For Cadets From West Point,
Jersey City Is a Peace Lab

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: April 6, 2008
JERSEY CITY — It sounds at first like a student’s worst nightmare: A long field trip to this gritty, gentrifying and altogether unlikely destination.

While visiting the Loew’s Jersey Theater on Saturday, the cadets checked out a sign dating from World War II.

But by Saturday afternoon, at the end of a three-day cultural adventure, 30 young men and women had seen a side of New Jersey’s second-largest city that few tourists or even locals had ever seen.

They met police officials, politicians and religious leaders. They shunned some of the city’s best hotel rooms with dramatic views of the Manhattan skyline and slept on blankets on the floor of the prayer room of one of the city’s largest mosques. They debated the roots of Middle East tensions with a Muslim scholar over omelets and falafel at breakfast, and then stood next to a rabbi as he went over a sacred, handwritten Torah scroll.

For a future Army officer, it was an excellent way to spend 72 hours.

Cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point taking a course called Winning the Peace spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Jersey City, exploring its varied ethnic communities as part of a cultural immersion field trip. The class is designed to teach cadets not military skills but the more political and social ones they might need when the countries that they are deployed in make the transition from war to peace: the subtle art of coalition-building and the complicated business of understanding and working with those whose language, religion and way of life differ from your own.

The semester-long class is now in its fourth year at West Point, and each year the cadets drive nearly two hours from the campus in Orange County, N.Y., to Jersey City. For many cadets, a number of whom had never been to Jersey City, this year’s trip amounted to a lesson in how big the world really is.

On Thursday, the cadets, dressed sharply in gray uniforms, met members of the Jersey City Police Department and visited an Egyptian Christian church, St. George and St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church on Bergen Avenue. On Friday, they spoke with Jerramiah T. Healy, the mayor of Jersey City, ate lunch with Pakistanis and dinner with Indians. On Saturday, they visited a synagogue, Temple Beth-El, and then, after taking off their shoes, sat in front of the altar at a Hindu temple, Govinda Sanskar Center. And for two days, they were welcomed as overnight guests of the Islamic Center of Jersey City.

“We woke up to the sound of the prayers,” said Cole Moses, 23, a senior. “That was our alarm clock. It was kind of surreal.”

Alec Moyer, also 23 and a senior, said he learned the importance of relationships and informal meetings, and was surprised and humbled by the openness of his hosts at the mosque. Jared Graham, 22, was struck by the breadth of the cultural diversity in Jersey City.

For some of the cadets, the visit offered a lesson in human rather than military relations. “Different cultures, but we’re still the same people,” said Alex Smith, 22, a senior.

All 30 cadets on the trip expected to be sent to either Iraq or Afghanistan at some point after graduating. Army Maj. Rebecca Patterson, the instructor, said Jersey City was a real-world classroom where the cadets could learn from its ethnic cohesion. “We come to Jersey City because it’s a place where 60 languages are spoken,” she said.

Jersey City treats the cadets like visiting dignitaries. On Saturday, the cadets’ three vans had a police escort, and the field trip ended with a community lunch under a tent on Newark Avenue, a busy strip of Indian restaurants, beauty salons and shops. A local group, the Cultural Coalition of Jersey City for Winning the Peace, helps coordinate the field trip each year.

Along the way, religious leaders get a cultural education as well. On Saturday, Ahmed Shedeed, the Islamic Center’s president, went with the cadets to the synagogue and the Hindu temple. “It works both ways,” Mr. Shedeed said.

One of the main reasons the cadets visit Jersey City every year accompanied them throughout the trip: Detective Richard Boggiano of the Jersey City police. Mr. Boggiano’s two sons attended West Point and served in the Army in Iraq, and when Mr. Boggiano learned from one of them about the Winning the Peace class, he lobbied officials at the Military Academy to do the field trips in Jersey City instead of that other, bigger city across the Hudson.

“It’s good for Jersey City because it shows the world that people can live together, that people can get along together,” Mr. Boggiano said.