Forge2Gether Bridging Cultural Differences Scholarship

I certify that I personally conducted the live interview described in my essay, and I confirm that the submitted photograph is an authentic, unedited image of me and the actual person I interviewed. I have read and agree to the Official Contest Rules. I certify this essay is my original, unpublished work, and it was not generated using Artificial Intelligence. I wanted to understand MAGA. So I found one sitting next to me in class. This might sound like the beginning of a terrible joke, but it morphed into one of the most meaningful political discussions I’ve had. My classmate Felix is a Republican in favor of MAGA. I'm liberal. Before I met him, I had spent much time trying to understand MAGA psychology from the outside, through political discussions, media, and my own observations. I hadn't asked someone who actually identified that way. We violently disagreed about politics, about government, about the direction the country was going. But what surprised me was how often we agreed on the things behind those political arguments. We both want people to be able to have basic necessities, safe communities. We both believe people should have a chance to succeed. We often disagreed not about whether those things mattered, but about what caused the problems we saw, and what should be done about them. That caused me to reconsider one of my many assumptions. I had sometimes thought of MAGA supporters as people deluded from political propaganda or people who saw liberals as an enemy of the state. Media and political psychology helped produce this polarization, but Felix was not a political theory. He was not a character on a TV screen, not a handle in a political debate. I saw him in class everyday;. I got to know him as a person before I got to know his politics. Our conversations changed the way I thought about political labels, too. Words like “liberal,” “leftist,” “conservative,” and “MAGA” can rapidly become huge buckets online. Words that cause such heated debates. People use them to describe people they have never seen. But Felix demonstrated how those labels can't tell you about a person. Two persons can be under the same political label, and have entirely different reasons for doing so. I also learned that listening doesn’t require me to abandon my own beliefs. I did not suddenly become a conservative and Felix did not suddenly become a liberal. We just listened to each other, listening to the other side of the political spectrum. The most significant lesson we took away from our discussions was that political beliefs don’t just develop in a vacuum. We all see the world through the lens of our own experiences: the communities we were raised in, the people we trust, the problems we have encountered ourselves, the information we have consumed. I was trying to understand political differences mainly in terms of ideology. Felix taught me to understand them by experience. Now, when I hear someone described as “MAGA” or “leftist,” I am more likely to wonder what that label actually means to that particular person. I still have strong political beliefs, and I still disagree with Felix on an abundant amount of issues. But I no longer see disagreement as proof that someone must be fundamentally different from me. Sometimes two people can want many of the same things and still see completely different paths toward them. For me, that is the difference between knowing someone's political position and actually knowing the person.

