The fireplace is on. A couple of westies are running around excitedly. And two tables are set in the dining room.

The dinner party on this brisk winter night in Maplewood, N.J., has a distinctly foreign flare: chicken shawarma and falafel are on the menu. And while the conversation includes typical talk about work — it also deals with war.

“Every day is becoming terrible,” explains Hayder Alqaysi, who fled Baghdad with his mother and sister. “You understand what I mean? I cannot live there.”

This is what is known as Syria Supper Club, in which Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq join groups of mostly Jewish New Jerseyans for dinners that are part fundraiser, part cultural exchange. Women from the refugee families cook the elaborate feasts; the Americans host the meals. In January alone, 14 meals have been scheduled, all with different cooks.

Hosting this week is Kate McCaffrey, a member of Montclair’s Bnai Keshet synagogue, which has organized various efforts to help refugees from Syria and Iraq acclimate to the New Jersey community.

“This refugee project really came out of a sense of outrage over the refugee crisis last summer,” says McCaffrey, an anthropology professor at Montclair State University.

“I was reading the news and it was so upsetting, seeing all these people at sea, drowning at sea, and feeling our country was doing nothing. I reached out to the rabbi and said: ‘What are we doing?'”

Among the first actions taken by McCaffrey and her partner on this project, Melina Macall, was a Christmas Eve dinner that Bnai Keshet hosted in 2015 in which Syrian Muslims and New Jersey Jews feasted on the traditional American Jewish Christmas meal of Chinese food.

The synagogue later hired one Syrian woman to cater monthly Saturday lunches after Shabbat services — now, there is talk of her catering Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

It’s that talent for cooking among many of the Syrian women who have settled in places like Paterson and Elizabeth that inspired the Syria Supper Club idea: How about these women cook dinners at Americans’ homes, enabling them to meet their new neighbors while making some much-needed money in the process?

“We have multiple objectives to this. One part is to fundraise,” McCaffrey says.

Attendees sign up online and pay $50 to attend the meal. The money goes to the Syrian cooks so they can buy the food — then, the women keep the rest. Given the difficulty their husbands have had in finding work in New Jersey and the limited resources provided by the federal government and charitable organizations, the funds are critically helpful.

“But I think in addition to that we are providing some affirmation of their talents, of their capabilities, of their humanity in a political climate where they’ve been demonized. And for the guests it’s an opportunity to get outside their bubble to meet people different from them.”

When dinner is served, the Syrian women sit down and eat with the guests, often along with other refugees who have become friends with the organizers. Language barriers are overcome with laughter, Google Translate and volunteer translators — tonight, it’s Mazooz Sehwail, an Arabic professor at Montclair State University.

It took three days for the cook on this night, Khlood Al Nabelsi, to prepare a delicious banquet-style Syrian dinner. The presentation, with ornately-cut vegetables and spices sprinkled in a pattern on top of the hummus, makes dinner guests gasp as they gather around the table and introduce themselves.

“My name Khlood, from Syria,” Al Nabelsi says. “Me, happy. I am happy for cooking.”

Dinner guests tell Al Nabelsi — and Alqaysi, an Iraqi refugee here with his mother and sister — about how they themselves are the children and grandchildren of Jewish refugees who fled countries in Europe beset by war, persecution and religious strife.

“The symbol of America, the Statue of Liberty, the poem engraved on the bottom, says: ‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door,'” says Sheila Fisher of Fort Lee. “And let’s all hope America leaves the golden door open.”

Over dinner, there are questions, like: Why is Al Nabelsi keeping her jacket on while she eats? The answer isn’t totally clear, but it leads to a conversation about how some refugees lack heat in their new apartments.

Later a simple question about how to say “cheers” in Arabic warrants an explanation about Muslim restrictions on alcohol.

And like at any dinner, there’s talk about work. Alqaysi, who earned a degree in electrical engineering before he left Baghdad, just started working at the drive-through at a Dunkin Donuts in New Jersey. He has funny stories to tell about trying to understand American coffee orders, handing over as many as 10 sugars and distinguishing between whipped cream and with cream.

