Mehnaz Afridi: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Muslims in Holocaust Memory

In this conversation, Mehnaz Afridi—Professor of Religion and Philosophy and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University—discusses her groundbreaking work “Shoah Through Muslim Eyes”, the overlooked stories of Muslims in the Holocaust, the challenges of teaching about Zionism and antisemitism, and the urgent need for interfaith dialogue in today’s polarized world.
00:00:00 – Opening

00:01:32 – Introduction


00:02:10 – Why a Muslim Scholar Wrote on the Holocaust


00:05:45 – Reactions to Holocaust Testimonies at the Omaha Conference


00:10:50 – Forgotten Stories: Muslims Who Died in the Holocaust


00:16:46 – Gen Z, Zionism, and Making Sense of History


00:24:07 – Islam, Antisemitism in Egypt, and Shared Lessons


00:29:31 – Teaching the Shoah: Risks, Backlash, and Empathy


00:35:01 – Islamophobia After 9/11 and Efforts to Humanize Communities


00:36:48 – Practical Steps to Build Tolerance and Understanding

Transcript

0:00

But, you know, it's interesting, Jews and Muslims are both being attacked by non-Jews and non-Muslims. I want you to note that very carefully for your audiences, majority of Muslims and Jews that are attacked, are attacked by males that are predominantly from a European white background. So there's another extremism that we have to deal with. And I think it's really hard. I know it's hard right now because of what's going on with Israel and Gaza. And there's so many politics around it. But shouldn’t we be standing up for each other at this point as two minor minorities in America? Today, we’re joined by Mehnaz Afridi, Professor of Religion and Philosophy and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University. She is the author of “Shoah Through Muslim Eyes”, nominated for the Yad Vashem International Book Prize, and is currently completing a book entitled, “The Wounded Muslim”, as well as the co-edited book,“Global Approaches to the Holocaust”. Afridi also serves on the U.S. delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and consults internationally on antisemitism, Islamophobia, and interfaith dialogue. Please enjoy our conversation. Hello, Mehnaz, it’s really nice to have you today on our platform. I've been really looking forward to having this conversation with you today about this very important topic, especially because of what's been going on in the media as well. But first of all, I had the pleasure of reading your book, and I'd like to know if you can give us a summary about this inquiry and what prompted you as a muslim to embark on this research. Thank you so much Sabah for having me here. I'm so glad that we did meet and I'm glad you're going to be closer to me soon. So I'm very excited to continue and develop our friendship both personally and as scholars. So I'm really delighted to be here. And I'm also really delighted that you read my book. I mean, it's so nice that people are actually reading my book and I've been very grateful and lucky with that in terms of the audience, different kinds of audiences wanting to read a book like Shoah Through Muslim Eyes, and it's a book that just keeps giving because it's going to be translated into Italian in the fall. So that's very exciting for me. So why did I want to do this book? I am somebody who believes in Islamic principles of justice, and I believe that Islam embraces all human beings. We are told in the Quran that every person on this earth is a creation of God. And these people with differences, different races, ethnicities, nationalities are there to challenge us and to look at the differences amongst people and to challenge us and to make peace with people. And I felt that in a lot of the Muslim communities that I was around, and actually I wrote this book in Southern California, in Los Angeles, and also back home where I'm from, Pakistan. There was a lot of relativization of the Holocaust. There was a lot of denial. There was, of course, Mahmoud Abbas's dissertation that says that, this was 2 to 3 million and it was a fog of war. And I'd heard that about Turkey and Armenia as well in my in my own I just wanted to write something that would touch people and acknowledge the historical fact and the enormity of something like the Holocaust. I also felt that Jews were always seen as the sort of ‘other’ in the Muslim communities, at least since I was growing up. So I think that there were certain factors, but it was a very emotional and passionate experience because I got to interview survivors, I got to know them. They came to my house for a brunch together, and they also got to know for the first time a muslim woman. And they had never really sat with somebody who was Muslim and actually had a conversation of any sort. So there was sort of this kind of exchange that happened in my journey throughout the book, and I wanted to always create understanding and peace between Jews and Muslims worldwide, but especially, have them understand what it means to experience Islamophobia, but also the worst kind of antisemitism, which resulted in the Holocaust. So when you had these interviews and I remember watching a few of them when we met at the conference in Omaha, Nebraska, where the conference title was Global Approaches to the Holocaust, which I found illuminating for many reasons. But we had the chance to watch a few of these testimonies, these interviews. And I'd like you to tell us a little bit more about how these people reacted to you since you said it was the first time that they interacted with a Muslim. What were these reactions like? You