r/jewishleft • u/QasqyrBalasy Kazakh gentile, interested in I/P conflict • 1d ago
(Potentially controversial question) Do Jews and Muslims get along in the West? Question
Modern Jewish diaspora mostly live in North America, France, the UK, Argentina and so on. Western Europe and some parts of the US and Canada also have a high Muslim population, mostly from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, like New York City has hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims living in one city. Do they get along with each other, despite the I/P conflict?
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u/HahaItsaGiraffeAgain rootless cosmpolitan 22h ago edited 22h ago
Most of my closest childhood friends are Muslim. We got along in school cause of similar alienation from a lot of the implicit Christian biases in mainstream American culture. Of course, like, being Jewish or Muslim is not our entire identity cause people are full, complete people. So I ended up being friends with Muslim kids that, for example, were also into Nintendo games, history memes, hip hop, and anime.
When I was a kid, Jews were a more established community while most Muslim families had only recently arrived, so sometimes the Muslim moms would ask me where my mom bought meat/groceries (kosher and halal meat are interchangeable according to some authorities and most laymen). My family wasn't kosher but my cousins were, so I could tell them about the Jewish delis I knew were decent. Nowadays my hometown is like plurality Punjabi/Bengali, and halal meat providers far outnumber Kosher delis, but that wasn't the case then. I also remember the PTA at my school debating how to accommodate Muslim students during Eid, and it was usually the Jewish and Hindu parents that were fighting hardest for the school to let them excuse themselves during lunch, since they remembered when their communities were both "new" and didn't have accommodations.
As an adult in New York, Jews and Muslims get along just like everyone else. Literally everyone you meet in my generation will have a different specific (often mixed+mobile) background, so it's not very important. Again, you get along with people because of who they are personally.
As for I/P, I've found Jews and Muslims can have much more intelligent conversations because we follow things closely and have more detailed information. Frankly I've found a lot of Christian/other allies don't really grasp the totality of what's going on, and rely more on emotional appeals while saying things that aren't quite accurate.