By Naama Barak - April 22, 2019

A Jew, a Muslim and a Christian walk into a classroom. No, this is not the start of a joke, but a most accurate description of a unique course on interreligious dialogue at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.

“The class as a whole is meant as an opportunity for Jewish and Arab students at Bar-Ilan University to get an appreciation of each other’s cultures and see the commonalities in religious traditions as a basis for dialogue,” says course lecturer Ben Mollov.

“They’re gaining the personal perspective of each other and that leads to a type of relationship building and relationship transformation.”

Mollov, a lecturer in political science and conflict management at Bar-Ilan, has been involved in Arab-Jewish dialogue from a religious perspective for the past 20-odd years. And while he’s a veteran enthusiast of this sort of dialogue, the current course emerged as an initiative of his students.