PhD student Peach interviews Laura Marks CBE, a distinguished policy advisor and interfaith social activist. Marks discusses the evolution of Mitzvah Day, which she founded as a Jewish-led initiative promoting interfaith collaboration through acts of community service. She reflects on how the interfaith landscape has changed over the years, highlighting the significance of positive engagement among diverse faith communities. Marks also shares her experiences establishing women-led interfaith partnerships, Nisa Nashim and the Women's Faith Forum, emphasizing the unique resilience and impactful roles these groups play. Toward the end of the conversation, a question about the presence of young people in interfaith settings, prompts reflection on how to ensure future generations continue to engage in and benefit from interfaith dialogue, with an eye to social cohesion.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

01:13 The Vision and Evolution of Mitzvah Day

05:35 The Role of Women in Interfaith Activities

08:23 Challenges and Opportunities in Women's Interfaith Work

10:29 Engaging the Next Generation in Interfaith Dialogue

15:22 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Resources mentioned:

• Mitzvah Day mitzvahday.org.uk
• Nisa Nashim: Jewish Muslim Women’s Network www.nisanashim.com
• The Women’s Faith Forum

Hello, I'm Peach and I'm a PhD student in the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. My research considers the orientation of women's interfaith activities within the contemporary British public sphere.

I'm pleased to welcome my guest today, Laura Marks.

Hello, lovely to be here.

Laura Marks is a policy advisor and interfaith social activist, whose work focuses on faith, gender, and social cohesion. In 2005, she founded Mitzvah Day, and she is also the co founder of women's interfaith organizations Nisa Nashim and the Women's Faith Forum.

Thank you so much for joining me today for this discussion about interfaith futures. So I'll start with my first question.

You're responsible for which is taking place for the 20th time later this month. So I wondered, what was your vision when you started out, and how has it evolved, and does this tell us anything about how the sort of general interfaith landscape has changed?

Thank you for interviewing me.

Mitzvah Day came out of a belief that I had that we could all do something. Many people set up charities because something bad has happened to them and I was very lucky, nothing terrible had happened to me. I found that the cause that I got into, the cause that Mitzvah Day is all about, is enabling other people to do things that they are passionate about.

Mitzvah literally means a commandment, but it's used to mean a good deed. So, Mitzvah Day is a day of good deeds. And I found the idea when we lived in California, 25 years ago, the idea being that on one day, you really celebrate the good that people can do hands on. And it very quickly became a day when Jewish people, it was set up to be Jewish, but it was always set up to be a day that Jewish people could reach out to other people.

So whether we were reaching out to a local non Jewish charity, whether we were reaching out to a mosque or a gurdwara or a church and saying, come and do it with us. The opportunities to do things hands on are there right across the board. So whether you are cleaning up a park, you're filling a food bank, you are going and visiting old people, which is actually my favourite activity on Mitzvah Day, whatever it is, you can do something to make the world better, physically.

Go out, do something and do it with other people. So the doing it with other people is integral to Mitzvah Day.

Now, when I started Mitzvah Day, I was much less, I mean, my background's in marketing and advertising, but when I started Mitzvah Day, I hadn't really thought through, and I think the world was a different place too, in terms of how this fitted into the interfaith arena.

I wasn't really thinking in those terms. I was thinking about something Jewish and positive and inclusive. But I think that now 20 years, almost 20 years on Mitzvah Day is well established in pretty much every mainstream Jewish community in the UK and also in about 30 other countries. This far on, I realize that we need Mitzvah Day because not only does it operate at a local level, pulling people together, but it's also very positive.

And right now the Jewish community really need it. There's a lot of people telling me this year and last year, but particularly both years really, that they don't want to be seen doing something Jewish. And that's a real phenomenon we've got going on. There's so much anxiety and fear.

And I'm not saying that the Jews are the only community feeling that. I think the Muslim communities are also feeling that, but the Jews are feeling it really acutely. It's not a hierarchy. The idea of going out on the street visibly and loudly Jewish is quite daunting for some people.

And the good thing about Mitzvah Day is it's so positive. We're not asking for money. You get away from all the Jewish stereotypes about money. It's about being positive, reaching out to our neighbors, giving back, and being part of a giving society, which we really need right now. So that was my sort of start point into the interfaith world.

And I know now when I look at it, it's a Jewish led model of interfaith. It's Jews leading this. And there's all sorts of models where a particular faith community leads an initiative. We reach out to our local church food bank, and we reach out to our local gurdwara who are serving lunch to people, or we are going and helping a mosque with their cleanup of the local park. Whatever it is.

It's an opportunity. It gives people a vehicle. It gives people a way to say, we're here. We want to do good. We do good year round. It's not something people only do one faith communities. This is what we do, right? We do every day. And we want to do it with our neighbours because we want to reach out.

Thank you. In my research, I've heard a lot of people express the view that women's interfaith organisations are more resilient in times like this than mixed gender groups.

Does this ring true with your experiences in Nisa Nashim and the Women's Faith Forum? And if so, why do you think that might be?

The short answer is yes. But if I take a step back, in about 2011, I did a commission for the Jewish community about the role of women in leadership, which as you would expect was pretty much like in other, particularly minority faith communities where not necessarily through religion, actually, or through scriptures, but through tradition, through culture, through family pressures, through, historical norms, the women have taken different roles and those roles have not been leadership roles.

And it's sort of the norm in the faith communities. It's the norm everywhere, but it's the norm particularly in the faith communities. We are behind on this one. And a lot of people joke when they see me say that because they look at me and other sort of strong, often Jewish women and say, well, how can you say that?

