At our first meeting of the ICJS Fellowship for Teachers, we were given guidelines for cultivating dialogue over debate. I took these to heart; they felt like a message from a higher power about how to improve all of my relationships. The conversations that we were able to have under these norms were challenging for me because of my tendency to enter conversations with facts as I seek to be correct; in a dialogue, nobody is right.
We all come to conversations about religion, identity, and discrimination from different places and with differing degrees of passion.
This fellowship helped me understand and practice dialogue over debate as a valuable way of interacting with peers; it helped me embody the value that understanding others is just as important as being understood.
This has shown up in my life in various ways over the years: a friend says “it’s more important to be right with people than to be right;” an aunt offers the advice that “nobody wins by fighting.” But this Fellowship put those ideas to the test and into practice in a professional context that opened up a professional taboo—faith—in a year when the Israel-Palestine conflict was dominating conversations.
In one meeting, one of the Fellows was sharing a conflict they were managing at their school where tension developed between Black and Jewish students around the Israel-Palestine conflict in Gaza. My colleague’s frustration was centered on how Jewish students weren’t recognizing their own privilege in the situation, saying that these students and their parents weren’t seeing their own white privilege.
This floored me. In a moment, I was flooded with opinions and facts, made completely indistinguishable from each other by the emotion in my response: I don’t see the world we live in as treating Jewish people with the privileges of Whiteness. “White” as a racial construction is, first of all, very new; we can trace it at its earliest to the beginning of the 20th century, and this Whiteness did not include the Jewish population of the United States, where strict quotas limited admission into White colleges and universities until the ’70s, and that same Whiteness certainly did not protect the 93% of the Jewish population of Europe who were murdered in the Holocaust.
I cannot, for the life of me, think of a country that has offered Jewish people the privileges of Whiteness for more than a generation—the closest might be Weimar Germany before the Holocaust, or the United States after the Holocaust. But we have to remember that the U.S. turned away a full ship of Jewish refugees in 1939. We think of the Holocaust as ending in 1945, but we have to remember that tens of thousands of Jewish people continued to live, long after the war, in makeshift buildings on the same grounds as the concentration camps from which they had been “liberated.” Sure, Bergen-Belsen became a “Displaced Persons Camp,” but the only reason Jewish people were displaced was the continued antisemitism of the Allied powers. It was on the tip of my tongue to light into her and shout her down with facts about global and American antisemitism. I still feel that impulse, thinking about it, as you can see.
Instead of yelling all my fact-opinions, I asked why. I asked why there might be a difference between what we see when we look at others, versus what others see when they look at themselves.
What resulted was a genuine conversation about self-identification, how people perceive their own privilege, and how personal and historical identity play out differently in different cultures; we talked about how much of what we see when we look at others is rooted in associations we have from our experience. We talked about the private identities, histories, and beliefs about the world that we all carry, about how our faiths, like our identities, aren’t necessarily written on our faces. I did work in a few facts about antisemitism in America—particularly in education—but because of the practice we’ve had with dialogue over debate, I was able to be genuinely curious about why my colleague felt the way they did instead of assuming a binary position of right and wrong.
I don’t think I changed anyone’s mind right then, but we had an honest conversation about how and why we perceive others the way we do. We listened. We came closer to an understanding of how two people or groups might be so far apart, and how our religious and cultural identities transcend appearance.
Morgan Kain teaches at The Baltimore City College and was a 2024-2025 ICJS Teachers Fellow. Learn more about the ICJS programs for teachers here.
Opinions expressed in blog posts by the ICJS Teacher Fellows are solely the author’s. ICJS welcomes a diversity of opinions and perspectives.