Alqaysi unabashedly says that he wants American friends; social isolation is a challenge in the refugee community. “I want to make more friend, because I don’t have friend,” he says. “I need to know this culture. I want talk to them, like I talk to you.”

President-elect Donald Trump, who once vowed to end immigration of all Muslims, including refugees, isn’t mentioned at dinner. There isn’t any talk of Gov. Chris Christie, who described 5-year-old Syrian orphans as potential national security threats.

Nonetheless, one of the Jewish guests, Melissa Polaner, has politics on her mind.

“It’s important for me to express my political views in this way, and it’s important for me to express my religious views in this way — to make people understand that Jews and Muslims have so much in common and there are so many more things that connect us than separate us,” she said. “And a lot of that gets lost in the national dialogue, but when you are sitting across from someone at the table, it’s easy to remember that.”

After dinner, several of the women are in the kitchen cleaning dishes and kibbitzing. McCaffrey, who grew up Catholic and converted to Judaism when she married her husband, threw herself into this work after her children graduated from high school. She constantly texts with dozens of refugees, helping with problems big and small. On this night, she finds out that one of the cooks in the Supper Club just lost her father. Their home was bombed in Homs, Syria.

McCaffrey turns around and makes some tea for Al Nabelsi, who will soon be heading back to her apartment, where her husband is babysitting their three children. Before she leaves, in broken English and with help from a translator, Al Nabelsi strains to show her deep appreciation for McCaffrey.

“I’m speechless in here about her kindness,” she says. “She’s the person who does not differentiate between different sects, different religions — a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim. She loves to help humans regardless of their religion.”

Dinners for the Syrian Supper Club are booked through March.

This story comes to us from member station WNYC in New York.

It was an executive action that created the system forcing Americans of Japanese descent to live in internment camps. Days after President Trump used an executive action to dramatically shift U.S. immigration policy, Fred Korematsu Day is attracting special attention — including being the subject of a Google Doodle.

Korematsu fought a discriminatory federal program all the way to the Supreme Court — and lost. Years later, he was awarded America’s highest civilian honor.

As NPR has reported:

“Korematsu was born in Oakland, Calif., but his U.S. citizenship didn’t keep him from being arrested for refusing to be relocated to an internment camp in 1942. He challenged his arrest in court, and two years later the case made its way to the Supreme Court. Korematsu challenged the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, the decree that forced the relocation of people of Japanese descent to internment camps. The court ruled in favor of the government and against Korematsu in what is now widely considered one of its worst decisions. The majority of justices claimed the detentions were not based on racial discrimination but rather on suspicions that Japanese-Americans were acting as spies.”

In 1983, the U.S. District Court in San Francisco formally vacated Korematsu’s conviction. At the time, he told District Judge Marilyn Patel that rather than a legal pardon, he wanted to be assured the U.S. government would never again take such an action.

“If anyone should do any pardoning,” he said, “I should be the one pardoning the government for what they did to the Japanese-American people.”

Over the weekend, the civil rights hero’s daughter, Karen, who leads the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, told member station KQED she didn’t know of her father’s stand until she learned about it in high school.

“He simply said it happened a long time ago and what he thought he did was right and the government was wrong, and I could just see this hurt go over his face,” she told KQED.

She added, “Why should he go to a prison camp when there were no charges, there was no day in court, there was no access to an attorney?”

A welder whose family ran a flower nursery in California before they were forced to leave and live in a Utah camp, Korematsu died in 2005. Since then, several states have enacted laws to celebrate his birthday, Jan. 30. California was the first state to adopt the Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.

Signed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 2010 law recognizes “the importance of preserving civil liberties, even in times of real or perceived crisis.”

When he awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, President Clinton praised him for being someone whose stand for civil rights helped the lives of millions of Americans, comparing him to names on landmark civil rights cases such as Plessy, Brown, and Parks.

But a key distinction remains between Korematsu’s case and those other incidents: the Supreme Court never overturned its ruling against Korematsu, as NPR and others have reported.