article: Nothing unusual there, you might think. But one writes about Allah and her mosque, the other about her synagogue and the Star of David. The two met at a Washington DC youth slam poetry event and write and communicate about their faiths in ways that aim to engage and provoke their audiences. It's a type of dialogue that will be much needed now, after the killings in Paris and the attack on a kosher supermarket there. The young poets were taking part in a session at Limmud, which has been likened to a Jewish Edinburgh festival, Hay and Glastonbury rolled into one and is held on Warwick University campus just before New Year. Limmud (from the Hebrew word for "learning") began life in 1980 and now has some 50 offshoots around the world. In the UK this year, it drew over 2,500 people from 27 countries - all the more remarkable given the relatively small size of the UK's Jewish community, which numbers under 300,000 people, a community with close links to Jewish families in Paris and elsewhere in France. The question of identity and security was tackled in many of Limmud's discussions, as Judaism and the role, lives and place of Jewish people in Europe and across the world was examined from every perspective, from the historical to the feminist, and from the religious to the secular. Even before the Paris attacks, there were worries over a sharp rise in anti-Semitism in the UK and mainland Europe in 2014, during and after the latest conflict in Gaza. In France, the killing of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse in 2012 by a Frenchman of Algerian descent, and the murders of four people inside the Jewish museum in Brussels by another Frenchman of Algerian descent in May 2014 heightened fears amongst the Jewish community in France and elsewhere. The uneasy mood was articulated by BBC's director of television, Danny Cohen, at a conference in Jerusalem last year. He said he had "never felt so uncomfortable as a Jew in the UK", as figures showed that anti-Semitic incidents in Britain also rose to record annual levels in 2014. Mr Cohen said levels of hatred were on the rise across Europe. "You've seen the number of attacks rise, you've seen murders in France, you've seen murders in Belgium. It's been pretty grim actually." The killings at Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week have further focused attention on radical Islamism in Europe, and the safety of Jewish communities in France, Germany and the UK. At one Limmud seminar, Michael Whine, of the Community Security Trust (CST), which seeks to protect Jewish communities and offer advice on security, sought to place last summer's figure in a wider European perspective, citing research by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research showing that Jewish people in the UK felt safer than those in France. However, CST figures still showed a significant rise in both verbal and physical attacks on Jewish people in the UK in 2014 compared with 2013, with 543 recorded in July and August 2014 alone - although the
summary: Two young college student poets, Hannah Halpern and Amina Iro, are talking about their faith.