“Are you still going to go?” I got this question a lot on October 8, 2023. When I told people I had a flight that evening to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – until fairly recently, a very unlikely destination for an American, let alone a Jewish American female solo traveler – their reactions ranged from skeptical to terrified. Mostly, I brushed off their concerns, though a tiny, doubtful part of me wondered if to go through with my plans wouldn’t be very foolish indeed. I thought of the moment when, upon filling out my visa application, I’d come to a disclaimer about how it was a crime to bring materials offensive to Islam into the country, and I’d wondered briefly what would happen if I accidentally packed my daily prayer book, with its reams of Hebrew text inside. Still, the trip – to meet a woman I’d been interviewing for my book on religious conversion, an American who’d relocated to Saudi Arabia in her early twenties – was years in the making. If I didn’t go now, I figured, I never would.

After October 7, can a Muslim-Christian-Jewish center in Abu Dhabi make any difference?