know, it was interesting. So it was different for everybody. I mean, there was a child of a survivor. Well, actually, he was a children's child survivor, that came in the train to London. This was the Winston children that were rescued. And he and his brother left and he was younger. And he just couldn't understand that I was a Muslim woman. Like he had this complete misperception of a Muslim woman being cold, kind of cut off from life or even being like a professor or learning about this stuff or having any kind of understanding of anything. So I think there was this stereotype that got broken for him that was really important. And I think that Robert Clary, who I loved, who played the chef in Hogan's Heroes for a long time. I mean, I wasn't raised in this country, but I know all about the Hogan's Heroes and what it meant to certain people of like the generation before us. He was secular, he was French and he was both in Dachau and Auschwitz. And he was kind of upset that I believed in a religion. And I think you may have seen that in that interview a little bit. And he said, “Do follow the rules that this religion sets up?” And then, “Why did you kill people?” And I was like, it's interesting, but I think for him, having faith was really following a rule without any critical thought or questions. And that's how he perceived a lot of the extremists that he was referring to in the Muslim world per se. And that was tough for me because it was kind of like, and you didn't see this part, but I mean, he does say in one part like,“What is a nice Muslim girl like you, practicing Islam?” So I was like, hmm. And I think that because of our interaction, because I said, well, I don't think my religion oppresses me. I have a whole different take on how I interpret it and how I find so many beautiful things about it. And when we had the exchange, he was quiet, he was humbled by the fact that I was, in his view, like crazy to follow a religion like Islam. So those were the kind of interesting nuggets of the interviews. And then, the women that I interviewed really didn't have that question. They were much more generous and open, and Renee Firestone, I know that she's still alive. She was more interested in my courage of doing this work, so she was more protective of me and Elisabeth Mann was amazing. And I also looked her up and she also is alive, probably really old, but she was another amazing woman that I went to her house. She came to my house. She shared her story. She shared her trauma. Her angst. And she just kept saying to me, I cannot understand why people cannot get along. Like it was it still in her mind after being in Auschwitz as a 16 year old girl, she just couldn't get it out of her mind that people just didn't get along. And, I think just witnessing that and hearing from them and having that interaction over a few weeks was incredible experience for me because there was a real exchange and an exchange of care and love because they came to my house, they had brunch with me. My daughter was very young at that time and they met her and I made like a little Pakistani food for them and they loved it. I mean, it was just incredible. I mean, I went all the way to pick them up and brought them over, like all of them in different homes. And it was fantastic. Having said that now, I do want to touch on some of the basic findings you had in your book, which I learned about, again during that conference in Nebraska. And talked about the Muslims who died during the Holocaust. And I won't give more details. I want you to tell us about about all that and what you found especially I want to mention that the list of the names for me was very striking. It's still in my mind, it's etched in my memory it was something I'd never given thought to. So tell us more about those findings. I've been interested in the role of Muslims in the Holocaust for a while, and that's kind of my other hat. From Islam and then I do the Holocaust. So I was interested in looking at what what was the Muslim world doing? Where were Muslims? You know, like what was going on? I could probably tell you easily what was going on in the Arab world and then, colonization and all of that. But I also was interested in Eastern Europe. Eastern European Muslims and Russia; to Muslims in Russia. And so the United States Memorial Museum uploaded 70,000 different documents about victims that were either in the refugee camp or were moving around or were emigrating or in displaced camps. And so I tried to look at that, and I found a lot of Muslims and they’re referred to differently, like sometimes Muslims or Turkmen or and I got really fascinated. So I contacted the Auschwitz museum in Poland and asked them if they had any records of Muslims dying in Auschwitz. And they did indeed. So they gave me 61 names. Now, out of those 61 names, there are many names, if you look through the column of the list, you don't know—”unknown”. So we know some died, but some are unknown. So you assume and scholars would assume they're dead. They just weren't even registered. So there was no accounting of them. And I became fascinated with that. And I took like 52 Muslim and Jewish women to Poland and Berlin. And there we prayed for these Muslims where our Jewish sisters prayed for Jewish victims. And I think they were just fascinated by this whole story. And then I got intrigued by what kind of Muslims. So there were Turkish or Albanian. There were Muslims in Poland, the Tatar Muslims that have actually rescued Jews. There's a whole documentary coming out about that, which I'm actually in. You know, I just got really fascinated.

