Salaam Shalom: Jewish and Muslim Bristolians united through the creative arts

Salaam Shalom, the UK’s first Muslim-Jewish media-led project, was designed to utilise creative arts and media as a means for Jewish people and Muslims to be empowered by their faiths in the face of racial and religious discrimination.

In England and Wales alone, Muslims and Jewish people are most likely to be victims of religiously motivated hate crimes , both on and offline.

The organisation will be launching Cultural Collaborations, a series of workshops that offer Jewish people, Muslims and other religious minority groups an opportunity to express their multifaceted experiences through creative arts.

Implementing the strategy of artistic collaborative projects, Salaam Shalom is working to unite two marginalised groups in the West in order to represent a message of hope and unity that thrives over adversity.

What began as an online radio station 15 years ago, had evolved into establishing creative relationships through several projects.

This can be seen through previous works such as Salaam Shalom’s art exhibitions that displayed the works of local Muslim and Jewish artists, as well as the production of Semites, a London-based theatre show, that was inspired by real-life interviews conducted in Israel and Palestine.

For the Salaam Shalom team, such community based projects collaborations had inspired what is the organisation’s next integral focus: the creation of Cultural Collaborations.

Cultural Collaborations will consist of three sessions that will outline themes such as identity, culture and religion to produce a piece of art highlighting those topics such as shooting a short video involving poetry, dance, acting and/or music.

The team stated that as a collective, they do not expect concrete results from the workshops.

However, they do firmly believe that these projects can become a stepping stone in bridging a gap within discrepancies as the fight for self-expression and self-empowerment ensues, using art as a vessel of truth.

Source: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/salaam-shalom-jewish-muslim-bristolians-6650551

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