Solidarity is one of those words that gets weaker the more often people say it.
So it helps to begin with money.
After the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh in October 2018, Muslim organizations raised substantial funds for the synagogue victims and their families. Months later, after the Christchurch mosque massacres in New Zealand, Pittsburgh's Jewish community returned the gesture, helping raise support for Muslim victims there. Those two moments did not solve Muslim-Jewish relations. They did something more modest and more believable. They created a record of reciprocal action under conditions of grief.
That is worth taking seriously.
The Pittsburgh response showed what fast solidarity looks like
JTA reported in October 2018 that Muslim organizations raised more than $115,000 for Tree of Life victims within a day, and the effort kept growing after that. The campaign language, as quoted by JTA, was simple: respond to evil with good.
That mattered because it moved support out of abstraction.
It is one thing to condemn antisemitism in principle. It is another to help pay for funerals, medical care, and the immediate needs left behind by an attack. Real communities notice the difference. They also remember it.
The return gesture mattered just as much
That is why the Christchurch response was not merely symbolic.
JTA later reported that Tree of Life and the broader Pittsburgh Jewish community helped raise money for the Muslim victims of the mosque killings in New Zealand. The language used by Tree of Life made the connection explicit: the community felt compelled to help because Muslims had shown overwhelming support to Pittsburgh only months earlier.
This is the part that deserves preservation.
Reciprocity changed the meaning of the first gift. Muslim aid to Pittsburgh was not left as a beautiful exception. Jewish aid to Christchurch made it part of a shared moral script: when your community is attacked, we know what that feels like, and we are coming anyway.
None of this erases harder conflicts
It would be cheap to turn these episodes into a fantasy that Jews and Muslims only need a few more dialogue dinners to transcend geopolitics.
They do not.
The American Jewish Committee's piece on Muslim-Jewish partnership is useful here because it says the quiet part out loud. Joint advocacy, cultural exchange, and standing together after hate crimes matter. So does the reality that both communities contain people eager to deepen mistrust. Partnership does not abolish disagreement over Israel, antisemitism, Islamophobia, nationalism, or the vocabulary of public grievance.
That is exactly why mutual aid after violence matters.
It creates connective tissue in the one place where communities can still meet without pretending to agree on everything else: the refusal to let massacre become normal.
Infrastructure matters more than sentiment
The Muslim-Jewish Solidarity Committee's own mission statement helps explain what comes next after the emergency fundraising stage. Its vision is not only about mourning one another's dead. It is about building relationships sturdy enough that learning, celebration, service, and advocacy become recurring habits rather than crisis improvisations.
That is the adult version of solidarity.
It asks whether communities can institutionalize the better instincts they show at their best moments. Can they build committees, programs, friendships, and mutual obligations before the next attack instead of after? Can they maintain a working relationship when the news cycle is no longer making everybody look noble?
Those are harder questions than a viral fundraising total. They are also the only questions that determine whether solidarity outlives the headline.
Why this deserved a rebuilt article
Jewish-Muslim solidarity is real when it is specific, reciprocal, and organized. It is weakest when it is presented as a mood. Pittsburgh and Christchurch offered one of the clearest recent examples of what such solidarity can do. Not everything. Not peace in the Middle East. Not the end of mutual suspicion. But something morally serious: it can teach wounded communities how not to leave one another alone.
That is enough to matter.