But it's true. There is no doubt that it's true in all of the faith communities. It's deeply embedded.

So after I had done that, I was working there both on Mitzvah Day and on thinking more and more about the role of women. And it was the obvious thing to do was to set up Nisa Nashim because Nisa Nashim means women in Arabic and Hebrew.

And so it's women and women. And we chose the name because it was one of the many, many, demonstrations of how similar Jewish and Muslim people are. We even have the same language in so many ways, same culture, same history of immigration, same patriarchy, same food. Lots of the rituals are the same, same prophets.

And we wanted to do something which was about bringing the two communities together. And I'm not sure that one was higher up our priorities than the other. They're both really big priorities and doing it together seemed like just such a brilliant idea. And I think it is a brilliant idea actually.

And we set up these groups all around the country and we started doing all sorts of things together. And the last two years have been horrific, right? Absolutely awful. And there's so much pressure to disengage. And I think the pressure is greater on the Muslim women than it is on the Jewish women, for all sorts of reasons.

But either way, both lots of women feel silenced, feel unheard, feel that it's really difficult to engage with the other side. And that the moment you get into the politics of the Middle East, the moment you get into, ah, yes, but Hamas did that, oh yes, but Israel did that, the moment you get into that, you're sunk because you go round and round in circles.

You know, if there was a solution by now that was easy, someone would have found it and we're unlikely to find it in our meetings on X, Y, or Z, whatever we're talking about. So mostly it's divisive. But what we do talk about and what we can share is we can share grief, anger, pain, how it's impacting our kids, how it's impacting our communities, how it's tearing families apart.

We can talk about despair. We can talk about hope, kindness, reaching out, similarities. So, there are things we can talk about around. But the conflict itself, you get nowhere. And I do think that all of those things that I was talking about, they're very female, you know, they are the sorts of things women talk about.

How are your kids dealing with this? How did you feel when your children couldn't wear their blazer on their way to school? How did you feel when your daughter was on the bus and got her hijab tweaked, you know, all those things. They're the sorts of things that women talk about, but they're real and they are as real as anything else that the men are talking about, but we're talking about it metaphorically and physically with our arms around each other.

Thank you. And then finally, at the recent Women's Faith Forum meeting in Parliament, I noticed there were significantly more young people present than is often the case in interfaith settings, and I wondered if this is something you've consciously cultivated, and how can we do more to ensure that future generations are actually engaging in interfaith encounter?

So let me explain about the Women's Faith Forum. So, it's interesting because Mitzvah Day is a Jewish- led model of interfaith. Okay? Nisa Nashim is a partnership, Jewish and Muslim. I realized a few years ago that actually there was an opportunity for a multi faith model as well.

And the Women's Faith Forum is that. It's a multi faith model of interfaith action. And increasingly, actually, I don't use the word interfaith. Increasingly, I start thinking about social cohesion, because that's what we're doing, right? We're building a stronger, more resilient, more caring, more connected society.

So the Women's Faith Forum is six women. We are all relatively well known and active in our own communities. We don't claim to speak for our communities, but we claim to be of our communities, right? So I am very much of the Jewish community. I don't represent it. There's all sorts of people who are very different from me, but I understand the Jewish community and it's the same with the other women.

And we are deliberately a partnership. We don't have a chair. We set up to see what we could do collectively as women and as people from all the different major faith backgrounds, what we could do to make the world better. So we don't spend a lot of time talking about “in our scripture, we do this and we do that”, unless it's helpful in terms of giving us ideas about things we can do. Our focus is on changing the world. Food poverty, isolation, hate crime, extremism. All of those things, which are all crises of today.

So we've had quite a lot of events before we launched in parliament this year in February. We've had two events in parliament. Which was a long preamble to your question.

But yes, we did have quite a lot of young people. And I think for lots of reasons.

Partly because it's less contentious. So we actually a few years ago set up a student Nisa Nashim. It was very difficult and that was, long before October the 7th. It was very difficult because students have very strong opinions and are often activists and don't necessarily want to look for the similarities. They are often looking for the differences because they are passionate about their cause.

And within the Women's Faith Forum, we are very, very committed to doing things together. So it was interesting, we didn't at our first event, even though it was in February this year, we didn't talk about the conflict, which would have been the obvious thing to talk about.

We chose instead to talk about gendered Islamophobia and gendered antisemitism, which are outcomes of the conflict, but get you away from the conflict.

They're things that are real. And they were also things that people from other faith communities were amazingly well disposed to come along and be supported, be allies. So why do young people come? I think maybe because it's in parliament. Lots of them, quite a few of them met their own MPs there.

Preet Kaur Gill was one of the MPs who came and there was a group from her own constituency. I think being in parliament makes it something interesting that young people would want to come to. I think it's not contentious in the way that Nisa Nashim can feel. It's not led by one community.

A lot of young people get involved in Mitzvah Day. A lot of Jewish societies on campus do it. Pretty much every Jewish school does it. You get young people in that way.

But I think the Women's Forum event had a sort of cachet and interest about it. It felt big. And by feeling big, I think that young people maybe feel that it's something worth their while investing in because young people need to be involved in the big things, right? They need to be involved in the vision for the future. And so maybe, and it wasn't deliberately setting out to do that, but I think it's a massive bonus that if we can find ways to bring young people in and get them to feel inspired and as women, as young women, to see that they can do things with people they wouldn't necessarily otherwise meet, they wouldn't necessarily otherwise have around to their houses or to their communities. There's something hugely positive and hopeful about that.

Thank you so much. That's my last question.

Thank you so much for talking to me today.

Well, it's an absolute pleasure and I wish you the best of luck with your research.

Thank you.