Berkeley Bridging Fellowship Program

This program is a radical and hopeful undertaking during a moment in which the escalated violence of the last nine months in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and the region more broadly has caused immense grief, anger, and despair, deeply dividing many on our campus. So many of us are looking for spaces in which we can grieve and process, and openly discuss the range of emotions brought about for us by the situation in the region. Many of us have personally experienced loss and trauma directly connected to the recent and historical violence in Palestine and Israel, or have faced uncomfortable encounters with fellow students or others in our campus community, including episodes of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, and anti-Israeli discrimination. We feel trapped under the extraordinary weight of all these developments and yet we often lack the capacity to discuss our experience, seek out the experiences of others, or attempt to build bridges through deeper understanding. 

The Berkeley Bridging Fellowship is an experiment in what might be possible when we come together with intention. Following an intro session for the fellows on Zoom in late August and an all-day retreat in-person on September 8 for the fellows with the facilitators and conveners, participants will have three-hour meetings every two weeks (mostly on Zoom), throughout the fall and then spring semesters.

We seek to create a unique space on the Berkeley campus for a diverse community of students who care deeply about Israel and Palestine. The immediate takeaways of the program will be fivefold:

• Building relationships and community among groups of students from different cultural and political perspectives who are struggling to come to grips with the terrible violence in Palestine and Israel that has unfolded since October 7, 2023, with acknowledgement that the current moment unfolds within much longer histories – of periodic violence targeted against civilians, ongoing military occupation, stark asymmetries of power and resources, violent ideologies of hatred and elimination, and shifting international politics.

• Encountering and learning from a wide range of perspectives and direct experiences of the history and contemporary situation in Israel and Palestine.

• Learning about Jewish, Muslim, Arab, Israeli, and Palestinian cultures, traditions, and histories.

• Acquiring a set of tangible skills and practices for having meaningful discussions about not only the situation in Palestine and Israel but highly fraught and sensitive topics more broadly.  

• Finding ways to apply immediately the experiences as Berkeley Bridging Fellows through direct conversation with senior administrators and an initiative-building capstone through which each fellow will be supported in trying to begin new conversations within and across communities. 

We will begin by building a container in which participants can process together and sit with each other’s lived and secondary experiences of the violence and trauma. We will invite this through a range of participatory group modalities, including circle work, storytelling, listening, and somatics. One avenue that will be particularly valuable early on as we explore the overwhelming challenges and emotions of the present is arts and culture. Participants will have opportunities for artistic creation, interpretive conversation, and the sharing of evocative music, poetry, and visual art from various traditions. As we deepen our capacity to engage with a range of experiences and vantage points, we intend to eventually also expand our historical knowledge of the region.

The program aspires to build a community of students who can help engender more connected, generative, and transformative discussions on our campus and, in time, far beyond. In the spirit of transformative dialogue processes in other regions and conflicts throughout history, we hope to come together with deeper knowledge, empathy, and mutual respect, embracing a multiplicity of visions in which all people, in Palestine, Israel, and everywhere, can exist with human dignity, equal rights, safety, and freedom. 

This will be a facilitated experience that mixes participatory group modalities, arts and culture, and educational content with expert instructors. At the conclusion of the program, the fellows will have an opportunity to apply their learning in two avenues for direct action: (1) They will be invited together to an in-person, extended meeting with UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons where they will be asked to share their opinions about what campus can or should do better to address the needs of various facets of the Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, and Israeli communities on campus, or to facilitate greater opportunities for conversations across communities. (2) As a Capstone final assignment, each student will work with the facilitators, faculty conveners, and program sponsors to take their experience as Bridging Fellows into spaces or groups on or off of campus and create a viable initiative for better conversations within or across communities. The idea is that this is a way to carry the work of the fellowship forward to maximize the tangible impact of your experience and share it with others. Thus the hope is that such initiatives would unfold in the summer or fall following the completion of the program. Budgetary support will be provided to help with the design and implementation of the capstone projects. 

The program can be done as part of a two-semester sequence course, which will count for 1 credit each semester (pending university approval). The course component is highly encouraged but optional. This first cohort of the Berkeley Bridging Fellowship will welcome between 12 and 15 UCB undergraduate students. The program makes no demands for any predetermined ideology, experience, or background. Given the nature of the work, those with personal connections to the region are particularly encouraged to apply.

