Bass Connections: Diaspora, Exile and Interreligious Dialogue

Bass Connections Project lead by Jewish Studies DUS, Malachi Hacohen, seeks to build bridges and highlight shared predicaments across religious traditions.

ME under microscope

Malachi Hacohen, Professor of History and Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in Jewish Studies, joins Professors Polly Ha (Divinity), Peter Casarella (Divinity), and Abdullah Antepli (Sanford), in leading a new Bass Connections team project that seeks to build bridges and highlight shared predicaments across religious traditions.

The project team, entitled "Diaspora, Exile and Interreligious Dialogue," joins nine new Bass Connections project teams starting this fall, in partnership with the Provost’s Initiative on the Middle East that will explore topics related to geopolitical conflict and humanitarian crises in the Middle East and beyond.  

The project centers religious dialogue as a pivotal component of the path to peace by exploring the affinities of Jewish, Christian and Muslim conceptualizations of exile. Team members will work together to:

  1. Develop a body of research on Christian, Jewish and Muslim conceptual affinities of catastrophe, exile and restoration.
  2. Initiate campus interreligious dialogue, facilitating meaningful conversation on Israel and Palestine.
  3. Bring Duke research, teaching and interreligious dialogue to other academic communities via a week-long joint summer school and international conference organized by the International Network for Interreligious Research and Education (INIRE).

Team members will collectively engage with foundational texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to learn how they engage with philosophical traditions on freedom, justice, reconciliation, human suffering and healing. Students will then launch research projects extending across disciplinary approaches, from literary to historical to social interpretive to constructive. 

More information on Diaspora, Exile and Interreligious Dialogue can be found at: https://bassconnections.duke.edu/project-teams/diaspora-exile-and-interreligious-dialogue-2024-2025 

More information about the Bass Connections and the Provost's Initiative on the Middle East can be found at: https://bassconnections.duke.edu/about/news/new-project-teams-will-explore-geopolitical-conflict-and-humanitarian-crises-middle-east