Through a new Interfaith America initiative, Tufts faculty and staff are building the trust and skills needed to talk across faith and fear
Jonathan Garlick and Sehba Hasan, who participated in the inaugural From Prejudice to Pluralism initiative. Tufts is the only university to have been selected by program sponsor Interfaith America to be funded for a second year. Photo: Alonso Nichols
Reverend Elyse Nelson Winger knew she was making a weighty request, as she invited a small group of community members into a thoughtful, year-long dialogue about antisemitism and Islamophobia.
“There’s something risky about discussing these prejudices together,” says Nelson Winger, university chaplain at Tufts. “But that’s exactly why we’re doing it.”
Their conversation took place as part of From Prejudice to Pluralism, an initiative of Interfaith America, a nonprofit organization that works to foster cooperation across religious and other differences. In 2025, Tufts was selected as one of 11 colleges and universities to participate during the 2025–26 academic year.
The sensitivity of the subject shaped the structure of the university’s effort. A multidisciplinary cohort of faculty and staff convened for series of sessions to discuss antisemitism, Islamophobia, bias, and belonging, with a focus on how to keep listening when difficult subjects arise. Led by Nelson Winger, Vice Provost for Faculty Colleen Ryan, and Assistant Director of Human Resources Business Partners Jannel Hill, the program built on existing dialogue work at Tufts while bringing a sharper focus to antisemitism and Islamophobia.
The aim, says Nelson Winger, was to give participants time and a structure for practicing what difficult conversations require: careful listening, humility, trust, and the willingness to stay present through discomfort.
She also notes that the cohort was broadly diverse in terms of identity and how each participant oriented around religion—including that identifying with a faith tradition was not a requirement to be part of this initiative.
Listening with Intention
For Sehba Hasan, the value of the cohort was that it created a place to enter conversations that were already shaping campus life, whether people named them or not. A Muslim and the associate director of the BLOOM Center, Hasan had not anticipated the opportunity to participate in such a program when Nelson Winger invited her. But she welcomed it.
“As a member of the Tufts community as well as in my own practice of my faith, it felt really helpful to be part of the conversation,” Hasan says.
What made the experience meaningful, Hasan adds, was that, in addition to the discussions, the program offered practical tools: ways to listen without rushing to respond, speak without making assumptions, and enter into sensitive subjects with respect for other people’s faiths and experiences. “One of the skills the program taught was listening with intention—listening not just in order to respond,” Hasan says.
Such habits of attentive, respectful engagement shaped both the content and the format of the experience. Sessions included presentations by experts—for example, one by a scholar of Islam and another from a Hebrew College faculty member—as well as small-group dialogue and discussions of readings. The programming also drew readily on resources already alive at Tufts, including reflective structured dialogue and facilitated circle conversations.
Across all aspects of the program, the points of emphasis remained consistent: build relationships, cultivate respect, identify shared values, and create conditions in which people can stay present through discomfort.
“A Posture of Grace”
Jonathan Garlick, a stem cell researcher, professor of oral and maxillofacial pathology at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine and director of the Civic Science Collective, knows this work well. Over the past 15 years, he has developed a dialogue center at Tufts and trained hundreds of students, staff, and faculty to facilitate conversations across differences of values, beliefs, identities, and lived experiences.
But in From Prejudice to Pluralism, he found himself in a different role.
“All of a sudden I was on the other side of the table,” he says. “I was now a participant in the dialogue rather than the person facilitating it.”
That shift gave him a new appreciation for what such spaces require. In this group, he says, participants developed a sense of shared accountability—enough trust to allow people to take the risks needed to speak honestly. For Garlick, the crucial movement was from listening defensively to giving another person the benefit of the doubt by welcoming the complexity of their viewpoints, beliefs, and experiences.
As Garlick puts it, “When we move from a position of vigilance to a posture of grace, we can engage each other through the lens of our shared experience and our shared humanity.”
Hasan describes a similar sense of trust. Participants spoke openly about upbringing, bias, and the ways Islamophobia or antisemitism had shaped what they had absorbed or assumed. “There was evidence of a lot of trust among that cohort,” she says. “People were speaking freely as well as being cognizant of everybody’s sensitivity to the topic.”
The program’s organizers had hoped the initiative could be expanded across Tufts—a hope that became a reality when it was announced this summer that Tufts was the only university selected from the first cohort to be funded for a second year.
Hasan welcomes the expansion. “I would love to make it a tool for every department, area, and academic space, so everyone has what they need to hold difficult conversations respectfully,” she says.
Garlick also sees possibilities for this past year’s cohort, as community members who can help model dialogue more broadly when urgent issues arise on campus. “I’m hoping that people who experience this can emerge and serve the broader Tufts community by holding that same collective accountability that we felt to each other in the dialogue space,” he says.