And the reason for my fascination is: 13:43

A) I think it's really interesting research, but B) because it includes Muslims and Arabs in a way that is important. A lot of the stories that I focus on in my class is about the Muslim rescue of Jews, or North Africa, because most people, forget Muslims, have not heard about this. I mean, it's not like a central focus in Holocaust studies. It has become now over the years, last ten years or so. And I think there are more and more people and Muslims especially, that are talking about this and they're interested in World War II and the mapping of World War II because it's also pre-independence for a lot of the Muslim countries. And it brings Muslims to the table in terms of Holocaust studies. It gives them something to bite into. That moment is really important. And when my Muslim students take my class, I'm teaching my class again in the fall, Muslims in the Holocaust, and they're just blown away. I mean, they just can't even get over the the map of the camps, the amount of camps. They cannot even understand how even North Africa was affected, and Greece. You know, it’s just wow, they had no idea. So they actually learn. They learn about this colossal event. So why I wanted to do this research. I have more research to do on this. And then I also have my heroine Inayat Noor Khan. You might be interested, I wrote a little fictional piece about her for the USC Shoah Lab, which is really fun. I would love to read it. I was putting these people together in this ideal society of making peace and having conversations with like a Jewish victim and her and another Palestinian, actually in this story. So it's all, like everything comes together. So that's really my work on Muslims in the Holocaust and looking at North Africa, but also looking at the moment of colonization, the perception of Arabs and the perception of Jews, the European sort of mindset coming into Palestine, Palestinians, Arabs looking at these people as Europeans and once again, without the knowledge of what was going on with the Holocaust. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting, if we can just pause those moments of perception. And this is what I teach in the class and think for a second on these sides. I look at this gap, this huge gap. It's really fascinating to see that. As part of our efforts to deepen dialog, we're introducing questions from individuals who've closely followed and contributed to our conversations. The following question from Zubin Solis, a viewer and friend of the podcast.

