Call for Applications for New Cohort for the 2025-2026 Academic Year
The Berkeley Bridging Fellowship Program (BBF), a forum and community-building space of the College of Letters & Science, invites applications to join our second annual cohort of fellows. The Bridging Fellowship Program is a unique undertaking focused on cultivating a space and community for meaningful and supported conversations about Israel and Palestine. It runs through both the fall and spring semesters, meeting a total of nine times in the fall and eleven times in the spring, with expected readings and reflections in-between meetings. Participants selected for the program generally take the Bridging fellowship as a two-semester sequence course, for which you receive 2 credits each semester, and a letter grade at the end of the academic year (Pass/No Pass is also an option). Participants in the first cohort, during the 2024-2025 academic year, came from extremely diverse communities, backgrounds, and perspectives, and found the experience engaging, educational, and often transformative.
I have learned to be able to listen to different and new opinions, and gotten better at asking insightful questions that help engage conversations and promote dialogue… I have used the skills learned in the fellowship to have other difficult conversations but also to converse in a more useful and thought-provoking way with my friends.
What makes the Berkeley Bridging Fellowship exceptional is the unique combination of three experiences: (1) learning content from a very wide array of leading experts on Israel, Palestine, and related subjects; (2) diving deep with world-class facilitators to develop powerful skills for talking across differences; and (3) building community among a remarkable and remarkably diverse group of your fellow students you might never otherwise encounter. Before applying, please read carefully below to understand the commitments involved in this program.
How to Apply
The application can be found here: Berkeley Bridging Fellowship Program Application
Many questions about the program are answered on this page below. Other questions about the program or the application process can be directed to bbf@berkeley.edu.
To guarantee full consideration, applications should be submitted by July 1, 2025. We will continue to accept applications on a rolling basis until July 15, 2025. We may conduct interviews with a select number of applicants and will reach out to schedule those in late July or early August. Selected fellows will be notified no later than August 15, 2025.
Structure and Requirements
This is a facilitated experience that mixes participatory group modalities, arts and culture, and educational content with expert instructors. It includes mostly in-person sessions, with some of the expert presenters doing so remotely (even as students are gathered together in-person for those content sessions). In the 2025-2026 academic year, during the fall semester, fellows are expected to attend a total of 6 meetings on Tuesdays from 3 to 5 PM, 2 all-day retreats on Sundays (from 10 AM to 5 PM), and 1 half-day retreat from 9 AM to 1 PM (also on a Sunday). The Tuesday sessions will be led by renowned experts on key academic topics connected to the region’s history and current events, and the retreats are led by the program’s two facilitators (more on them below). The spring semester follows a similar schedule (7 Tuesday sessions from 3 to 5 PM with major thinkers on history, politics, culture, or current events, and 4 all- or half-day retreats on Sundays led by the facilitators). All meetings are mandatory.
This experience of interacting with the other fellows and learning in the fellowship was rewarding, well-supported, and surprising.
The program is generally done as part of a two-semester sequence course, which this year will count for 2 credits each semester. If the course component presents a problem, please contact us. This year’s cohort of the Berkeley Bridging Fellowship will welcome about 25 UCB undergraduate students. Given the nature of the work, those with personal connections to the region are particularly encouraged to apply.
At the conclusion of the program, the fellows have an opportunity to apply their learning in two avenues for direct action: (1) They are invited together to an in-person, extended meeting with UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons where they are asked to share their opinions about what campus can or should do better to address the needs of various facets of the Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, and Israeli communities on campus, or to facilitate greater opportunities for conversations across communities. (2) As a Capstone final assignment, each student works with the facilitators, faculty conveners, and program sponsors to take their experience as Bridging Fellows into spaces or groups on or off of campus and create a viable initiative for better conversations within or across communities. The idea is that this is a way to carry the work of the fellowship forward to maximize the tangible impact of your experience and share it with others. Thus the hope is that such initiatives would unfold in the summer or fall following the completion of the program. Budgetary support is provided to help with the design and implementation of the capstone projects.
