At Length with Steve Scher
At Length with Mehnaz Afridi
Prior to her Equity & Difference lecture, Freedom, Religion and Racism in Jewish-Muslim Encounters, Mehnaz Afridi, assistant professor of religious studies and director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College, sat down for a conversation with At Length host Steve Scher, ’87.
Recorded on Feb. 4, 2016.
Poster from the Winter 2016 Equity & Difference lecture series. Click to enlarge.
Dr. Mehnaz Afridi is committed to interfaith work, contemporary Islam and Holocaust education. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, raised in Europe and the Middle East, she brings with her a multicultural perspective. Afridi’s studies of the struggle with anti-Semitism within Muslim communities and her interviews with survivors of the Holocaust have informed her first book, “Shoah through Muslim Eyes” (Academic Studies Press), which will be published in November 2016. Her articles have appeared in edited books such as “Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an as Literature and Culture” (Brill, 2006), “Not Your father’s Anti-Semitism: Hatred of the Jews in the 21st Century” (Paragon House, 2008). She is a member of the ethics and religion committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where she produces a podcast on “Voices of Anti-Semitism.”
In this conversation with Steve Scher, Dr. Afridi talks about the need for empathy in the Muslim community on the topic of the Holocaust, the “racialization” of different people in the Muslim world and the implications of colonialism in fostering animosity between the Jewish and Muslim peoples.