Application Instructions

Applications for 2024-25 are now closed.

Questions about the program or the application process can be directed to cmes@berkeley.edu.

Program Facilitators, Conveners, and Consultants

This program is a partnership of the Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) and the Center for Jewish Studies (CJS), co-sponsored by the Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) and the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC). Each session will be led by two highly experienced facilitators with deep experience, knowledge, and care about Palestine and Israel. These are Alia Lahlou and Dorit Price-Levine. The faculty conveners of the group will also play an important role in program design. They are Professor Asad Ahmed (CMES) and Professor Ethan Katz (CJS). Julia McKeown, the Campus Bridging Specialist at OBI, will also play an important supporting role. All of their bios are below:

Alia Lahlou supports people working for social change and liberation around the world through facilitation, coaching, and training. She has 15 years of professional experience in organizational development, traditional and social justice mediation, Non Violent Communication, anti-oppression and justice facilitation, circle work, somatics, and various healing and community building modalities. She is a core member of the facilitation teams at YES!, working at the meeting point of personal, interpersonal, and systemic change; and at Interaction Institute for Social Change, building collaborative capacity and transformative leadership for social justice. At the root of all her work is a dedication to creating brave spaces for people to grow and to (un)learn in community. Alia grew up in Morocco and has degrees in international relations from Brown University and Al Akhawayn University. She has worked in nearly 20 countries on 5 continents. Alia is deeply inspired by the life and work of James Baldwin, particularly his simultaneous and uncompromised commitment to both justice and to love; she  strives to walk through the world with authentic attention to both. 

Dorit Price-Levine is a Senior Associate Facilitator, Coach, and Mediator at the Consensus-Building Institute, with a decade and a half of experience in conflict resolution. She specializes in supporting teams to speak productively across their differences. Price-Levine has worked with hundreds of stakeholders across the country; her clients range from national nonprofits to start-ups and corporations, from regional governmental initiatives in the public sector to local communities of faith. She supports her clients by designing and facilitating collaborative decision-making processes, leading team-building and communications workshops, and coaching in management and conflict resolution skills. Price-Levine was previously the Deputy Director and Senior Facilitator at Resetting the Table. Prior to that, she lived and worked in the Middle East, primarily in Israel and Palestine. She continues to be involved in peace-building initiatives there. Price-Levine is a licensed attorney and has a working knowledge of Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic.

Prof. Asad Ahmed specializes in early Islamic social history and pre-modern Islamic intellectual history, with a special focus on the rationalist disciplines, such as philosophy, logic, legal theories, and astronomy. Although he has worked extensively on Islamic intellectual history of the so-called classical period (ca. 800-1200 CE), his current focus is the period ca. 1200-1900 CE, especially with reference to the Indian subcontinent. He is the author of The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz (Oxford, 2011), Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic (Oxford, 2011), and Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Muslim India (University of California Press, 2022). He is the Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture, and the Faculty Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. 

Prof. Ethan Katz is an expert on Jewish-Muslim relations and modern Jewish history who teaches courses on Muslim-Jewish Encounters, Jewish history, and the history of modern Israel. He is the author of the prize-winning book The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard, 2015) and the co-editor of Colonialism and the Jews (Indiana, 2017). He is currently an Associate Professor of History, the Faculty Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, the co-founder of the Antisemitism Education Initiative at Berkeley, and Chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Life and Campus Climate. He has participated in a number of Jewish/Muslim dialogue programs over many years, and took part in the “Encounter” program in Israel/Palestine.

Julia McKeown (they/them) is a poet, a folklorist, a facilitator, and the current Campus Bridging Project Specialist for the Othering and Belonging Institute. They have spent their life as a bridger, living in and among a variety of different countries, cultural contexts, and stories from the East Coast to the West, the Northeast to the South, the US to Senegal and Morocco, and the myriad of other spaces and places where they find themselves. They bring artistic creativity, unabashed weirdness, and curiosity to the programs they manage and curriculum they develop to facilitate bridging us across our differences and working towards a belonging without othering on Berkeley’s campus and beyond.

The facilitators and conveners are committed to expanding the circle of those involved in shaping the program as widely as possible. As we develop the program’s content, we are working with a wide range of faculty at Berkeley for their content expertise. Eventually, many of these faculty may participate as presenters in individual sessions of the program.