Peace and Polarization

Peace and polarization are among my two greatest obsessions.  It is difficult for me to feel at peace as long as others are at war.  And it is impossible to make peace as long as the combatants are ideologically polarized.  For decades, I have seen polarization destroy the prospects for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.  More recently, it would appear that the American political climate is being swallowed up by this same scourge.  My first novel, The Creed Room, was largely an effort to confront such polarization.  And my work on Jewish-Islamic dialogue is obviously motivated in large part by a desire to make peace between those two peoples.  I hope you can confront each of the writings on this page, with this in mind:  As long as we listen respectfully to the "other" and treat them with love, we will eventually realize that as human beings of good faith, what binds us together is far more profound than what tears us apart.  

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Diaries on the May '21 Israel/Palestinian Conflict sets forth my thinking,  in reverse chronological order, about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and what we can do to stop the periodic cycles of violence and truly make peace.  These statements were originally posted on Facebook.  

"Jew Versus Jew: How Incomplete Visions of the Faith are Dividing the People" was written in 2020 in response to the schism among Jews in confronting the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.  

American Political Polarization was an essay that I wrote and delivered for a session of the Jewish-Islamic Dialogue Society of Washington in May '21.  This is a topic that all Americans must confront right away, lest we lose the fraternal spirit that is necessary to any functioning democracy.  

Prayer written for and delivered at the July 19, 2014 Iftar at the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington, DC was one of the prayers that I delivered annually at the Embassy of Pakistan as the Jewish speaker at the Embassy's Interfaith Iftar.