Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, Ph.D., associate professor of religious studies, is RRC’s resident expert on interfaith issues and is known internationally for her important work in this area. In the summer of 2005, she received a call from an embassy employee asking her on behalf of the emir of Qatar to attend an international conference of Christians, Muslims and Jews. It was the first time Jews had been asked to attend the conference, and Kreimer was one of only four rabbis invited. In 2006, she was invited back to the same conference.
For more than 30 years, she has been exploring what joins and separates religions in their practice and approach to holy texts. One of her recent projects included team teaching a course with a Muslim scholar from the University of Pennsylvania. RRC students who were enrolled in the course later paired up with Muslim students from U. Penn to team-teach workshops to middle-school students at Muslim and Jewish day schools. The goal of the workshops, and a resulting video, was to improve understanding among Jewish and Muslim students.
“I look on inter-religious study as part of the spiritual formation of rabbinical students,” she says. “We teach them about Christianity because politically and socially, it’s the world in which we live. In addition, I’ve felt very strongly for a number of years that, as Americans and as Jews, it is our obligation—really a moral obligation—that we know something about Islam.”
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