A Dorm With A View... Or Two

At first glance, the hallway of the Middle East Coexistence House at Rutgers University looks like one in any other dorm: painted exposed pipes, patterned blue carpet, a red firebox and a full-body image of actor Patrick Dempsey—with “Anatomy of a Hottie” scrawled across his abs—posted on one door. But spanning the top of another door are green cutout letters that spell salaam (Arabic for “peace”) and, underneath, the words “We’ll find better days.” An entrance to the adjacent room sports a paper flag of Israel and a sign: “There is too much beauty to quit.”

The fourth door features photographs of leggy dancers and the name Danielle Josephs, in both English and Hebrew. Its occupant, a 22-year-old senior, is a petite, olive-skinned woman with shiny brown hair loosely gathered in a large pink plastic clip, revealing hoop earrings as large as plums. Josephs is the mastermind of this unusual dorm-experiment in Jameson Residence on Rutgers’ Brunswick, New Jersey, campus, where 12 female students—five Jews, four Muslims, two Catholics, one Hindu—live together and attend weekly seminars on Middle East conflict resolution and negotiation.

“When I first arrived on campus as a freshman, in 2003, the tensions were high between Jews and Muslims,” says Josephs, who speaks with the polish of a presidential candidate. The campus is home to 5,000 Jewish and 3,500 Muslim students (out of roughly 33,000 total), and both groups are politically active. “While I expected heated arguments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Josephs continues, “I was shocked to overhear ‘death to the Jews’ during one of the pro-Palestinian rallies.”

Josephs made up her mind to do something about the tension and joined the Rutgers’ Hillel executive board, serving for three years. “During my time at Hillel,” she says, “the gap between the Jewish and Muslim communities continued to widen. Even if the hostilities were not in your face, they were seething underground.”

Thus was born the Middle East Coexistence House, where students learn from one another—not only in classrooms but also from sharing their daily lives. When Josephs first saw housemate Nadia Sheikh, a willowy sophomore, without her hijab, she closed her eyes until Sheikh explained that it wasn’t necessary: Only men are forbidden from seeing an observant Muslim woman’s hair.

“I never really thought about whether people were Jewish or not,” Ruchi Gupta, a Hindu, reflects. “Though we are very different, these girls have been my friends from the first day. Of course, we’re girls and we have our fights—minor ones.”

But, she adds, “we realize there are differences between political opinions and personal opinions.”

Around 7 p.m., the young women begin pushing chairs and sofas together in the spacious lounge for their weekly seminar on conflict resolution. The seminar is led by Amy Linch, a doctoral candidate in political science. The comfort level is obvious in the dimly-lit room, where dress is casual and red Rutgers sweatshirts stand out. Gupta slouches with her legs extended to the coffee table, while Leila Halwani, in a yellow hijab, is barefoot.

“They really care about and trust one another,” says Linch, who accompanied seven of the women on a trip to Turkey last January. “Their shared cultural frame of reference as American students helps them to negotiate their differences, since they can switch easily from heated debates about the conflict to talking about how attractive Jude Law is.”

Under Linch’s tutelage, the students have learned how to constructively communicate their disparate viewpoints. Though their views have changed little over the school year, they can now better understand one another’s strongly held positions. As Josephs explains, “During class we can bring up issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a safe space. The primary goal of this house is to train women to be ambassadors so that we can go into our own communities to spread the message of coexistence.”

Linch begins this class by assigning the students to make presentations about various Middle Eastern wars that occurred between 1948 and 1988, then shows part of the documentary Encounter Point, about a grassroots group of Israeli and Palestinian families that have lost loved ones in the conflict but continue to work toward reconciliation. Squished together, the women are silent as they watch the film. Class is over when the movie ends, but no one leaves. Estee Atzbi, a Jew, expresses her sadness while wiping away tears over a Palestinian family’s loss of a son shot by an Israeli soldier. Sara Elnakib, a Muslim whose eyes are also red, talks about the tragic death of a Jewish girl in a suicide bombing.

The experiment on coexistence will continue next year—with a mix of old and new residents—but Josephs, who is graduating, will not. Recently featured as one of Glamour magazine’s “Top 10 College Women,” she dreams of becoming a Middle East negotiator, even secretary of state. She is currently helping other colleges like Yale and the University of Michigan set up their own coexistence houses.

As she wrote in her blog back in September, “Success in this project is not measured by the amount of calm in the House, but by our ability to tackle contentious issues in a respectful manner. We need to get comfortable with getting uncomfortable, and that will be the secret to this project’s success.”
—Susan Fishman Orlins