Tikkun Olam, Repairing the World - A conversation with Irshad Manji and Edgar M. Bronfman

Irshad Manji directs the Moral Courage Project—the “speak-truth-to-power-people” she likes to call it—at New York University. She is the author of The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith and producer of the PBS documentary Faith Without Fear. A known critic of orthodox Islam, she is not an unbeliever. “As a Canadian Muslim,” Clifford Krauss writes in the New York Times, “Manji never eats pork, never drinks alcohol, and regularly reads the Koran. Otherwise she is Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare. ...Ms. Manji, a lesbian intellectual with spiky hair and a sharp tongue, is an outspoken television journalist who admires Israel and applauds the American overthrow of Saddam Hussein.”

The Trouble with Islam Today, Manji writes, is “about why my faith community needs to come to terms with the diversity of ideas, beliefs, and people in our universe, and why non-Muslims have a pivotal role in helping us get there. ...That doesn’t mean I refuse to be a Muslim, it simply means I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah.” For her candor, Manji has been graced with numerous death threats, and—as a result—she lives within the confines of a strict security regimen that includes bullet-proof glass in the windows of her home.

Edgar Miles Bronfman is another story. Bronfman is a Jewish businessman from one of the world's most influential families; for twenty-three years he was president, treasurer, and director of Distillers Corporation-Seagram’s Ltd. Bronfman earned, as president of the World Jewish Congress from 1981 until 2007, international acclaim for having spurred the Congress to its preeminence among world Jewish organizations today—with campaigns to free Soviet Jewry, expose the Nazi past of Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, and to compensate victims of the Holocaust and their heirs.

In Hope, Not Fear: A Path to Jewish Renaissance, which appeared last fall and was co-written with Beth Zasloff, Bronfman urges American Jews “to build, not fight. We need to celebrate the joy in Judaism, even as we recognize our responsibility to alleviate suffering and to help heal a broken world.” In a conversation with his co-author, he had this to say about Jewish intermarriage: “Instead of trying to force [Jews] to fall out of love with someone, let us try to help them fall in love with Judaism.”

If the similarities between Manji—a young Muslim lesbian “refusenik” with spikey hair—and Bronfman—an octogenarian Jewish businessman—are not immediately apparent above, Manji herself fleshes them out in her introduction to the conversation that follows. Recorded live at Cooper Union in October 2008, the conversation was sponsored by the Moral Courage Project and The Research Center for Leadership in Action at NYU, and the Selma Ruben Distinguished Lecture Series at the Bronfman Center.......