WE ARE THEIR WITTENBERG:

What is exceptional, however, is that the 20 or so students in Kurtzer's class today are not Jews. Neither are they Christians, for whom Hartman has run programs for many years. They are, rather, Muslims. American Muslim leaders, to be precise. Most of them are in their 30s and 40s.One is of Lebanese origin, another Algerian, a third Iraqi. Almost all are in Western dress. Two of the women wear hijabs. And they are here, in Jerusalem, because they want to learn about Judaism, Zionism and Israel.

This is not an interfaith effort. It is not an exercise in dialogue between two religions whose relationship overflows with violence, tension and bitterness. It is an educational program, whose participants have come to Israel to understand why Jews believe what they believe, how Jews see their history, why Jews are so attached to this contested strip of land -- and thus to better engage with American Jews when they return to the United States. It's an effort by goodhearted people, a complicated, fraught, even dangerous effort, to throw some light into the dark abyss of ignorance and hatred that separates almost all Jews and Muslims worldwide.

These 20 or so students are the third "cohort" -- the third group -- in Hartman's Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI). The cohorts go through a program that lasts a year -- with two weeks at Hartman in Israel at the start, a series of lectures in the US, and two more weeks at Hartman at the end. This Sunday class is part of Cohort 3's opening two weeks in Israel. And as with their predecessors, the calm, scholarly atmosphere in the classroom belies the frenzy that their very presence in Israel is provoking.

On the previous Friday, the group went to pray at al-Aqsa mosque, which ought to have been a joyful highlight of their visit. Instead, it was a stressful experience, because the fact of their presence here in Israel was being hyped on some pro-BDS social media outlets as nothing short of treason. Participants in the previous two programs have been castigated by anti-Israel activists as "Muslim Zionists," traitors to the wider Muslim and specific Palestinian cause. They have been accused of being duped into "faithwashing... using religion to whitewash Israeli crimes and dilute the occupation," of undermining the "Palestine solidarity movement," of being engaged in "an effort to blunt support for Palestinian rights among North American Muslim communities." Their decision to go to Israel via "a Zionist, anti-BDS institution is incredibly shameful and dangerous," wrote a columnist in the Islamic Monthly last year. This program "undercuts the plight of Palestinians and normalizes Zionism - a racist ideology and institution that is antithetical to our own Islamic traditions of social justice - within our communities."

This time, a petition was being circulated against the group, and there were concerns that they might be physically confronted at prayers.

For that reason, Imam Abdullah Antepli, the founding director of Duke University's Center for Muslim Life, the university's first Muslim chaplain, and the prime mover behind the MLI program, did not go to Al-Aqsa with the rest of the group that day. He is the only member of the group whose name and face were widely known and publicized. Instead, together with author Yossi Klein Halevi, the MLI co-director, he sat with me for three hours to explain why he so energetically, insistently, indeed desperately pushed to establish the program, through which he ultimately aims to bring to Israel a "critical mass" of the most promising young American Muslim leaders -- young leaders committed to better understanding American Jews, Zionism and Israel, and seeking to build better relations with North American Jewry.

It's not for Israel's sake. It's not for the good of the Jews, he emphasizes. It's for the sake of Islam, and most especially for American Muslims.

Antepli stands for what he says is authentic Islam. For an Islam of tolerance and equality. For an Islam whose American adherents seek constructive integration into mainstream American society. And if this decent Islam is to be accepted in an America scarred by Islamic extremism, he believes, one of the central paths to that acceptance runs via the US Jewish community, which itself so successfully integrated into America. Put simply, if American Jews come to understand, empathize with, and most importantly learn to trust American Muslims, Antepli is certain, then the rest of America, the Christian mainstream, will gradually follow suit.

And how better, as Muslims, to try to demonstrate that you can be trusted by American Jews than to study Judaism at one of the Jewish world's most highly regarded liberal educational institutions -- not in America, but teeming, divisive, complicated Israel?

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