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JCC Conversations | Terry Swartzberg
Terry Swartzberg, a Jewish “Ethical Campaigner” who has lived in Germany for 45 years, speaks with us from his home in Munich Germany. Terry Swartzberg became a reporter for the International Herald Tribune. Terry talks about the time he met with Presitent Vladimir Putin and the profound effect the invasion of Ukraine is having on Germany.
Terry answered questions about his experiences openly wearing a kippah in Germany for the last 9 years as well as his involvement with the Stolperstein project, the world’s largest distributed commemoration project. The project has installed over 100,000 concrete cubes bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution in the sidewalks in front of their last place of residence before becoming victims of the Nazis.
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Roots Oral History Testimonies of Religious Community Bonds in Washtenaw County: Njoki Sandra Kamuyu
Njoki Sandra Kamuyu grew up in the Willow Run Historic Village and has been a member of Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church since age twelve. Kamuyu moved to Kenya with her husband in 1972 and gave birth to her three children there before returning to Michigan in 1989 where she resumed her Brown Chapel membership and has remained involved ever since. Over a lifetime of church involvement, Kamuyu has watched the community evolve and continues to assist in its growth by educating children as a Sunday school teacher.
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Roots Oral History Testimonies of Religious Community Bonds in Washtenaw County: Matthew Schumann
Dr. Matthew Schumann is the Felicity Foundation Chaplain at the University of Michigan, where he serves as the campus imam. Dr. Schumann became Muslim in 2009 and has followed his dedication to Islam from Qatar to Vancouver, a position as a bus driver in Salt Lake City, and in 2021 to Ann Arbor. He works tirelessly to cultivate a vibrant and dedicated Muslim student community at UM through daily prayer services and connecting personally with students.
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Roots Oral History Testimonies of Religious Community Bonds in Washtenaw County: Jesse Bernstein
Jesse Aaron Bernstein has been a member of the Temple Beth Emeth community since he arrived in Ann Arbor in 1970 to pursue a Masters of Social Work at the University of Michigan. He has served on the Temple board and has been an active participant in the development of the Jewish community in Ann Arbor over the past 50 years.
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Roots Oral History Testimonies of Religious Community Bonds in Washtenaw County: Emily Knickelbein
Emily Knickelbein is a member of St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Ann Arbor, where she
completed her conversion to Catholicism in November of 2022. She is a lifelong Washtenaw County resident and was raised in the Lutheran tradition as one of eight siblings. Her commitment to Catholicism has led her to a supportive and like-minded faith community at St. Thomas where she regularly attends mass and works as a liturgy assistant.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Nancy Taylor
Nancy Emmons Taylor was born in 1941 and grew up in Luxmanor, Maryland. She attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. She married Thomas Taylor soon after graduating, and they had two children. She received her Masters from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. When their children had graduated from high school, the Tayors moved to London for 12 years. Thomas was the administrator of an international Quaker program and Nancy was the warden of the Quaker meeting house and ran a program for international diplomats.
Nancy Taylor was interviewed by students from Skyline High School in Ann Arbor in 2014 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Ruth Zweifler
Ruth Zweifler was born 1929 in Palisades, New Jersey. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College, and converted from Judaism to Quakerism. Since the 1960s, she has been active in Civil Rights, anti-war, and anti-Zionist protests, including a sit-in at Ann Arbor City Hall protesting residential segregation. In 1975, Zweifler co-founded the Student Advocacy Center of Michigan, and she was Executive Director for nearly 30 years.
Ruth Zweifler was interviewed by students from Skyline High School in Ann Arbor in 2018 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Becoming American | "Muslim Cool: Race Religion and Hip Hop in the United States" with Dr. Su'ad Abdul Khabeer
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer is a scholar-artist-activist who uses anthropology and performance to explore the intersections of race and popular culture.
Su'ad is currently an associate professor of American Culture and Arab and Muslim American Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Princeton University and is a graduate from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and completed the Islamic Studies diploma program of the Institute at Abu Nour University (Damascus).
Her latest work, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (NYU Press 2016), is an ethnography on Islam and hip hop that examines how intersecting ideas of Muslimness and Blackness challenge and reproduce the meanings of race in the US.
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Michigan Notable Book Author and U-M Professor Sally Howell Discusses Her Book “Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past”
Michigan Notable Books Award winning author Sally Howell speaks about the history of Islam in Detroit, a city that is home to several of the nation’s oldest and most diverse Muslim communities.
In the early 1900s, there were thousands of Muslims in Detroit. Most came from Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and British India. In 1921, they built the nation’s first mosque in Highland Park. By the 1930s, new Islam-oriented social movements were taking root among African Americans in Detroit. By the 1950s, Albanians, Arabs, African Americans, and South Asians all had mosques and religious associations in the city, and they were confident that Islam could be, and had already become, an American religion. When immigration laws were liberalized in 1965, new immigrants and new African American converts rapidly became the majority of U.S. Muslims. For them, Detroit’s old Muslims and their mosques seemed oddly Americanized, even unorthodox.
Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past explores the rise of Detroit’s earliest Muslim communities. It documents the culture wars and doctrinal debates that ensued as these populations confronted Muslim newcomers who did not understand their manner of worship or the American identities they had created. Looking closely at this historical encounter, it provides a new interpretation of the possibilities and limits of Muslim incorporation in American life and shows how Islam has become American in the past and how the anxieties many new Muslim Americans and non-Muslims feel about the place of Islam in American society today are not inevitable, but are part of a dynamic process of political and religious change that is still unfolding.
Sally Howell is Assistant Professor of History and Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
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How Faith Communities Can Change the World One Meal at a Time
In this event, part of a year-long Interfaith Council for Peace & Justice program entitled Food & Justice: An Interfaith Exploration of How Our Food Choices Impact Our Environment, Our Economy and Our Neighbors, a panel of interfaith leaders explores how their faith traditions take on issues of food justice and how their communities are making a meaningful impact in all areas of the food system addressing issues like hunger, worker's rights and climate change.
Hosted by Interfaith Council for Peace & Justice and Interfaith Round Table, the panelists include: Reverend Ryan Boes, Ann Arbor Christian Reformed Church; Yusuf Salloum, Islamic Center of Ann Arbor; Julie Ritter, Jewel Heart Ann Arbor; Reverend Kristin Reigel, First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor; and Rabbi Rob Dobrusin, Beth Israel Congregation.