CAIRO — Just weeks after a New Year's Day church bombing rocked the port city of Alexandria, Egypt's religious tensions have been set aside as the country's Muslims and Christians join forces at anti-government protests. Making my way to Tahrir Square during the anti-Mubarak protests, a striking piece of graffiti caught my eye. Scrawled on the concrete pillar of a flyover was the symbol of a Muslim crescent embracing the Christian cross and the words: "We are all against the 

CHICAGO — This conference, "Changing Roles? Women in Traditional Jewish and Muslim Communities," will attempt to discuss and examine Muslim and Jewish women's traditional roles in context with modernity, women's rights, and progressivism. "In both Islam and Judaism there's a sense that one's relationship [to God] is [through religious] law," said Samuel Fleischacker, Professor at UIC, director of Jewish Studies, and the organizer of this conference. Fleischacker says that there is a tension for these women between wanting to stick to traditional religious laws, and taking up leadership positions in their communities, and in turn breaking into Western society. "There's a lot of deference to the past." These women want to show certain respect to the way things were done before." Religious law is considered a "good thing," said Fleischacker. The Halacha (Jewish Law) and the Sharia (Islamic Law) are a part of the all encompassing practice of both religions. Religious requirements

LONDON — Jewish and Muslim students are joining forces to tackle anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on university campuses - in a bid to spread a message of tolerance. One of those with first-hand experience of religious hatred is Yassir, who as a student in 2004 was abused as he set off for his mosque in London. Four teenagers spat at him and called him "Bin Laden." Shortly afterwards, he was beaten up, which left him in

ROME — Tullia Zevi, who fled Fascism as a teenager and led Italy’s Jewish community during a period of improving relations with the Vatican, died on Saturday in Rome. She was 91. Her death, in a hospital near her home in Rome’s Jewish Ghetto after a short illness, was confirmed by her granddaughter, Nathania Zevi. As president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities from 1983 to 1998, Ms. Zevi was among those who greeted Pope John Paul II when he visited the Rome synagogue in 1986, the first by a modern pope to a synagogue and a watershed in Catholic-Jewish relations. She also helped negotiate a groundbreaking agreement between Jewish leaders and Italy as part of a reform in which Roman Catholicism lost its status as an official state religion and the symbols and property of other faiths were granted equal status under the law. Elegant, poised and multilingual, Ms. Zevi played a major role as the dialogue between the Vatican and the world Jewish community blossomed, and she helped