Jacob Bender
Executive Director, Council on American-Islamic Relations
(Philadelphia Chapter)
“I was born into a Jewish immigrant family immersed in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, where being a Jew obligated one to take part in the great struggles for social justice and protest the ever-growing militarization of American foreign policy. In today’s America, it is the American Muslim community that is one of the main targets of the current administration’s campaign of racist intimidation. I am honored to stand with my Muslim brothers and sisters in their struggle for justice.”
Biography
As executive director of CAIR-Philadelphia, Jacob Bender has accomplished decades of activism promoting mutual respect and understanding between Muslims, Christians, and Jews around the world and on behalf of peace and justice movements in the U.S. Because of his work in promoting interfaith understanding, Jacob was selected as a finalist for the prestigious 2012 Goldziher Prize for Jewish-Muslim Relations, presented by Merrimack University, a Catholic college in Massachusetts. He has also been a longtime voice in the American Jewish community supporting the rights of the Palestinian people and a just resolution of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
Bender has a degree in religious studies from UCLA and studied film and television at New York University’s Graduate School of Film. Bender has been widely published on the topic of Muslim-West relations, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict, in The New York Times, L.A. Times, International Herald Tribune, Jordan Times, El Pais, and The Daily Star of Beirut. Bender is also a documentary filmmaker, and his most recent production is the award-winning film Out of Cordoba, exploring the lives and influence of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) the Muslim, and Musa Ibn Maymun (Maimonides) the Jew, the two greatest thinkers to emerge from Al-Andalus. The film has been screened around the world at film festivals, conferences, universities, mosques, churches, and synagogues, including at United Nations Headquarters in New York and the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin. The film was funded by a unique combination of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish donors, including a major grant from the Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation of Saudi Arabia.