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by Susan Dugan

Melodye Feldman’s experience growing up as a Jew in Miami in the 1960s offered early, hard-won lessons in confronting religious/ethnic divides.

MELODYE FELDMAN’S EARLY EXPERIENCES WITH ANTI-SEMITISM led her to the belief that the only effective way to combat ignorance-based prejudice is through mutual understanding. She founded Seeking Common Ground, which brings Israeli, Palestinian and American kids together each summer to confront their differences and consider their commonalities.

Walking to elementary school, a Catholic neighbor badgered her about her religion. “She would ask me, ‘If a Jew and a Catholic were drowning, who would you save?’ I told her I would save both. She never liked that idea. Every so often she would touch me on the top of my head. I finally asked my mom if I had something on the top of my head, and she told me, ‘She’s looking for your horns. Somewhere she’s learned that Jews have horns.’”

Later, in middle school, the anti-Semitism escalated. As one of three Jews, Feldman was routinely slammed against lockers and called names. “One day they followed me home from school and beat me up. When I went back to talk to the principal with my parents, she asked, what would I like to do? I told her I thought if they knew me, they would like me. So I got a group together, and we had this wonderful class where I got to learn about their heritage and cultural background, and ended up making friends. I always say that informed the work I went on to do.”

At the end of middle school, the founder and former director of Seeking Common Ground – the Denver-based nonprofit that brings Israeli, Palestinian and American kids together each summer to confront their differences and explore their common ground – visited Israel for the first time. “The people all looked like me and spoke Hebrew and Arabic. It felt comfortable. I had been brought up to believe that Israel was my home.”

She visited again in high school, and as a student at Northeastern University  through a study-abroad program. She stayed another year-and-a-half with her then boyfriend, and later, husband. “The letters I wrote back to my parents talked about what a beautiful land it was and what a shame people couldn’t find peace. But when my husband and I considered living there permanently, we didn’t want children to grow up in a place of war. And my husband would have to go into military service, and we didn’t want that.”

The couple returned to Boston where Feldman finished her degree, married and, in 1980, followed her husband to Denver to attend graduate school. She ran a shelter for battered women in Longmont for five years before taking over the summer residence camp program at Denver’s Jewish Community Center. She then went back to school at the University of Denver to earn a degree in social work.

While completing her studies there, her widowed mother immigrated to Israel and Feldman began visiting. “On one of those visits, a local rabbi gave me a package to deliver to a rabbi in Israel. It was December 1987, the start of the first Palestinian uprising. The rabbi brought me up to a ridge in the Jerusalem neighborhood where he lived, and in the valley below were Israeli soldiers on one side and kids throwing stones on the other. He asked what I knew about the Palestinians’ narrative. I told him there was no such thing as a Palestinian, only good Arabs and bad Arabs. He said, ‘You know the narrative of the Jew. I challenge you to learn about the other.’”

Unnerved, Feldman resisted, but the rabbi’s challenge nagged. “I had grown up in a liberal home; the civil rights movement just kind of marched through my living room. But when I came to Israel, it was very much us against them. So I kept coming back. I lied to my mother and said I was meeting friends, but really I was meeting with Israeli activists for peace. They introduced me to Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem, and then the West Bank. I started seeing things with my own eyes and went through all those stages of grief that you go through when you learn something that you thought was true, is not.”

When Desert Storm broke out in the early ‘90s, her mother would call her with her gas mask on and bombs bursting close by. “I remained very connected in graduate school with what was happening in the Middle East.”

But it was a National Public Radio report about the war in the former Yugoslavia that galvanized Feldman to act. “The journalist was interviewing a young woman in a park that was now a cemetery. All of a sudden you heard sniper bullets and he hit the ground and was screaming at her to get down. She said no. He kept saying, ‘You’re 16 – you have so much to live for!’ Her response was that she had nothing to live for. She had seen family and friends die; there was no hope.”

Sitting in her car, Feldman started to cry, realizing that at 16, she had had everything to live for. “At that moment I decided I could do something to give hope back to young people in areas of conflict. That’s when I turned back to Israel and thought: I know this conflict. I know what it’s like to have gone on a journey of understanding the other.”

The idea for Seeking Common Ground followed. Together with a fellow DU grad student, Feldman sat down and brainstormed how to combine their joint love of travel, social work skills, and Feldman’s extensive camp experience to create a program for Middle Eastern teenagers living in conflict. They started to explore rationale, methodology and fundraising possibilities along with an interested local Palestinian and a local rabbi. “We needed to go over and talk to people about what a 14-day program would look like. This was 1993, 1994, when the peace process was sealed between Arafat, Rabin and Clinton. There was a lot of good will. We went over – a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew – and met with a Palestinian photojournalist willing to help select Palestinian kids, and the Israeli minister of education, who was very excited and open.”

The program launched in August 1994 with 48 kids ages 16 to 19, including Americans. “We wanted to give Americans the opportunity to meet people who lived in conflict. To hear their stories and challenge the Americans to identify what keeps us from entering into conflict like this.”

Participants learn communication skills and exchange cultural stories and traumatic experiences. “What it’s like to grow up as a Palestinian living under occupation, an Israeli living under stress. We have kids on both sides that have lost family and friends in the conflict, kids who are going into the military. We have black, white, Latino and Native Americans from the United States who are starting to address issues they didn’t want to talk about.”

The program entails extensive follow-up. Currently, that means kids return home to participate in a year-long program, meeting at least four times a year for a three- to four-day retreat. “Right now Palestinians and Israelis are finding it very difficult, because the borders are closed.”

Long-term follow-up has revealed lasting benefits, although challenges faced by the program and its participants have changed over time. “In the beginning we were taking kids who had lived in siege for so long, and suffered so many traumas. What was so uplifting was their desire not to forget or forgive but to know that they needed to move forward, to really understand the other.”

Since 9/11, Middle Eastern participants have faced new traumas. And in the United States, things have changed drastically. “We’re needed more than ever,” Feldman says. “But what has stayed constant is our research to back up our findings. Negative thoughts about whoever the other is tend to change for the positive. They can no longer generalize about each other. We put them through exercises that help them think out of the box and develop empathy. A bomb has just exploded in downtown Jerusalem. What are your thoughts? What are you really thinking? They start to communicate better, and parents report a new level of listening.”

Feldman cites the example of the Israeli versus Palestinian perception of passing through checkpoints. “Early in the program there were two kids, and one said, ‘I hate Israeli soldiers at checkpoints, because it’s a point of humiliation where I could be turned back or arrested.’ The Israeli said, ‘Checkpoints make me feel safe and secure, confident that when I take the bus in the morning, I’ll survive.’ Those feelings didn’t change. What changed was, the Israeli said, ‘Well, you’re my friend. I don’t want you to go through that.’ And the Palestinian said, ‘‘You’re my friend. I want you to live – so I understand the checkpoint.’ The hope is, the Israeli kids will say, ‘When I grow up to be a soldier, I want to be a kind soldier.’ And the Palestinians will say, ‘I hate the occupation, but I will find an alternative to violence to demonstrate my opposition.’”

An inordinate number of alumni have gone on to work in fields such as journalism, international affairs, psychology and nonprofit conflict resolution work. “Another thing that gives me hope is that in Israeli society and somewhat in Palestinian, there are nonprofits honestly looking at the role they play in perpetuating the conflict. I wake up in the morning very optimistic. I can get on a negative track and move backwards or walk forward, even if it’s a half step. I have a very small window of time in my life, and I just feel this is what I can do.