Tragedy and Opportunity

Sitting at their kitchen table on a recent summer afternoon, Ruth and Judea Pearl think back to another day four and a half years ago when an FBI agent sat across from them with tears in her eyes. It was Feb. 21, 2002, and their only son, journalist Daniel Pearl, had been missing for 28 days, abducted by Islamic extremists while on assignment for The Wall Street Journal in Pakistan. After weeks of uncertainty and false reports, there was now terrible confirmation: a video of Danny being beheaded. Among his last words was the statement, “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

Those words marked the end of Daniel Pearl’s life and the start of a new one for his parents. Through the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which they run mostly out of Danny’s childhood bedroom in their home in Encino, Calif., the Pearls bring Muslim journalists from around the world to work as fellows in U.S. newsrooms and at Jewish papers. As a tribute to Danny’s musical talents—he was an accomplished violinist—they coordinate and sponsor hundreds of concerts each year as part of their World Music Days celebration, and their World Youth News project trains high-school students to be future journalists. This is their new life’s work. It is all they do anymore, and they say they’ll do it until they die.

Their efforts have not gone unnoticed. Judea, a UCLA computer-science professor, has made the jump from academic lecturer to social advocate. For the last two years, he has partnered with noted Muslim scholar and former Pakistani diplomat Akbar Ahmed for a series of dialogues where the two men address conflict in the Middle East and ways in which to span the chasm between two faiths that have never seemed farther apart—Islam and Judaism. The dialogue has landed them among the winners of the inaugural Purpose Prize , an award given by San Francisco-based think tank Civic Ventures to honor people over 60 who take on “society’s biggest challenges.” Judea Pearl, 70, and Ahmed, 63, will split the $100,000 prize money. Judea Pearl’s share will be funneled into the foundation’s $500,000 annual budget.

NEWSWEEK’s Matthew Philips sat down with the Pearls recently to talk about Danny’s legacy, their personal struggle against religious extremism and their own religious beliefs. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Can you talk about how the foundation got started, the process of your grief and how you transformed that into resolve?

Judea Pearl: We simply could not cope with the idea that Danny was gone, that his spirit of friendship and of bridge-building had just disappeared and been terminated. So we had the idea of continuing that spirit and combining it with the idea of defiance. If his killers wanted to sow divisions among people, then we were going to defy them and spread friendship and humanity.