He is also the author of Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli

Abdullah Antepli

“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

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