My friend had been trying to get me to join her interfaith youth panel for weeks, and for weeks I had been finding reasons not to. I told myself I was busy. That as a Jewish teenager more connected to the food and the holidays than to the prayers, I wasn't qualified to speak for anyone. The truth was simpler and harder: I was afraid. It was June. You can guess why that made it harder. The event was held in the basement of a community center folding chairs, fluorescent lights, a table of cookies nobody was eating. Across the circle sat a girl named Lana. Seventeen, like me. She wore a Palestine pin. She had the kind of calm that makes you feel embarrassed by your own nervous energy. I remember thinking: "She's going to say something that makes me angry, and I won't know how to respond." I was wrong. But not in the way I expected. The facilitator asked us to share a moment when our identity had made us feel like an outsider. Lana talked about lunch. In middle school, she would eat in the bathroom during Ramadan because she was tired of people watching her not eat, tired of having to explain herself every day. The hardest part wasn't the hunger. It was the loneliness of being visible for something deeply private. I sat with that. Because I knew that feeling not from fasting, but from being the only Jewish kid at a Christmas party, laughing along at jokes I wasn't sure how to take. From the quiet exhaustion of always being a little bit *other*, always someone's representative. I hadn't expected to recognize myself in her story. I came braced for difference. I found a mirror instead. After the panel, we talked really talked for two hours. She told me how her family navigates being Palestinian-American and Muslim in a midwestern city, how her faith isn't just spiritual but structural: it organizes her time, her relationships, her sense of what matters. I told her I didn't know how to pray, that the last time I was in a synagogue was my cousin's bar mitzvah and I mostly remembered the food. She laughed a real laugh and said: "Maybe that's its own kind of faith. Showing up. Being there. That's not nothing." I've thought about that almost every day since. We didn't avoid the hard part either. We talked about the Middle East about what that word, Israel, Palestine, does to a room. Lana told me about relatives she's never met, a grief that is inherited and real. I told her about my grandmother's family, about the fear that lives underneath my secular Jewish identity like bedrock, quiet but always there. We didn't agree. We didn't reach some tidy reconciliation. But we were both crying a little by the end, and that felt more true than resolution would have. What changed in me is hard to name. Something loosened. I had been holding Lana as a category before I knew her as a person. When we talked, those categories didn't disappear but they stopped being the loudest thing in the room. What I understand now is that people's identities aren't just beliefs they hold. They are worlds they were born into, losses and joys that accumulate over generations. To really listen across difference isn't to pretend it doesn't exist. It's to say: "I want to understand what it cost you to become who you are." I'm still learning how to do that. But I'm less afraid than I was before.

"Would you still choose medicine if it paid $40,000 a year?" My answer came out too fast. "No." Marisol laughed, and I laughed too because I realized how blunt it sounded. We were on Zoom for an interview about cultural differences. I know Marisol through my English tutoring work, so I thought the conversation would feel familiar. Usually I'm the one with the slides and the questions. This time, she was asking me things I didn't have ready answers for. Marisol is older than me, speaks Spanish as her first language, and came to the United States as a refugee from Mexico. For her, work was never an abstract discussion about fulfillment. It meant food on the table, rent paid, and family members being okay. I had asked her about careers, thinking we'd talk about opportunity. I said people should choose work they love. When I said it, it felt like common sense. Then she asked the $40,000 question. When she asked why I said no, I started explaining: medical school costs money, doctors train for years, people need enough income to actually live. A career has to support a life too. Halfway through my answer, I realized I was saying exactly what she had been saying. Marisol told me that when she was younger, a good job meant something steady. It helped with bills. It kept the family from worrying so much. She wasn't against passion. She was just talking about what comes first. Then she asked, "Do you think your dad chose his job because it was his passion?" I didn't know what to say. My dad has worked at Panda Express for as long as I can remember. He leaves early and comes home tired, smelling like fryer oil and soy sauce. I have always been grateful for how hard he works, but Marisol’s question made me realize I usually think about his job through what it gave me: time to study, volunteer, do research, and imagine a future in medicine. I had not thought enough about what that work meant for him. Before our conversation, I thought choosing passion was brave. I still think it is. But Marisol helped me see that choosing stability takes courage, too. It means doing work that wears you down because people are counting on you. It means choosing the job that keeps your family afloat, even if it's not the one you imagined for yourself. After the call, I kept thinking about how I expected cultural differences to show up in obvious ways — language, food, holidays, traditions. Instead, it showed up in how we understood one word: choice. I was used to asking, "What do I want to do with my life?" Marisol made me ask, "Who had to be tired so I could choose?" I still want to pursue medicine because I love science and care about patients. That didn't change. What changed was how I understood the freedom behind that choice. That night I looked at my biology notes spread across the table while my dad came home from another shift. I had always felt grateful for him. But Marisol made me rethink gratitude. His sacrifices weren't separate from my dreams. It gave them somewhere to begin. I certify that I personally conducted the live interview described in my essay, and I confirm that the submitted photograph is an authentic, unedited image of me and the actual person I interviewed. I have read and agree to the Official Contest Rules. I certify this essay is my original, unpublished work, and it was not generated using Artificial Intelligence.