Faculty Perspective: Malachi Hacohen

Bass Connections Project Team: Diaspora, Exile and Interreligious Dialogue (2024-2025)

Malachi Hacohen led a 2024-2025 Bass Connections team that centered on religious dialogue as a pivotal component of the path to peace by exploring the affinities of Jewish, Christian and Muslim conceptualizations of exile. The project was part of a special call for teams exploring topics related to geopolitical conflict and humanitarian crises in the Middle East and beyond. Hacohen shared his perspective and advice on team leadership with Leila Chelbi during an interview in Spring 2025.

What was your initial vision for this project, and how did it develop or change over time?

Debates on the Middle East are politically polarized, on campus and in public culture alike. My sense was that the political negotiations over borders and human rights had reached a stalemate. 

For almost a decade, I have been involved in interreligious dialogue with Muslims and Christians. With friends at Duke, we decided to explore whether we could use the dialogue to accomplish a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through intellectual discovery of resources for peace and reconciliation. 

There is presently a major power difference between the Israelis and Palestinians, the former constitute a regional power, the latter have no state, and many linger for generations in refugee camps throughout the Middle East without citizenship. Yet, both Israelis and Palestinians are nowadays part of larger global diasporic communities that have only a minority living in Israel-Palestine and yet aspire to end their exile and return to the land. The two are blind to their similarities and their historical entanglement, and no one takes note of the openings for political reconciliation provided by the Abrahamic religious traditions. Dissatisfied with the current state of political debate about the Middle East, our group wanted to offer an alternative grounded in interreligious dialogue. 

The project proved an incredible learning experience for me and the participants, enlarging both our research horizons and conceptual and political ones. I personally became much more familiar with Muslim traditions and found out the limits of my original hypotheses about the shared conceptual world of exile and return. Yes, the three Abrahamic traditions display similarities, but often even structural affinities are expressed divergently religiously: The terms diaspora and exile are not nearly as meaningful to Muslims as to Jews, or even Christian, and, following the hijra, exile even acquires positive religious meaning. 

We also opened the debate to decidedly secular faculty interested in refugees and migrations and build bridges between the secular and religious while dialoguing between the Abrahamic religions. We discovered many lacunae in the scholarship, many things we wanted to know, and couldn’t – we just did not have the time or expertise to explore. But we also became more convinced than ever that the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not religious, and religious dialogue can help advance reconciliation. 

What unexpected challenges or opportunities emerged during the project, and how did these shape the research outcomes and student learning?

I did not expect to end up with a group of more than twenty-five people, including several international participants from Germany and Turkey. This enriched the project but also made it more challenging, especially for the undergraduates. Many undergraduates came without prior knowledge of Middle Eastern history, and an advanced research group is not the place to teach the basics, so they had to catch up with the help of faculty and postdocs in tutorials. 

We divided our group into four, each subgroup composed of undergraduate, graduate, postdoc and faculty. All groups brought their work to the general seminar. The undergraduates needed to show initiative and much of the time they did.

The larger international group opened the possibility for a more expansive and diverse research project than originally envisioned and provided participants with a range of international perspectives. It also made it clear the project will have a global life after this year.

How has leading a Bass Connections team influenced your approach to mentorship and interdisciplinary collaboration?

For the undergraduates, after the initial shock at a new unfamiliar world of high-level academic exchange, the project opened new trajectories for their intellectual careers. The graduate students integrated the group into their academic program and Ph.D. dissertations, and I dare say that they would have never received this feedback on their projects within the conventional confines of an academic department. I am thinking especially of a dissertation in Divinity that can now become a pathbreaker for a range of other humanistic disciplines. 

For the faculty, the project revealed the virtues of collaborative mentoring. Even experienced mentors found that confronting the challenges of difference across fields and diverse student pedagogical needs, yields solutions to seemingly intractable problems and superior research products.

I would note the diversity of the group: Muslims, Christians, and Jews, from diverse humanistic disciplines and the social sciences, as well as from the Divinity School and the Sanford School of Public Policy. Our team included American, German, Palestinian, Syrian, and Turkish students. It was a unique, once in a lifetime experience for many of them.

What specific moments or experiences from your Bass Connections project stand out as particularly meaningful for student growth or research breakthroughs?

We had a discussion of exile and return, in the seemingly disarming context of the Jewish and Moorish expulsion from Spain in the late medieval and early modern period. Jews and Muslims expelled from Spain viewed themselves as exiles from the homeland and dreamt of return. An Israeli-born and a Latina-American human rights activists led the discussion. Suddenly the quiet voice of the Palestinian-Turkish Ph.D student came from the Zoom. "But, as we learned from Saidiya Hartman (the African American novelist who, in Lose Your Mother, found herself estranged on her return to the African homeland), there is never a return, not even to Syria (the civil war in which the writer and her family fled to Turkey). The keys to your old home (which Palestinians keep in refugee camps) are but symbols. The homes and the world are lost." Silence. The room, the group, were united, taken over by sadness over loss, by acceptance, by recognition of tragedy. In such moments, one can sense reconciliation and peace. The challenge is: How we can we grow the community sharing them?

Looking back, what advice would you give to faculty who are considering leading a Bass Connections team for the first time?

It is an enormous amount of work, but it could be one of the most rewarding experiences of your academic career. 

One important piece of advice I’d give to new team leaders is to lean into graduate students and postdocs who show initiative and want to step up as leaders. Throughout the year, we had some unexpected shifts in our leadership structure, but two students from our group emerged who were hugely helpful in preparing for public events and mentoring the undergraduates.

In retrospect, it would have been useful to have these students in place as leaders ahead of time, but it was advantageous in other ways to embrace emergent leadership at pivotal moments.

Ultimately, my recommendation would be to make sure you have enthusiastic and capable graduate student leaders so you can share – and also delegate – some of the work of leading and managing your team.

How has your Bass Connections experience influenced your broader academic work and perspective on collaborative research?

The group has expanded my research agenda and exposed me to intellectual sources I would not have reached myself. I am sure it has done the same for others. 

It has also expanded our teaching agenda. Under the initiative of two other Team Leaders, Polly Ha and Abdullah Antepli, our interreligious initiative, research and personnel have been integrated into the Transformative Ideas program and the Provost Initiative on Intellectual Friendship. 

Moreover, Team Leader Peter Casarella and I have been working with the International Network for Interreligious Research and Education (INIRE) to advance the project. In Summer 2025, members of our team attended INIRE summer school in Berlin at the Katholisches Akademie. 

We also expect a volume of the group research to be published online sometime in the coming year. So although the year is over, our Bass Connections work will continue. My hope is that more faculty in the humanities and religion see Bass Connections as a vehicle for collaborative projects in the future.