Due to the "sensitive nature" of the topics discussed, the registration page stated, attendees were required to register ahead of time and media was barred from the event.

MSU’s campus and the city of East Lansing have seen both antisemitic and islamophobic incidents over the last year. MSU Chabad, a Jewish center located off campus in Downtown East Lansing was vandalized in December 2025. The perpetrator, who is still at large, hurled rocks at the center’s windows and spray painted swastikas on the building’s front door.

In April 2025, a video of several students burning a copy of the Islamic holy text, the Quran, which was originally filmed in the fall of 2024, circulated campus. A Muslim student who shared the video with The State News said the video gained traction because a similar incident involving the same individuals had happened that week.

Events like Friday’s conference have been hosted by MSU for years, just in different formats. The conference, in its current form, launched in the spring of 2023. Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Muslim Studies Program, Mohammad Khalil, said the forum's origins reach back to 2016 — when two of his students, one Jewish and one Muslim, said they experienced forms of prejudice and discrimination. 

"These were two among many," Khalil said.

Khalil’s presentation on Friday focused on dispelling misconceptions of Muslims and better educating attendees on the religion, while also broaching the topic of Islamophobia, which he defined as: "anti-Muslim prejudice, anti-Muslim bias."

Khalil said that anti-Muslim sentiment has risen across the nation and at MSU — noting the Quran burning from last year.

"The reason I still do this is because I feel there's a need — I hear complaints," Khalil said. "You hear about students feeling unsettled about things, and so that pushes me to feel obligated to do what I do."

IEI Assistant Director of Education and Development Programs Ralph Johnson, who facilitated the conversation, said the reasoning behind closing the event to the media and requiring registration stemmed from a need to create a "sense of intimacy and safety" in the room.

"When someone shows up and they're brave enough to be vulnerable, we want to make sure that there's some safety in that," Johnson said.

This has been the standard for similar programs run by the IEI office, Johnson said. Past antisemitism and Islamophobia conferences have also held those same restrictions.

James Madison Professor and Director of the Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel at MSU, Yael Aronoff, echoed Johnson’s sentiment.

She said the conference opens with the rule that "what’s said in the room, stays in the room" and opening it to the public "would completely alter the entire intention and atmosphere of this."

Aronoff added that when she and other organizers initially conceived this conference, it being closed to the public was "implicitly understood” among everyone.

Aronoff's presentation on Friday focused on the history of antisemitism, also looking at antisemitic tropes and incidents in a modern context. She brought up the recent antisemitic vandalism at MSU Chabad as an example of what may be discussed, emphasizing the importance of this event being an outlet for attendees to share their own experiences of antisemitism or Islamophobia. 

Friday’s event spanned four hours, an important detail according to Aronoff. She explained that this longer time period allowed people to build trust with one another and speak more comfortably about their thoughts and experiences regarding these prejudices.

According to Aronoff, past conferences have averaged 20 attendees, with the highest turnouts extending to 40.

These conferences could not have been a simple lecture, said Associate Professor for Religious Studies Morgan Shipley, who presented on Muslim representation in pop culture.

“Those often become very academic in nature, right?” Shipley said. “Where you have the expert up front speaking at people, and while there is that question and answer moment, those can be sometimes overwhelming.”

When the event came Friday morning, the turnout was lackluster.

Social relations and policy junior Alexis Goldapper said after the meeting that around 12 people attended, with people "coming in and out."

Goldapper found out about the conference through her class and attended for extra credit. She said she felt like the event could have been advertised better.

She expected most of the event to be dedicated to discussion, however of the allotted one hour, the open discussion only lasted 30 to 45 minutes, Goldapper said. The event was made up of two main presentations and small-group discussion in between, she said, with the lecture side of the conference taking up so much time because of how dense the content was.

And when the time came around for open discussion, Goldapper said it was mostly students asking the professors questions — with a lot of the professors' responses being "very dense."

"No one really had anything to say," Goldapper said. "And I don’t know if that’s just because so much was covered in that time, or people were just hungry because it was four hours, but not much was discussed after. I don’t know if people knew exactly what they were even supposed to ask."

Still, Goldapper said she attended to learn more about Islamophobia and came away with more knowledge on the subject.

"I personally don’t really hear about Islamophobia, or even never really understood the roots of it," she said. "It was really nice being able to hear different perspectives and just break down biases."