91�첥

In cities scarred by conflict, even the ground beneath our feet becomes contested territory. Streets, neighborhoods, and landmarks aren’t simply physical locations—they carry histories, memories, and meanings that vary dramatically depending on who’s doing the looking. But what happens when educators with very different backgrounds, but living in close proximity, deliberately examine these places together?

A new paper, by Michal Muszkat-Barkan, Ph.D., drawn from a decade in her role as the founder and academic head of the Teachers’ Lounge program in Jerusalem, offers compelling insights into how place itself can become a pedagogical tool for fostering understanding across divides. The study examines Jewish and Palestinian teachers participating in professional development, exploring how their encounters with concrete locations in their shared city transformed not only their understanding of place but also their perception of one another.

In an era of deepening polarization, both in regions of active conflict and in increasingly fragmented societies worldwide, Muszkat-Barkan’s research offers a practical methodology for fostering mutual understanding. The hermeneutics of place provides more than a theoretical framework; it offers a reproducible approach that educators can adapt to their own contexts.

The Teachers’ Lounge program demonstrates that dialogue doesn’t require participants to abandon their identities, histories, or commitments. Rather, it asks them to become curious about how others inhabit and interpret the same world they themselves walk through daily. In that curiosity lies the possibility of genuine encounter—not agreement necessarily, but the mutual recognition that makes shared society possible.

For teachers who shape how the next generation understands their place in the world, this kind of learning may be among the most essential professional developments they can undertake.

How did you come to understand “place” as a tool for learning across divides?

From the beginning, this program, Teachers’ Lounge, had a great emphasis on place. I felt, living in Jerusalem, that I was blind to half the city. I have my own geography, my own neighborhood, my own restaurants, and theaters. I have my own places to go. And I can live here for many years without noticing East Jerusalem, without noticing the neighborhoods of the Arab people. I realized that we don’t see each other’s lives. And it was easier to look at each other’s lives by describing where we are from.

How did you incorporate this idea into the program’s structure?

For the first session, we put a map in the center of the circle, and we asked people to tell us how they arrived. How did they get here? And many came in private cars, on trains, by bus, and walking. But there were some people who had to cross a barrier, who had to go through a checkpoint, who were standing for three hours waiting to be able to move across.

Many started to see that there are things in your own city that you never think about. We may live close to each other, not all Arab neighborhoods are in the east, but we never looked at each other because we have separate lives, separate routes.

So talking about our lives through the places we live is a very rich resource for curiosity. It’s not direct argumentation. There is a lot of tension between us, and we are in a conflict that is not going to be easily resolved. Getting to meet each other really has its own value aside from conflict resolution.

What else did you learn?

Each group planned a tour in the same city, each of which became intercultural encounters. We would visit a regular home in a regular neighborhood, which is richer than viewing it as a tourist or never viewing it at all.

And so, over time, we realized that speaking about place may offer good leverage to open a deeper encounter and to understand, on a more meaningful level, what it means to live in conflict. And we can do it through personal perspectives and personal memories. Not to fight about history, but to learn about who we are. And that enables us to listen to each other deeply, which is a key to getting to know each other better and to have a structure to discuss the reality that we are all living in.

What was the most surprising thing you learned?

I realized during the years with this program, how much fear is driving relationships between Jews and Arabs, and how much this fear is manipulated both by leadership who doesn’t want us to live together, but also by how fear is rooted in the feeling that we don’t have any future together.

And if we don’t see a shared future, we will continue fighting each other, killing each other, hurting each other. If we want to dream about Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, we need to find ways to live together, to imagine ourselves in the future as we share this place.

Why is 91�첥 a meaningful home for this kind of work?

This is one of the deepest values of this institution. The value of fighting for peace, fighting for a shared future. Fighting for pluralism, for multiculturalism, for solidarity. It’s easy to give up. It’s easy to say let’s wait for an easier time. Let’s continue just training Jewish leaders for the liberal community. But what are we expecting of those leaders? We’re expecting them to lead these charges, to bring together Jews and Arabs, to bring together different people, to bridge the toughest challenges in order to imagine a different way of living. I believe we are what we do, not what we talk about. So are we doing enough?

To read the abstract of Muszkat Barkan’s article, please click .