Muslim and Jewish Friends Come Together To Fight Hate In Bethel And Beyond

Mohammad Shilleh and Yehezkel Landau believe that when people talk, even when they disagree, they can connect in ways that can cut through hate and bigotry.

Shilleh is a Palestinian-American Muslim who grew up in New York City, while Yehezkel Landau is a Jewish Israeli-American. The two longtime Bethel friends are joining forces to host a monthly casual coffee session with the Bethel community called “TABLE TALKS with a Muslim and a Jew.” The first session will take place on Wednesday, April 23, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Daily Fare bakery and cafe at the Bethel train station. Visitors are invited to stop in, grab a coffee and a pastry, and ask any questions they might have. The event is sponsored by the nonprofit My Brother From Another Mother, which was founded by Landau’s wife, Joyce Schriebman, who will also be attending and participating in the series.

During a recent meeting over coffee at Daily Fare, Shilleh, Landau and Schriebman discussed the upcoming series and shared how it was prompted by a terrifying experience Shilleh’s family endured. While Shilleh’s wife, daughter and mother-in-law were entering Caraluzzi’s, a man they did not know put his middle finger in their faces and yelled at them to “Go back where they came from.”

“The racial profiling of my family sparked it, and we took it from there,” Shilleh says of what inspired this talk series.

“This reflects our ongoing friendship,” Landau adds, noting it is a way for both men “to be proactive rather than reactive in helping our community understand Muslims and Jews better. There’s rising anti-semitism and Islamophobia in our society, so this is a modest step to address that.”

Landau is a retired professor of interfaith studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. He now devotes his time to interfaith training and consulting aimed at improving Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations. Shilleh owns Royal Choice Global Transportation. The two met several years back after Landau began using Shilleh’s transportation services to get to the airport. To demonstrate the closeness of their friendship these days, Landau said that on “the morning of October 7, 2023 and the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, Mohammad called me up to find out how I was doing emotionally, which meant so much to me, and I asked him out later in the day for a cup of coffee so we could talk about how we were doing in the wake of this horrific event. We sat for three hours over coffee and talked.”

Shilleh says this upcoming coffee chat series is a small effort to combat the rising tide of discrimination in society. “There’s more and more hatred in this country, and not just against Arabs and Jews, against all races and colors,” he says. “It's not what this country is. It's not what any religion is. We're all brothers and sisters.”

The series is modeled on a similar series Schriebman held with a Muslim friend prior to the COVID pandemic. That series often resulted in powerful conversations.  Schriebman would sit with a copy of the Torah while her friend would sit with the Qur’an. Some people would plan to attend the session, others would wander over by chance. In one particularly memorable moment, Schriebman invited a person to attend who had written an anti-Muslim letter to the local paper.

“He came by, he was an older man and we were at the mall at that time,” Schriebman says. She added, the man was quoting violent passages from the Qur’an. Her friend shared peaceful passages from the book, Schriebman says. “I opened up the Torah and talked about all the violence that's in the Torah as well. I said, ‘That doesn't necessarily represent the entire religion.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I didn't know.’”

This education-first approach is a key to how Shilleh and Landau plan on connecting with those who come to their talks at Daily Fare. “You approach people with facts. People's opinions— they Google and read headlines,” Shilleh says. “Once you educate people, you come to a common ground, they’ll get to understand you.”

Landau adds that connecting with people emotionally is also important, particularly when someone has views you may disagree with. “I try to stay as non-judgmental as I can with as much empathy as I can muster,” he says. “My understanding of human psychology includes an awareness that much of people's grievance is based on grief that hasn't been worked through. So they are suffering pain, loss, either materially, they've lost a loved one in a violent attack, or they lost their land, or more abstractly, they've lost their freedom or dignity. So they've been assaulted emotionally on some level, and their unhealthy way of coping is to blame other people for their pain and suffering.” This suffering often results in stereotyping, and Landau’s approach is to try and break through that as best he can. “I try to ask probing questions to get to their inner pain,” he says. Even when he disagrees with someone politically or ideologically, this approach can allow him to connect with them. “More often than not, we have common values and human needs on a basic level,” he says.

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