He writes: 17:00

Younger generations such as Gen Z are trying to make sense of the legacy of Zionism, especially when it's often portrayed as either an ethnoreligious supremacist ideology or a dignified cause. How can they begin to understand its historical roots without flattening trauma or complexity on either side? And I would add that in your book, you go very into depth as to the history of colonialism, as well as the politicization of many of these religious ideologies and conflating them into political turmoil. It's a really good question because I've been saying to my Jewish colleagues in some organizations years ago, you guys need to do something about how you see this word Zionism, because Zionism in many parts of the world is seen as basically Nazism or, extremism. But, for me, Zionism is rooted in Zion, again, religion comes in, it's basically the home. The kind of home, not what Christians and Muslims think of as a home, within somewhere in heaven or as we call it, Jannah. It's a home here physically given to the Jews by God. And listen, I went to Israel in 1995 and I took a class in biblical archeology because I thought I'd find out where that home was. But I didn't, and I didn't create peace or anything like that, but that was like a fantasy. But anyway, this home is where Palestine is. And I'm not disputing that because I'm not a scholar of Judea and Samaria and I don't know where all those things are, but it's indeed a home in the minds of Jews. And that is Zion. And so Zionism was something that was created in the 1870s by Herzl, Chaim, there were different levels of Zionism, there was political, cultural, religious, there was and all of these zionism's were based on kind of an idea of a homeland outside of Europe where Jews were constantly getting persecuted. And that Jews like Herzl felt a need that we need to get out because look at the pogroms and, I don't want to be here. And a lot of the Orthodox Jewish communities felt the need to say, no, we have to go to Palestine because that is where Zion is. That is really the religious underpinning of it. And the concept of that physical space is interesting because we're going to talk about Islam and the Quran, I had a dear friend, Khaleel Mohammed, and you can look him up. He passed away. He was in Islamic studies, he taught at UC San Diego and he wrote about the Quran and what it says about the land of Israel. There's a lot of people who have done this scholarship. It doesn't mean that if the Quran says the land was given to the Jews, they should have it. I'm not trying to adjudicate that, but I'm talking about the religiosity of that land in these three traditions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, we kind of forget that. And we just talk about this land. And that's why Israel calls their country a Jewish state. I don't think their intention was that nobody else can live there but Jews, but they had to call it a Jewish state because on Zion, that's a religious thing. I mean, I know I've been to Israel and it's not an intolerant state. Well, maybe now, but “Mehnaz is Muslim and let's kill her because she’s Muslim.” No, there are 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs living there, not equally, always, but they are there. They have more human rights there than in many places. So my point is, is that Zionism has been politicized because of the Haganah that went into Israel and that were actually a group, like paramilitary group that took over what was Palestine and made it into Israel today. You have a history of the kibbutz. You have the history of the Haganah and those paramilitary fighters were fighting for a land to live freely and safely that were the political Zionist. And they were extremist about it because they wanted to have this land. And that is why you have this sort of attachment of this political Zionism. So a lot of Muslims will say, and I'm sure Sabah has heard this, and others on the zoom that Muslims will tell me unequivocally , “Mehnaz, we have nothing against Jews, but we hate Zionists.” And I say, okay, I get what you're saying in a way, but you know you are a Zionist if you don't want to destroy Israel. And I know there are arguments against that, but I do believe as a religious scholar that's what it is. So Zionism is not a one monolithic movement to kill Palestinians or Arabs, period. I spoke to a graduate student at the University of Chicago maybe eight years ago, and she asked me that question. Dr. Afridi, doesn't Zionism mean killing Palestinian? And I was like, oh my God, where did you get that from? And so I told her the whole history and she was being taught that. So I think we have to be really clear, it's like saying all Palestinians are Hamas. That all Palestinians want to just kill Jews. I mean, we just don't have this conversation anymore in a nuanced way, regardless of what you think of the Israeli government or the Knesset or regardless of what you think of Hamas, there are human beings that are living there that are being killed, including the hostages and including Israelis. And of course, in huge amounts, the Gazan people. So we have to stop this idea that, these terms that have been politicized on every side, I'm not just saying for the Jews, but on every side, have stopped the conversation. Stopped the classroom conversations for your caller. But you need to just go in and say this just like I'm saying, because we have to be honest about not knowing and knowing some historical facts. And I know linked to this conversation, as you write in your book, you face a lot of questions where people come up to you. And I ask, when people ask whether Islam is anti-Semitic, you use an example in your book of Egypt. Could you help us understand how anti-Semitism took root there? And as you ask in your book, what do you think Jews and Muslims, especially in Europe and North America, can learn from one another's past and present? Well, I mean, I have a chapter called, “Is Islam anti-Semitic?” And my answer is no. That's the title. And I do not believe Islam is anti-Semitic. And Egypt, I mean, I did my Ph.D. on Naguib Mahfouz was Egyptian Nobel laureate. So I actually did a lot of work around Egypt. I mean, I talked about, like the movements within Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, but I also talked about sort of the openness and the sort of idea that, Egypt was not always a Muslim or Arab country. It was Arab, but Coptic, and it was taken, you know, invaded by Muslims in the eighth century. And that's when it became predominantly Muslim. But what's interesting about Egypt is that Egypt has this pharaonic past. So it's in Africa, but it's really not it's an Arab, it's in the Suez Canal, it's just an amazing country. It has got so much to give? And it's the most multicultural place in a sense, in terms of rootedness. I mean, Jews and the exodus. We have that story. And when I was reading Mahfouz's body of literature about Egypt there was still like a little bit of jealousy of the Muslim girls with the Jewish girls in his novels. but he also was a wonderful writer that was really saying, we need to embrace all of it. The pharaonic, the Arabs, the African, the Christian, the Coptic, the Jewish, and the Muslim. And his idea was, and this