Lecture series intent on strengthening dialogue

When Israel critic and DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein spoke last March at U.C. Santa Cruz, 150 people held a candlelight vigil outside the lecture hall accusing the speaker — and students who brought him to campus — of promoting hate speech.

After that acrimonious incident, Rabbi Shalom Bochner of Santa Cruz Hillel and Pastor David Grishaw Jones of First Congregational United Church of Christ invited a dozen community and religious leaders — Jews, Christians and one Palestinian man — to participate in a dialogue group that would change the way people talked about Israel and Palestine.

The fruits of the group's impassioned conversations were realized when the school year began in September with a four-part lecture series on the Santa Cruz campus featuring leading experts on Israel and the Palestinian territories, accompanied by a semester-long class that encourages students to consider both an Israeli and Palestinian perspective.

The lecture series and related class conclude in mid-December.

"If you would have told me a year ago that this is what would grow out of these discussions, I would have said, 'It's not Purim, stop drinking,'" Bochner said.

Initially, the dialogue group simply wanted to open lines of communication. They met monthly and talked about difficult topics, considering the meaning and history behind words like occupation, apartheid and anti-Semitism.

The group's discussions were difficult at first.

"We had to learn how to have dialogue, and how to use language that didn't alienate people," said Paula Marcus, associate rabbi at Beth El.

As the conversation opened up, Bochner, Jones and philosophy professor David Dodson, also a member of the church, approached the chancellor with a proposal to broaden their work: a class and accompanying lecture series, called Illuminating Dialogues, that would inspire discussion — not vitriol — by presenting balanced perspectives.

Campus officials immediately got on board, and Dodson got busy researching the Middle East. He created an original curriculum made up of excerpts from the writings of Alan Dershowitz, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Ross, Benny Morris, Amos Oz and Sari Nusseibeh, among others.

About 30 students — a mix of Jews, Palestinians and the simply curious — signed up for the course.

The class has been time-consuming and "an emotional commitment," Dodson admits, but well worth it. During one class, he invited Bochner and Sami Abed, the Palestinian-American member of the dialogue group. The students watched as the two men role-played, with Bochner as a Palestinian and Abed as an Israeli Jew.

"I think if we made people uncomfortable at times, that means we've been successful," said Abed, who was born in Sacramento and whose father left Palestine in 1948.

The Illuminating Dialogues series has had three lectures this semester, all drawing crowds of 200 to 400. Each lecture has featured two speakers, representing the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. Previous speakers were Hatem Bazlan and Bruce Thompson; Souleiman Ghali and Carol Been; and professor Mohammed Abu Nimer and Eliyahu McLean.

Lecture coordinators say this is just the beginning. They want to have another series next spring or fall that will focus more on a feminist perspective of the Middle East conflict.

"When you're in a place of conflict, the human gut reaction is fight or flight, not engagement. But that blocks conversation," Bochner said. "Ultimately for there to be peace, there needs to be a lot more listening from both sides."




The final lecture in the Illuminating Dialogues series takes place 7:30 p.m. Dec. 5 at U.C. Santa Cruz, College 9 and 10 Multipurpose Room. Speakers are Daniel Levy, former advisor to Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Yasser Abed Rabbo, former advisor to Yassir Arafat. The lecture is free and open to the public.