The antidote to extremism is not a louder argument, but smaller, braver conversations. When the loudest voices are the worst ones, choose the quiet ones.
(This article was published on June 15, 2026, in EJewishPhilanthropy.com)
There is a familiar and corrosive logic that takes hold every time someone commits violence in the name of religion. A terrorist sets fire to a synagogue, shoots worshippers leaving a mosque, or guns down congregants at prayer, and within hours the act is generalized into an indictment of an entire religion and everyone who practices it. We give the perpetrators the results they were hoping to provoke – fear and mistrust. Worshippers no longer feel safe attending services, and suspicion between neighbors undermines the harmony between our communities.
We should refuse to give these terrorists what they want, and I believe that the most effective refusal is not a press release or a hashtag. It is a conversation.
As an active member of the National Council of Jewish Women of Canada (NCJWC), I have seen how grassroots interfaith conversations can build bridges. Faced in recent years with an unprecedented rise in antisemitism, Canadian Jews could have responded only with statements of condemnation, which are necessary but rarely change a single mind. Instead, NCJWC has built something quieter and more durable: a grassroots project called “Fighting Antisemitism: The Power of Small Conversations.”
The project’s premise is disarmingly simple. Most people of goodwill, across every background, race and religion, want to push back against hatred but do not know how. They lack not the conviction but the confidence and the words. The project trains volunteers to host small, honest, sometimes difficult conversations about antisemitism, racism and the Holocaust, and equips participants with a guide, background materials, and a way to learn from each exchange.
What is striking about the Small Conversations model is its direction of travel. It is explicitly designed to move people from confrontation toward alignment, from the defensive crouch of an argument toward the shared ground of a community. That is precisely the terrain that religious extremists try to poison, and precisely where interfaith trust is either built or lost.
Trust is built where it is hardest
Religious communities carry a particular responsibility, and have a particular advantage. We are organized. We gather weekly. We have membership lists, sisterhoods, youth groups, clergy who are trusted voices, and physical spaces built for assembly. When a Jewish organization recruits through its own networks, or a church or mosque opens its hall to a neighboring congregation, it is not starting from nothing. It is activating an infrastructure that already exists. The Small Conversations project understands this, and works through advisory circles of established organizations that reach into their own membership bases. Its impact can be multiplied far beyond Canada: all over the world, the institutions best positioned to repair trust are religious institutions that feel the pain of extremism, and where people of goodwill already show up.
The case against guilt by association
It should not need saying, but it does: no faith community is responsible for the crimes of those who hijack its name. Every major religious tradition contains at its core explicit instructions to share hospitality, to protect the vulnerable and the dignity of the stranger. Violent terrorists are not the sincere adherents to their tradition that they claim to represent; they are betrayers of it. The people most often harmed by their actions are the ordinary believers who share that tradition and want nothing to do with their violence.
Treating a whole community as suspect because of a criminal who claimed its banner is not vigilance. It is the extremist’s own logic, adopted secondhand. The Canadian project draws on this knowledge and is focused on lived experiences of antisemitism in Canada.Honest dialogue about it is not only an act of memory; it is an inoculation.
Women finding common ground
It is no coincidence that the Small Conversations project was started by a women’s organization. Across faith traditions, women have long carried the relational labor of community life – the meal trains and visiting committees, the sisterhood and the parish guild, the networks that hold a congregation together between services. That same capacity, turned outward, is one of the most reliable bridges between communities that the rest of the world tells should be wary of each other.
When a Jewish women’s group and a Muslim women’s circle cook together, when church and mosque and synagogue women organize a shared food bank, they begin not with theology or geopolitics but with the common ground that they already share: raising children in a society that can feel hostile to faith, caring for aging parents, worrying about a daughter walking home. Conversations between women of faith are durable because they are built on lived solidarity rather than abstract tolerance. Extremists trade in the fiction that women of other faiths are strangers to be feared. The quiet, persistent answer has frequently been a roomful of women deciding otherwise.
Similar women’s interfaith organizations exist around the world. The Nisa-Nashim network in the UK brings Jewish and Muslim women together to inspire and lead social change. The leaders of our Australian affiliate, the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia are actively involved in Religions for Peace and the Jewish Christian Muslim Association. In Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, our affiliated women’s organizations are working with the National Democratic Institute to build coalitions between different ethnic and religious groups, developing collaborative solutions to promote religious freedoms and protest hate speech.
How can Small Conversations make a difference?
The encouraging part of the Small Conversations model is that it does not require heroism. It requires showing up. It asks clergy to build standing relationships with counterparts in other faiths before a crisis, not during one, so that the phone call after an attack is between people who already know each other. It asks congregations to train a few willing volunteers rather than wait for a charismatic leader. It asks all of us to treat the difficult conversation not as a risk to be avoided but as the actual work of citizenship in a plural society. And it asks for patience: this is described, accurately, as a multi-year effort, because trust is not restored in a news cycle.
Extremists bet that we are too fearful, too busy or too divided to do this. They bet that one act of cruelty can undo years of neighborly life. The most quietly radical response available to religious communities is to prove that bet wrong, repeatedly, in church basements and community centers, one small and difficult conversation at a time. That is not a substitute for security or for justice. But it is the only thing that actually rebuilds what extremist violence is designed to destroy.
We should not let terrorists define how we view our brothers and sisters in faith communities. In Bondi Beach, Manchester and San Diego, extremists have tried to drive faith communities apart by attacking us where we gather to pray. Wherever we can, women of faith find common ground, building bridges that we hope will withstand the attempts of extremists to drive us apart. As Jewish women, we reject the power of terrorism to destroy and maim. We invest in the power of words to build and to heal.
Debbie Wasserman from Toronto, Canada, is the new President of the International Council of Jewish Women (www.icjw.org), representing 36 Jewish women’s organizations around the world.