is what I argue, is that Islam is about ‘Adl, which means balance between the secular and the religious. Secular is not a bad thing. And I think Muslims just freak out when they hear that word. But nobody's taking away your religion. You can actually in fact, I can wear whatever I want here. I can have a mosque and I can go to the mosque, what I'm trying to say is that, that's why you don't have to go to the Quran for every single woman's rights issue. You don't have to come up with witnesses when you get raped because that's ridiculous. So these are all these questions that we have had that allows a secular court, a social democratic court, especially in British parliamentary systems, to come up with these laws. I mean, you know, international law. Now in Pakistan a human rights lawyer, Asma Jahangir who passed away, changed that. It is out of our Constitution, a woman is raped, a woman is raped. So there is no witnesses needed. This is possible. It's about us knowing how these things work. And I'm talking about international because I know some of you are interested in international law. And then the other thing is, look, there's a lot of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the United States. Anti-Semitism is higher, unfortunately, and Muslims don’t want to believe me, which is crazy. But also data wise, it has to be higher. There are more Jews there than there are Muslims in America. But, you know, it's interesting, Jews and Muslims are both being attacked by non-Jews and non-Muslims. I want you to note that very carefully for your audiences, majority of Muslims and Jews that are attacked, are attacked by males that are predominantly from a European white background. So there's another extremism that we have to deal with. And I think it's really hard. I know it's hard right now because of what's going on with Israel and Gaza. And there's so many politics around it. But shouldn’t we be standing up for each other at this point as two minor minorities in America? 2% Jewish, 1% Muslim. It's really interesting thing when we look at media and we look at social media and what they're talking about rather than,“You guys, we're like real minorities here, and we're being attacked because of our religious hijab, yarmulke, you know, whatever it is, our mosques, our synagogues, our schools.” And that's my message, Khalas, as they say, yeah, that's what I want to say to the audience. Adding to that point, because you said it so brilliantly about these threats largely come from outside of these two communities. And it reminds me of a story you detail in your book of the Palestinian professor, Muhammad Dajani, and the backlash he faced for taking his students on a trip to Auschwitz. And how do you feel about being at the center of a similar universe where you are teaching students about the Shoah? And how have you, if at all, faced similar dilemmas and difficulties as Professor Dajani? And lastly, how do you see the current risks faced by educators in developing empathy, especially across politicized identity lines? I mean, surely, is there any alternative? As educators continue face backlash? Look, the Holocaust happened, right? It's a fact. I hope people realize that. And, I run a center and I was hired to teach it. And so I teach it. And I think that now there are so many stories about the Holocaust and so many ways to approach teaching the Holocaust that actually it's helped us have a very provocative but good dialog in the classroom. So I think that it's actually the moment to teach it and of course, I have the advantage of being Muslim, but also knowing about the Muslim stories and the Muslim history and colonization. And I think that putting those things together like my Islamic education, but also historical education with my Holocaust scholarship helps develop pedagogy. I'm very interdisciplinary about my approaches. And in terms of being an educator today in higher ed, it's horrible because you have no idea who's going to sue you for what you say, even if you're not even teaching the Holocaust or Gaza or Israel, right? You could say anything. And I think that higher Ed has of course, we expect academic freedom. But I'm at a private Catholic university, so if I put out a statement or if I say something, I carry the name of my university. So I'm very careful with what I say. I actually don't make statements. I'm not a big statement person. I don't think they carry you anywhere. And I think that people who know the work, I do understand what I condemn and don't condemn. And I think that if they are also unclear, I think that's even good. Why is this Muslim woman so quiet or why is she doing this? I don't think that's a bad thing. I think you have to be confident as a teacher, as an educator of one thing only. Are you making your student think critically or are you giving them what you believe ideologically? Those are two very different things. And I think we have to be careful as educators. It doesn't mean that I'm not biased. You know, just for your listeners, of course I am. There's no objective, like whatever. But as much as I can, I ask questions rather than make statements and I give them books and actually I’m teaching Aomar Boum graphic novel “Undesirables”.. I don't know if you've seen or read it, it's brilliant. And it's great to teach. So you pick materials that are materials to have conversations with and you pick like historical books. This is what I do in the first part, maybe boring, but it's history. And then you make it more interesting. And then you bring in Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. I do all of that because I want this to be relevant to their lives, because this future, I don't know where it's going to take it, but they're being bombarded and bombarded and bombarded to the point where they say to me, Dr. Afridi, we don't want to watch the news anymore. They don't even want to have an opinion about it some of them just want to go to school and try to look at their future. And some of them are completely into it, as you've seen right on college campuses. So we have these two kind of narratives going on even within the students. But I have to say that there is something about us in America that we have failed with our students. We have disenfranchized them so much and disempowered them so much that they want to fight every institution, including academia. So I think we have to look at ourselves as adults. I certainly do ask myself that question a lot, and I think institutions need to look at themselves and say, Why are these young people so disempowered? Why are they so angry? What what can we do better rather than don't do this? It's really about what can we do better? And sometimes not even about the politics. It's about the sort of rage within our youth that we have to address. After 9/11, where there was a surge in Islamophobia across the world and you mentioned this in your book as well, there were many attempts by benevolent organizations to spread tolerance. And so there were different activities organized. You know people would be invited to celebrate Ramadan together or eat together and to humanize the people around us. And I want to say something here. You know, since we're on the subject, one of the profound learnings

