One of the best Curb Your Enthusiasm moments, which addressed the similarities and divide between American Jews and Muslims, was “Palestinian Chicken” (S8 E3). First aired in 2011, the episode revolved around Larry David’s attempt to eat at Al-Abbas, a new Arab restaurant with Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin) and Marty Funkhouser (Bob Einstein) in tow. When Marty shows up wearing a kippah (yarmulke) and refuses to take it off, Larry and Jeff enter the restaurant anyway to a chorus of applause for allegedly standing up to Marty’s performative activism. Both men then enjoy what they claim is the best chicken in the world.
“Palestinian Chicken” is ranked as among the best Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes because it uses humor to focus on something (food) that cuts across divisions and can bring people together, even between communities that were already neighbors, albeit deeply resentful ones. Anyone who has studied the Middle East should know that beyond imperialism and colonialism – whose ugly roots laid the foundation for many continuing crises – the main commentary used to broadcast the supposed antipathy is religious difference.
Enter Samuel Heilman and Mucahit Bilici, Queens College and John Jay College faculty, respectively, and their new work, Following Similar Paths: What American Jews and Muslims Can Learn from One Another. Heilman and Bilici have brought their friendship and shared passion as sociologists to answer one overwhelming question: how do observant American Jews and Muslims maintain their cultural and religious identities? This sample, the authors suggest, “perform[s] a constant balancing act, responding to the demands of American culture without sacrificing their religious obligations and commitments.”
Following Similar Paths is an academic text that appeals to anyone with more than a passing interest in Judaism, Islam, and comparative religion. There are no pop culture references, providing instead the origins of many of the Muslim and Jewish practice concepts represented in culture, particularly film and television. I would not call this book ambitious, but the authors tackle a difficult topic by breaking it down across seven thematic chapters: law and legal theory; food (slaughter and preparation); clothing and modesty; religious leadership and preaching; places of study and knowledge; houses of worship; and Islamophobia and antisemitism.
The groups of interest here are Americans, for whom being Muslim and Jewish are core identities. This matters, the authors write, because “our focus remains on those we generally call ‘religiously observant’ rather than simply ‘religious’ because the former are visible both to the researcher and, more importantly, to the American public.” This is a clever approach, articulating that religious identity is not just an individual relationship with G-d, but rather how a religiously observant Jew or Muslim weaves through the daily act of living in the United States. Religiously observant Jews and Muslims straddle a two-lane highway, the authors write, with one foot in religion and one in culture, constantly worried about being hit by traffic.
According to these authors, there are some profound commonalities between Islam and Judaism, but what makes their methodology interesting is that Heilman and Bilici do not force those similarities upon the reader. We are left to decide on our own how Jews and Muslims observe their religious commitments. Their chapter on food, for example, is an excellent illustration of the many commonalities between Jews and Muslims (which ties back to the genius of Larry David).
It is more than just the “Great Marshmallow Divide” between Jews and Muslims, which made me laugh out loud; it is about a desire to want to eat what God has allowed for us but also gingerly balancing the realities of living in the US. Yes, Jews and Muslims will always have to ask the hard questions about Jell-O, gummy bears, and bacon, but the authors are correct to assume that “eating kosher food is clearly a social marker of cultural engagement.” It is the same for Muslims.
As one of those religiously observant Muslims, even I was astonished to read the commonalities of religious study and leadership between the groups discussed in Following Similar Paths. Historically, the authors point out how rabbis and Jewish clergy were often imported from Europe until a specific American Judaism was established, which allowed for a domestically-trained rabbinate. This reminded me of Robert Aldrich’s comedy The Frisco Kid (1979), where Gene Wilder plays a Polish rabbi who travels to a new Jewish congregation in San Francisco.
Heilman and Bilici are correct that American Muslims have not yet reached the critical mass for all of our ulema (scholars) to be trained in the United States. Instead, they cleverly point out that there are four categories of religious leaders: “the immigrant imam”, “the imported imam”, “the American-born imam”, and “the homegrown imam”.
However, the text has two weaknesses, one more forgivable than the other. First, through no fault of their own, the timing of the book’s publication barely allowed for any mention of Hamas’ October 7th, 2023 attack on the Nova music festival and Israel’s overwhelming response. There are four pages about it, but I suspect the corpus of Following Similar Paths was likely finished in early 2023 with little room for additions.
However, I was still disappointed that the authors reduced the violence and suffering to simply “death and destruction on both sides”. Given the book’s goal, it would have been helpful to see a few paragraphs about how the religious commonalities might foreground space for reconciliation, particularly since many of the groups involved in this conflict rely on their religious interpretation and exegesis.
Second, the book is not focused on understanding the causes of differences but rather the similarities between Judaism and Islam, which are often overlooked. Doing so, however, limits the extent to which the reader can discern solutions to the increasing divides in America. Put simply, reading Following Similar Paths might bring some people together, the text’s lack of recognition of the drivers of difference offers little solution.
For example, the focus is on the “religiously observant”, but who are the observers? Protestants and Catholics, most likely. American Jews and Muslims do not adhere to their religious traditions in a vacuum. Yet, nothing in Following Similar Paths acknowledges how the act of being observed engenders a differential response among the religious person being studied. Evangelicals, for example, conflate Christian religious practice with their conception of Zionism based on an apocryphal understanding of God’s reckoning. How would that not profoundly affect Christian perceptions of Jews and Jewish practice within a Christian gaze?
One cannot possibly separate the lived experiences of being Muslim or Jewish from micro and macro-historical structures of intolerance. Despite the commonalities and often similar intent (kosher versus halal, kippah vs. kufi, yeshiva vs. madrasa), the practices of Islam and Judaism in the United States are different. Each community was and continues to be affected by the endogenous and exogenous variables of immigration, its resistance (nativism), and public perception. We need to move the conversation to a place where we can acknowledge that similarities exist and that interfaith work is valuable, while remaining aware that American civil religion creates space for some practices and not others.