Livre d'Or

I mean, part of my good interactions with Muslims has indeed been in a campus interfaith context, sure. But at the weekend I went to a Limmud, a Jewish learning conference, which had a fair number of Muslim speakers and guests. I feel an instinctive affinity with Muslims, really; they're monotheist and text-centric like me, but perhaps more importantly they're racially othered, and represent a religious minority within a primarily Christian culture. And in a more negative way, I feel scared when people attack Muslims, because to my eyes the sorts of things that are said about "those people" are extremely close to anti-semitic rhetoric.

There absolutely are Jews who are very negative about Muslims. Sometimes it's the thing of slightly older immigrants considering themselves a "good" minority and looking down on more recent and less assimilated immigrants. And sometimes it's the Israel issue and generally being scared of Muslim anti-semitism. There's far-left pro-Palestine solidarity stuff, which is great, and the other thing I tend to encounter is very safe and almost anti-political dialogue groups. But neither gets anything like the mainstream press coverage that mutual prejudice commands.