The Douglass Campus Center at Rutgers New Brunswick hosted a collaborative effort between School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) faculty working in Jewish Studies and those focusing on the Arab and Islamic world called "Going Viral: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and the Role of the Media” to draw parallels between contemporary conversations concerning these forms of prejudice in popular culture. Featuring professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University, Jack Shaheen and the American Jewish Committee’s specialist on anti-Semitism, Kenneth Stern, the event was designed to "inject reason, tolerance, and thoughtfulness into an increasingly rancorous conversation taking place on college campuses, in the media, and in the political arena."¹

Gathering sponsors from the Bildner Center, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies; the Department of Jewish Studies; the Middle Eastern Studies Program; the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, and the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, the panel hopes to generate more thorough discussions of prejudice across multiple disciplines.  As Charles Haberl, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies emphasizes the need to "remove this issue from the immediate situation and talk about it in terms of its broader context..." She continues, "Rather than simply address this from the perspective of polemics, our intention was to broaden the discussion and talk about the history of these two phenomena, and how they relate to one another."²