I had a few years ago was when I was told: 35:37

What is the difference between, say, the 1970s, America now, the current setting in terms of say acceptance towards homosexuality? And the difference is that the lady who was very, let's say, Christian, I mean, she could be anything. I'm just giving an example. And who live next to this homosexual man and who was probably intolerant in the seventies. Today, the same type of woman with the same background is more tolerant towards the homosexual who’s her neighbor not because she has thought through it, not because the woman of today has actually delved into the details of why she should be tolerant. It's because of habit. In the sense that now when she goes out to the supermarket, it's more recognized. She sees the homosexual as a human being, just like the he coughs, he eats, he sleeps, he buys the same vegetables as she does. And so she gets a chance to humanize him. And I think all of these activities that have been done so far in terms of like exposing us to each other, getting to know each other, is this element of humanizing each other and which is what you did by inviting these witnesses. I mean, these people you interviewed to your house and by serving them a meal and their getting to know that you're a Muslim, you are just like them. You're just like everybody else. Now, what more can we do? I want to talk about practical solutions. What have you been exposed to in terms of other things that we can do to encourage this, the tolerance that we ought to spread among our children, among just our friends in general, and our community? I would say I'm primarily an educator more than anyone else. It’s what I love, it’s because I see so much transformation in the classroom and I think education is one but exposure. And I'm very stubborn about this in a way. My parents, when I was being raised all over the world, always had this need to have a Pakistani community. This little small little Pakistani community and fine I mean I'm not critical of that, but I found that community to be so gossipy and so sort of like competitive and so like siloed and so not wanting to speak French when you're in Geneva, although I had to speak French. Like there was like this pressure on me as a child, but I honestly really didn't like that. That was one thing I didn't like, although my father had, people over that he did business with because he was a banker, international banker. So we had a lot of people from all over the world come over, but it was like once a year, kind of like business party. But their real group was, this kind of like incestuous Pakistani society. I mean, that's a metaphor, guys. But anyway, it just kind of really got to me. And you know what? I broke that in my adult life completely. I have the weirdest set of friends, that are not necessarily even married, are not necessarily Muslim or faithful or Jewish or Muslim. I mean, it doesn't matter. So I just have people in my life that I can talk to intellectually like we are, Sabah, or people I can share a cup of coffee and not have to worry about what I'm saying or what I'm wearing, or what car I drive. So I think the reason I think this important for the future generations is because we really silo ourselves, even though we have the ability to to live, say, just take Queens as an example, one of the most multicultural boroughs in the world, basically, but you have the Pakistani community, then you have the African community, then you have the Jewish community. And it's still, it's there. It's fantastic. I'm not knocking down Queens. I love Queens. I love the food in Queens, but we're still sequestered. So we human beings move towards what we think is us, what is similar. And I'm totally guilty of that in terms of intellectual space. That is for sure my fault. But what I'm trying to say is that my daughter has been in a Catholic school. She went to a Jewish preschool. I didn't know what to do when I moved here and I did whatever I could. She just graduated from her high school as valedictorian, the first Muslim valedictorian and like 300 years. And she spoke about it at her speech as a muslim. And I was so proud of her. And she spoke about it fluently. And she knows everything about Catholicism. She knows a lot about Judaism. And she said, I think this is great that I'm a muslim and I'm at a Catholic high school and it shows the value of this Catholic high school, but it also shows the value of interfaith tolerance. And I was like, I did not write that speech. But something she has witnessed in her life that we don't just hang out with Pakistanis and Muslims. We open our door to everybody. And I think that something comes from the house, but your experience and who you choose to have your coffee with and where you choose to live and who your neighbors are in a sense. I live in a very diverse sort of community. And there are people there, there are, white Americans that say, what nationality are the new neighbors? I'm like, they're American. It's such a weird question, right? So this is one thing that we can do, is not to have that silo effect. We do that in academia. We don't talk to each other if we don't agree with each other, whether it's a genocide, Israel or Palestine, I mean, whatever it is. I'm willing to talk to people that I do not agree with. And that's something our students need to see, and we're not doing it enough. And I think that, the more and more you are in the classroom, the more and more you realize how open your students really are. This was Not to Forgive, but to Understand with our guest Mehnaz Afridi Don't forget to like, subscribe, and stay tuned for more discussions.