AAVC Spirit of Vassar Award Bestowed Upon Georgette Bennett ’67, an ‘Evangelist’ for Nuanced, Interreligious Understanding

At the northwest corner of campus, where Vassar connects to its Arlington neighbors, stands a gate dedicated to a Holocaust survivor and Hungarian refugee “whose dream of a Vassar education for her daughter was realized here.” On September 18, that daughter, Georgette Bennett ’67, came back to campus to talk about her work fostering interreligious cooperation and to accept the 2025 Spirit of Vassar Award from the Alumnae/i Association of Vassar College (AAVC).

“Having started life as a stateless refugee, Vassar was a milestone along the road to the American dream,” Bennett said in accepting the award. “So it’s deeply meaningful to me to receive this great honor from my alma mater.”

The annual AAVC Spirit of Vassar Award recognizes an alum “who has demonstrated extraordinary and distinguished leadership, contribution, and commitment to serving a community in which they affect positive, transformative societal change.” In Bennett’s case, that “community” is nothing short of the entire world. As founder of both the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding and the Multifaith Alliance, Bennett has spent decades mobilizing faith communities to confront global crises, bridge divides, and transform conflicts into opportunities for healing and change. During her talk, titled “Mobilizing Interreligious Relations to Transform Conflicts and Confront Big Issues,” she spoke with Vassar’s new Associate Dean for Religious and Spiritual Life and Contemplative Practices, Reverend Callista Isabelle, about how she goes about that seemingly impossible mission in an ever-more dangerous and polarized world.

Watch the talk and award ceremony.

Isabelle started by asking Bennett to “share some of the early religious and spiritual roots of your life and how they have informed your work in an ongoing way.” The in-person audience at Rockefeller Hall and viewers online via Zoom immediately became riveted by Bennett’s description of her early years in Hungary and her family’s escape from the Nazis in the 1940’s.

“I was born into a bombed-out apartment, and there was no food. My mother tells me the only thing she could get hold of was beer and sardines, and that’s what I was fed on as a baby,” said Bennett, who also recalled that her mother suffered seven miscarriages. “I think very much about myself as having had an accidental and unexpected life, because between the Nazis and the miscarriages, the odds of my having been born are practically nil, and so that has left me with a lifelong feeling that I owe a debt to the world; that’s driven a lot of my life’s work.”

Another source of inspiration was her belief in God, which developed once her father died soon after the family emigrated to Queens, NY. But, having developed a close friendship with a young neighbor with whom she attended Christian Science Sunday school, she didn’t see the God she believed in as belonging to one religion or another. “At age nine or so, I became an evangelist,” she recalled. “I wasn’t evangelizing Christianity or Judaism or any other religion. I was evangelizing God. … At one point, I got it into my head that I’d like to be the first Jewish nun. That’s how much into God I was at that age.”

At Vassar, Bennett pursued an academic interest in religion but majored in sociology, having become energized by the politics of second-wave feminism, the Civil Rights movement, and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. After earning a PhD in sociology from New York University, she worked as a criminologist, advising New York City’s police department on issues related to women. Also, she said, “as a criminologist, I became very interested in the links between religion and violence, specifically the way that apocalyptic thinking and believing that one has a monopoly on truth, how that ultimately leads to violence.”

In 1982, she married Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, one of the most influential religious leaders in America. “He introduced me to a kind of outward-facing Judaism that had an enormous impact on me,” Bennett explained, “and he introduced me to the ways in which religious coalitions could be formed to address conflict, to address serious social problems. For example, he helped organize the international rescue effort for the Vietnamese ‘boat people.’” Tanenbaum also built alliances between Jews and Muslims “at a time when this wasn’t being done,” which prompted Bennett to read the Quran from cover to cover—twice. “That helped me to understand what a deeply misunderstood religion Islam is, and the tremendous similarities between Islam and Judaism,” she said.

After Tanenbaum died in 1992, Bennett founded the Tanenbaum Center to continue his work. In 2013, she founded the Multifaith Alliance (MFA) to aid the millions of Syrian refugees displaced by civil war. “I was stunned by the magnitude of the suffering, and it just reminded me so much of what my own family had gone through during the Holocaust,” Bennett explained. “But it was really being a Jew that drove me to do it, because Leviticus 19:16 [states that] ‘Thou shalt not stand idly by while the blood of your neighbor cries out from the earth.’ And I just felt I could not stand idly by.”

Isabelle noted that through the MFA, Bennett was able to mobilize over $660 million in humanitarian aid to benefit nearly 4 million Syrians affected by war—and that the group had recently been able to provide aid to 100,000 families in Gaza. She then asked Bennett how religion can engender healing rather than conflict. “I’m curious what your thoughts are about how we might go about finding common ground in an especially polarized moment. How might we build bridges and understanding even right here at Vassar?”

“I mentioned earlier apocalyptic thinking,” Bennett replied. “One of the problems with religion is that it tends to divide the world into the children of light and the children of darkness. And the children of light hold a monopoly on truth. The children of darkness get dehumanized.” This type of “binary thinking” can progress quickly from dehumanizing speech to physical violence, Bennett warned.

A perfect example of binary thinking, she said later, is “the whole Israeli-Palestinian thing—that you have to be either pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, as if they’re mutually exclusive. They’re not mutually exclusive—you can be pro-both; it’s called being pro-humanity.”

Bennett said that liberal arts colleges such as Vassar, which emphasize the development of critical-thinking skills, have a role to play in exposing the fallacy of binary thinking—for example, “that you are either the oppressed or the oppressor, or you are the colonized or the colonizer,” she said. “That doesn’t leave any room for nuance. It doesn’t leave any room for communication, and it ain’t that simple. … The real world is full of the murky middle, and that’s what people have to learn to live with: the ambiguities of the murky middle.”

That’s just the type of education Bennet said she herself received at Vassar. “My education was nuanced, compassionate, and open,” she said. “My commitment to human rights, interreligious understanding, humanitarian diplomacy—all of that began here, and so did my understanding of democracy. The liberal arts and humanities are crucial for democracy to survive.”

Isabelle’s last question to Bennett was, “What have you seen in the last year that gives you hope?”

Bennett reframed the question: “When confronting an overwhelming problem, and that’s what you’re asking about, where you want to have some impact, where you want to create some change, how do you do that?” she asked. “I have a very simple formula that I have applied in all of the settings where I’ve been a change agent, whether it’s policing, criminal justice, the corporate world, or intergroup relations: Find an entry point. Identify a gap that hasn’t been filled. Find something doable with which to fill that gap—and the operative word here is doable—and then stay tightly focused on that doable thing.”