Cultivating a Community of Bridge-Builders

by Gabriel Krause-Grosman, August 2026

At a time when civic dialogue feels like a rare privilege, I am glad that bridge-building is being studied, and grateful to be part of the conversation. As a participant in the inaugural cohort of Campus Commons, which supplied over half of the students studied, I was deeply interested in this report, but feel strongly that there is more nuance to be uncovered.

The CASJE report, Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Jewish Undergraduates and Engagement Across Difference, analyzes interviews with 30 campus bridge-builders. Most interviewees define the bridge-builder as someone who enters conversations without intent to change anyone's mind, including their own. Yet some of these same bridge-builders view personal change as a core reason for doing the work. Abby, for example, "lives" for personal transformation and Rebecca is "hungry" to be challenged. Dr. Riback Rand observes that this explicit language of understanding-but-not-change "does not fully align" with how some bridge-builders implicitly experience the work.

True understanding of someone else's perspective carries an implicit liability of viewpoint transformation. You may not enter a conversation aiming to change your own mind, but it is a plausible result of good-faith engagement. The report's working definition does not distinguish intent to change an interlocutor's mind from openness to changing your own, two notions we ought to pull apart. Tal comes close to saying it herself: you can't come to people with the goal of changing their mind, "but first the goal of listening and understanding." Through this lens, understanding is an entry posture, not a promise to remain unmoved.

The report's quadrant cleanly separates bridge-building from debate, advocacy, and polemic. Yet within that low-temperature, genuine-listening quadrant, right next to the bridge-builder, sits a figure the report doesn't name: the diplomat, an unexposed observer, withholding their own convictions to manage the relationship. An approach like Leah's, "always me asking them questions," can shade into this disposition. Advocacy is framed as expression without listening. Diplomacy represents the opposite, and yet goes unregistered, because the horizontal axis measures only whether we engage with another's views, not whether we offer our own. What's missing is that third measure of whether we expose our own views to revision. As someone who's at times been a diplomat and thought I was virtuously bridge-building, it's important to recognize that being a good listener without the courage and vulnerability of sharing your voice and convictions forfeits equality with your conversation partner.

This does not have to conflict with situational self-effacement, one of the report's four characteristics; temporarily decentering yourself while remaining movable is a powerful skill. Yet sinking into the comfort of that posture risks leaving your convictions outside the exchange entirely, neither brought into contact with what you hear nor offered up in return. The result may be one person who understands better and another who feels better understood, while the convictions of only one participant have truly entered the conversation.

With this in mind, another question comes into view as we zoom out from the individual: is bridge-building a personal trait, a facet of one's personality, or is it cultivated by certain institutional and social environments? The report names four characteristics of the bridge-builder: Jewish pride, situational self-effacement, an ability to lower the temperature of discourse, an orientation toward complexity. Participants often describe these dispositions as innate or rooted in their own formative experiences, yet the influence of community norms is legible in some of their own tellings. When Merav describes learning to "argue from a very young age" in a way that is "respectful and intense and honest," growing up in a family of rabbis, she is describing an inherited communal tradition that blends into a personal mentality. How much of Merav's formation is the Talmudic modeling of dialogue, how much is her particular family culture, and how much is the community that shaped both? Miriam lands in the same place from the practical side: to approach bridge-building "as if you're learning a new sport or a new instrument is a strange project"; the work is "creating the setting," not "teaching people how to do it." Nathan’s experience after graduation takes this one step further. Once outside the Hillel and college environment, he describes his views becoming less nuanced, challenging how static and individual an “orientation toward complexity” really is, and suggesting how much it may be shaped and sustained by the communities and structures around us.

In Campus Commons, what stood out to me was how much the setting shaped student behavior. There was of course a self-selection bias, but the shared values, deep respect, time to sit with questions, and sense of security made opening up, even without absolute conviction, much easier. Campus Commons and similar programs can inspire, but they also give us a chance to study the environments in which bridge-building happens, not just the people who practice it. It’s important to support the students already doing great work on their campuses, but the deeper question is what allows a culture to produce, sustain, and learn from bridge-builders.

Interpersonal outcomes, worthwhile as they are, may be less the goal of this work than the starting point for shifting institutional structures and cultural norms. The report's conclusion already charts a middle path, calling for bridge-building to be woven into Jewish learning and communal life alongside structured programming. I want to push it further: how do we strengthen the institutions already doing this work, learn what is effective, and carry those lessons into other communities? 

Gabriel Krause-Grosman is a Senior at Boston College where he studies Political Science and Transformative Education. A participant in the inaugural Campus Commons cohort, he is interested in how conditions shape people.