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LOS ANGELES — Although only 23 miles apart, Milken Community High School in Los Angeles' Bel Air hills and Jordan High School in South Central Los Angeles exist in different worlds.

Milken, part of the Stephen S. Wise Temple and the largest non-Orthodox Jewish high school in the United States, was founded in 1990.

Eight years later, the school moved into a new $32 million state-of-the-art building, which now houses 500 students, all Jewish, in grades nine through 12.

Jordan High School is home to almost 2,300 students, nearly all Latino or African-American, in grades nine through 12.

The high school, the first to be built in Watts, dates back to 1925. Protected by a high fence and barred windows, the school sits next door to the Jordan Downs Housing Project.

But through a program sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League's World of Difference Institute, students from both schools are learning that they share more similarities than differences. They are learning that people should be judged, as Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed on the steps of the Washington Monument in 1963, not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Together, the children of Watts and the children of Beverly Hills are learning together in the Jordan auditorium.

Rabbi Marc Schneier is on stage, as is Martin Luther King III, and even the ninth-graders are paying attention.

The problems between the Jewish and African-American communities are often discussed, but King, the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Schneier, the president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, want to talk about shared dreams.

Schneier has developed a one-day school curriculum, based on his book "Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King & the Jewish Community," to which King wrote the foreword.

The students chosen for this program, 20 from each school, begin with a trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance. The Milken students then travel to Jordan where once they warily pass the gated and guarded entrance, they find that it doesn't fit their image of a gang-infested and graffiti-covered inner-city school, that it hosts an honors program and college-bound students. The Jordan students also spend a day at Milken.

"Students learn their own reactions to prejudice and stereotyping. It's one thing to study in the abstract, another to experience firsthand," says Nancy Schneider, a psychology teacher at Milken.

The students talk about times they have been hurt by name-calling.

"I don't like it when my brother and sister call me Lite Brite," says an African-American student from Jordan, "just because their skin is darker than mine."

By sharing these experiences in small groups, by talking about times they have said something hurtful or times they didn't intervene, the students learn that they have all experienced pain, prejudice and powerlessness.

During the social interludes, as they view the Watts Towers in South Central together or snack on pizza during a lunch break at Milken, they discuss music and clothes, television and movies. They complain about homework, overly strict parents and annoying siblings.

And they discover, as they chip away at the overlay of learned prejudices and stereotypes, that they are all teenagers, full of normal doubts, anger and stress. They discover, as King once pointed out, that "most hate is rooted in fear, suspicion, ignorance and pride."

For Milken 10th-grader Jon Kay, ignorance is the culprit. "It's important to realize," he says, "there are other people in the world, and they're not much different. I don't think kids are racist. We just haven't been exposed much."

Shawnta Jones, a Jordan ninth-grader, sees fear and suspicion at work. "People at my school say that Jewish people hate black people. They say if we see Jews in person, we should turn away. I want them to see this. Jews are just like everybody else. We all have 10 fingers and 10 toes."