During field research in Paris (2015-17) I joined an otherwise all-woman steering group for Jewish-Muslim dialogue at the Mouvement Juif Libéral de France. The impetus for the steering group came from the response to the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Kasher murders in January 2015. Over two hundred people, friends and regular congregational members alike, wrote to the Movement asking them to help people live together (aider le vivre ensemble). Participant Observation therefore fitted intimately to both the research project and the circumstances as my motivation for involvement straddled these civic concerns and my professional responsibility.
The aim of this paper is to explore the work of the steering group and the difficulties of developing durable models for Jewish-Muslim encounters in the context of a ‘state of emergency’. It points towards the sustainability of bottom-up initiatives and it endeavours to illuminate the obstacles of a movement positioned on the margins of an official traditionalist/orthodox community. Conversations on the fringes of the steering group initiatives speak to both intra- and interreligious local and global tensions around the site of the religious in secular society, and the question of gender (crucial for the Liberal Movement) and religion.