Our Commitments
The program makes no demands for any predetermined ideology, experience, or background. We do not engage in any tone-policing, but we do invite and expect a willingness to listen and reflect. The conveners and facilitators have diverse, conflicting views on a number of issues and the widest possible range of political, cultural, intellectual, and philosophical perspectives is truly sought and welcomed into the fellowship. While we know there are intense debates about the proper terminology to describe the historic and current violence, we start with the shared belief that this violence is horrific and untenable, and that multiple alternative paths to justice and to peace must be built.
Program Description
The Bridging Fellowship Program began with a series of conversations among diverse Berkeley faculty, staff, and students in the fall of 2023. The BBF program is a radical and hopeful undertaking during a moment in which, for more than a year and a half, the escalated violence in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and the region more broadly has caused immense grief, anger, and despair, deeply dividing many on our campus. So many of us are looking for spaces in which we can grieve and process, and openly discuss the range of emotions brought about for us by the situation in the region. Many of us have personally experienced loss and trauma directly connected to the recent and historical violence in Palestine and Israel, or have faced uncomfortable encounters with fellow students or others in our campus community, including episodes of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, and anti-Israeli discrimination. We feel trapped under the extraordinary weight of all these developments and yet we often lack the capacity to discuss our experience, seek out the experiences of others, or attempt to build bridges through deeper understanding.
The Berkeley Bridging Fellowship is an experiment in what might be possible when we come together with intention. Our inaugural cohort during the 2024-2025 academic year was remarkably diverse – it included Palestinian, Jewish, Israeli, and Muslim students, connected to more than half a dozen nationalities. It was also extremely diverse politically, spanning a very wide spectrum of opinions and outlooks. The fellows found the Bridging fellowship to be a challenging and powerful experience that each participant described as an immense opportunity for unique, multi-vocal learning and discussions, and personal growth. While fellows often maintained their previous deep commitments to communities, identities, and various political causes, many found their perspectives, skillsets, and approaches to activism utterly transformed by their experience as a Bridging fellow.
Some of the words that students from the initial cohort have used to describe their experiences are: “meaningful”, “thought-provoking,” “transformative,” “educational,” “memorable,” “powerful,” and “an engaging experience full of growth in dialogue.”
Program Takeaways
The Bridging fellowship creates a unique space on the Berkeley campus for a diverse community of students who care deeply about Israel and Palestine. The immediate takeaways of the program will be fivefold:
● Acquiring deeper self-awareness and a set of tangible skills and practices for having meaningful discussions about not only the situation in Palestine and Israel but highly fraught and sensitive topics more broadly.
● Building relationships and community among groups of students from different cultural and political perspectives who are struggling to come to grips with the terrible violence in Palestine and Israel that has unfolded since October 7, 2023, with acknowledgement that the current moment unfolds within much longer histories – of periodic violence targeted against civilians, ongoing military occupation and structural violence, stark asymmetries of power and resources, violent ideologies of hatred and elimination, and shifting international politics.
● Finding ways to apply immediately the experiences as Berkeley Bridging Fellows through direct conversation with senior administrators and an initiative-building capstone through which each fellow will be supported in trying to begin new conversations within and across communities.
● Encountering and learning from a wide range of perspectives and direct experiences of the history and contemporary situation in Israel and Palestine.
● Learning about Jewish, Muslim, Arab, Israeli, and Palestinian cultures, traditions, and histories.
One fellow with deep personal experiences in the struggle over Palestine and Israel explained that whereas previously they had often shied away from hearing “the other side’s perspective,” after the experience of the fellowship, they “now feel equipped to hold discomfort and approach conversations with humility, empathy, and a genuine desire to understand.”
Another student who entered the fellowship realizing that their own understanding had been narrowly shaped by the community in which they grew up explained after the first several months in the fellowship that this had shifted markedly: “Moving forward…I intend to advocate with historical clarity and mutual respect as essential tools for fostering dialogue and progress, for the benefit and success of both peoples.”
