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Experts and leaders in defending religious liberty gathered at the University of Notre Dame July 9-11 for the 2024 Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit. The event is put on by the Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative and focuses on discussions surrounding the free exercise of religion across the United States and beyond. The theme for this year’s summit was Depolarizing Religious Liberty.
G. Marcus Cole, dean of the University of Notre Dame Law School, encouraged attendees to “take religious liberty out of politics,” emphasizing the importance of pushing for religious liberty for citizens across the globe, particularly in spaces where political arguments have caused strife and fractured relationships within communities.
The three-day event saw eight panels covering the intersections of religious liberty and impacted groups of people, including Muslims, the Black church, women and Ukrainians.
One of the first panels, held Wednesday morning, invited discussion on establishing common ground between Jewish and Muslim communities after the attack on southern Israel by the Islamist militant group Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.
As many of the panelists remarked, the attack and ongoing conflict have greatly challenged relationships between people with different religious and political backgrounds.
“I was here in the fall at Princeton. I observed the deterioration of relations between Muslim and Jewish students due to these global political tensions,” said Rabbi Alex Goldberg, dean of Religious Life and Belief at the University of Surrey in England.
Rabbi Goldberg said the violence began spreading rapidly, making it to his English town mere days later when a Jewish single mom was attacked in her home.
“Religious liberty has never before been threatened in my country in the way it has now,” Rabbi Goldberg said.
Soraya Deen, a Muslim feminist activist and founder of the organization Muslim Women Speakers, reflected on the current negative attitude toward Jewish people in the United States, and how much work it will take to fix it.
“We are delegitimizing and dehumanizing the Jewish people and our relationships today have become the first victim of this war in Gaza,” she said.
But, she said, it hasn’t always been this way.
Deen said that following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, her young son was bullied. Unsure of how to fix the situation, Deen reached out to her Jewish friends.
“It was the Jewish community who resuscitated us and who built us and who told us how to respond,” she said.
In moving toward unity among religious communities, Rabbi Goldberg said resolutions cannot lie solely on the shoulders of religious leaders and interfaith activists. Instead, it must become the responsibility of all people to encourage ongoing communication between people of differing faiths, particularly Muslims and Jews.
“We need a strategy where people sit down together…people who represent and encounter thousands of their own, and they need to take people with them,” he said.
On his part, Rabbi Goldberg is taking a few different approaches, explaining that as part of the English Football Association, he’s working to create on-the-ground change in the communities he interacts with. One way he plans to start is to bring imams and rabbis together to play “keepie uppie” at St. George’s Park, home to England’s 23 football teams.
He’s also working with the United Nations on its Faith for Rights program, which looks at the connection between religion and human rights. Rabbi Goldberg and other religious activists are working on a six-city approach to building dialogue between Muslim and Jewish leaders.
Following a rise in hate crimes in the wake of the 2016 election, Deen organized a solidarity march in the San Fernando Valley, which led to them establishing the Interfaith Solidarity Network, a nonprofit organization that encourages interfaith communication and advocacy in the San Fernando Valley.
Deen said that to find solutions, all sides need to work with specific goals in mind.
“We can’t work with generalities. We can’t work with ambiguities. Certain, very specific undertakings have to be made from both communities,” she said.
Despite the dismal outlook on religious liberty and the relationships between citizens of different faiths right now, the panelists expressed genuine hope that things can change for the better.
“There is a counter narrative slowly being developed. We refuse to be enemies, and we seek the peace of the city,” said Rabbi Goldberg. “But we can only do that together.”
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