The image of a Muslim girl standing on a stage with a Jewish girl appears on the wall that serves as a projection screen in the 7th grade classroom where I am teaching, immediately capturing the attention of the fourteen students in the room. As these 7th graders watch the YouTube video of the girls’ slam poem, I watch along with them, trying to see it through their eyes. The Muslim girl wears a hijab while the Jewish girl sports denim jeans, and while they may look different from one another, they speak both in sync and in tandem, their message, hopefully, resonating with my students: don’t judge us by preconceived expectations.
This is the first and only time I will meet these 7th graders on this trip, and I have decided to tackle the danger of stereotyping through the slam poem “A Muslim Girl and a Jewish Girl.” I watch them as they listen to the Jewish girl report how she has been called a money grabber, and the Muslim girl describe how she is routinely taken out of airport security lines and patted down. Even so, the girls focus on their shared experiences: a love of hummus and a frustration with their mothers who want them to meet a nice Muslim/Jewish boy at a respectable place like a mosque/synagogue.
The part that strikes me comes when the Muslim girl laments the death of a young Israeli girl killed by a bomb at her favorite restaurant by the beach, while the Jewish girl mourns a young Palestinian girl who was shot and killed by an Israeli settler in Hebron. The 7th graders, chatty and distracted at the beginning of class, watch in silent and rapt attention, stunned not only by the words but by the very concept of a Muslim girl and a Jewish girl sharing one stage, communicating one message. But when their Hungarian teacher asks me to explain how it is possible that a Muslim girl and a Jewish girl would even be able to attend the same school, it is I who am rendered momentarily silent.
Earlier in that class period, my students and I had talked about traditions, and I introduced the concept that stereotyping others is one of those traditions that we would do well to replace. When I asked them to tell me about their school traditions, they answered readily, describing Jewish practices such as boys wearing kippot, students lighting candles on Friday and eating kosher food. But when I asked them, if given a chance, what new traditions they would like to introduce at their school, they did not know how to answer, and their teacher explained that this was probably the first time an adult had asked for their opinion on a school matter.
I began to describe to them Beth Tfiloh’s Student Government, which acts as a voice for the collective student body and runs our Friday assemblies, giving students a forum to present their ideas and introduce activities to the high school. I encouraged these 7th graders, looking at me in wonder and almost disbelief, to talk to their teachers about forming their own Student Government, to create activities that will engender student involvement and effect change in their school and to enlist the help of their teachers in accomplishing this goal.
Tomorrow I will teach Scheiber Sandor students one last time before accompanying a group of them together with a group of Beth Tfiloh students to a Shabbat retreat, followed by our return trip home on Sunday. I hope that my SSG students will have learned not only to discard their preconceived notions of others, but to rethink their opinions of themselves, to recognize that they can not only have a voice but can use it to speak for someone else who needs one.
