In early January at the height of the fighting in Gaza, bFM’s Joe Nunweek rang up AnjumRahman and myself to pick up the conversation from where we left off from our 2006 Aotearoa Ethnic Network Journal articles on Jewish and Muslim perspectives on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The bottom line: While Anjum and I have different perspectives on history and the core issues, we continue to be good friends and seek to support those who work for peace.
Thanks to Joe and bFM for running excellent, balanced, and yet probing interviews.
The Guardian’s Islamophonic and Sounds Jewish podcast teams have joined forces in an inspiring podcast. If you don’t listen to any other podcast audio this year, listen to this, as it’s a model for how we can work together to explore the crunchy issues:
The first half of the podcast focusses on how the conflict in Gaza has affected Jewish-Muslim relations in the UK, and moves on to a feature on to the Mu-Jew Crew – a Muslim-Jewish theatre team, and finally to a Muslim-Jewish comedy duo.
The damage done by the Gaza conflict to Jewish-Muslim relations runs deep, but this podcast shows that we can keep the conversation going, and look for new ways of working together to build a better future.