Process
We begin the fellowship by building a container in which participants can process together and sit with each other’s lived and secondary experiences of the violence and trauma. We will invite this through a range of participatory group modalities, including circle work, storytelling, listening, and somatics. Participants will have opportunities for artistic creation, interpretive conversation, and the sharing of evocative music, poetry, and visual art from various traditions. As we develop our capacity to engage with a range of experiences and vantage points, we also expand our historical, cultural, and political knowledge of the region.
The program works to build a community of students who can help engender more connected, generative, and transformative discussions on our campus and, in time, far beyond. In the spirit of transformative dialogue processes in other regions and conflicts throughout history, we find ways over time to come together with deeper knowledge, empathy, and mutual respect, embracing a multiplicity of visions in which all people, in Palestine, Israel, and everywhere, can exist with human dignity, equal rights, safety, and freedom.
I feel much more morally grounded after the fellowship conversations, and I’m asking new questions.
To apply for the fellowship, go here! Berkeley Bridging Fellowship Program Application
Program Facilitators and Conveners
Each dialogue session of the Bridging Fellowship will be led by two highly experienced facilitators with deep experience, knowledge, and care about Palestine and Israel. These are Alia Lahlou and Dorit Price-Levine. The faculty conveners of the group, Professor Ethan Katz and Professor Asad Ahmed, lead the more content-centered sessions, and often bring guest experts to present material. All of their bios are below:
Alia Lahlou supports people working for social change and liberation around the world through facilitation, coaching, and training. She has 15 years of professional experience in organizational development, traditional and social justice mediation, Non Violent Communication, anti-oppression and justice facilitation, circle work, somatics, and various healing and community building modalities. She is a core member of the facilitation teams at YES!, working at the meeting point of personal, interpersonal, and systemic change; and at Interaction Institute for Social Change, building collaborative capacity and transformative leadership for social justice. At the root of all her work is a dedication to creating brave spaces for people to grow and to (un)learn in community. Alia grew up in Morocco and has degrees in international relations from Brown University and Al Akhawayn University. She has worked in nearly 20 countries on 5 continents. Alia is deeply inspired by the life and work of James Baldwin, particularly his simultaneous and uncompromised commitment to both justice and to love; she strives to walk through the world with authentic attention to both.
Dorit Price-Levine is a licensed attorney, mediator, facilitator, and coach with over 15 years of experience in conflict resolution. She specializes in guiding individuals and organizations through complex dialogues, particularly on issues of identity, belonging, and political polarization. Dorit’s expertise includes designing collaborative decision-making processes, leading communication skillbuilding workshops, and providing management and conflict resolution coaching. Dorit was a Senior Associate at the Consensus-Building Institute and Deputy Director and Senior Facilitator at Resetting the Table. Prior to that, she lived and worked in the Middle East, primarily in Israel and Palestine. She continues to be involved in peace-building initiatives there. She has a working knowledge of Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic.
Prof. Asad Ahmed specializes in early Islamic social history and pre-modern Islamic intellectual history, with a special focus on the rationalist disciplines, such as philosophy, logic, legal theories, and astronomy. Although he has worked extensively on Islamic intellectual history of the so-called classical period (ca. 800-1200 CE), his current focus is the period ca. 1200-1900 CE, especially with reference to the Indian subcontinent. He is the author of The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz (Oxford, 2011), Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic (Oxford, 2011), and Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Muslim India (University of California Press, 2022). He is the Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture, and the Faculty Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
Prof. Ethan Katz is an expert on Jewish-Muslim relations and modern Jewish history who teaches courses on Muslim-Jewish Encounters, Jewish history, and the history of modern Israel. He is the author of the prize-winning book The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard, 2015) and the co-editor of Colonialism and the Jews (Indiana, 2017). He is currently an Associate Professor of History, the Faculty Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, the co-founder of the Antisemitism Education Initiative at Berkeley, and Chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Life and Campus Climate. He has participated in a number of Jewish/Muslim dialogue programs over many years, and took part in the “Encounter” program in Israel/Palestine.
The facilitators and conveners will continue to expand the circle of those involved in shaping the program as widely as possible. As we develop the program’s content, we are working with a wide range of faculty at Berkeley and far beyond for their content expertise, many of whom will participate as presenters in individual sessions of the program.