The theme for this year’s Jewish Council for Public Affairs plenum — which was held from Feb. 20 to 23 in Dallas — was “Building bridges, acting together.”
The stated goal was to figure out how to alleviate partisan vituperation in the American public square.
But the hundreds of Jewish leaders, representing various political, religious and ideological spectrums, zoomed well beyond that — getting into lengthy discussions about how Jews treat one another in the organizational world and how they treat other minorities.
Rabbi Steve Gutow, the executive director of the JCPA (an umbrella body for Jewish public policy groups such as local Jewish Community Relations Councils, the ADL and the American Jewish Committee) set the tone for the 2010 theme with a Feb. 22 op-ed in the Dallas Morning News.
He wrote the piece with JCPA chair Andrea Weinstein.
Their recommendation was an initiative that would “send community leaders into our schools, workplaces and congregations, in our own faith communities as well as others, and work with one another to define a code of civility, create a system of checks and balances to alert others when that line has been crossed, and to generate appropriate and public responses for when one continually crosses that line.”
The initiative apparently was in its early stages; no further details were available.
The vexatious question of what “civility” means and when and how it should be applied crept up throughout the conference.
Fresh off his recent headline-making encounter with hecklers at U.C. Irvine, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, said in his Feb. 21 keynote talk that the notion of civil discourse did not obviate “brutal” exchanges.
Just after his talk at Irvine, he delivered another at U.C. San Diego where he encountered fierce but politely put criticism of Israel — and emerged invigorated.
“It proves it can be done otherwise,” he said.
The intensity of the Irvine encounter rattled the delegates from 125 communities and 14 national agencies, and they were seeking strategies.
Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, said the point-and-click instantaneousness of the Internet age was helping to create what he said was the most pervasive display of anti-Semitism in decades.
Hannah Rosenthal, the former JCPA director who is now the Obama administration’s envoy on anti-Semitism, said it would be a mistake to confront such discourse through legal means — as some have advocated — using laws in other countries that contain toxic speech. Her British counterpart, she said, called America’s First Amendment preoccupation “silly.”
“We in this country care about the First Amendment, and as disgusting as some speech is, we like to see more speech, not less,” Rosenthal said.
The notion of inter-Jewish civility arose in a formal session on tensions between Jewish Republicans and Jewish Democrats.
Ira Forman, the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, advised the delegates not to confuse civility with a he-said-she-said approach to analyzing the political debate.
On the hot-button area of abuse of Holocaust imagery, Forman said both parties were guilty — but Democrats were less culpable and more likely to apologize. He identified the more pervasive abuse with leaders of the Tea Party movement and other conservatives who have likened the Obama administration to Nazis.
Noam Neusner, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, talked about cartoons and other such images that depicted Bush and his Cabinet as Nazis during their two terms. He also showed the images to the JCPA delegates.
“It would have been nice to have the JCPA and the NJDC actively condemning” such imagery during his Bush’s years in the White House, Neusner said. “I would have welcomed an effort of focusing only on the issues.”
Neusner said the focus on increasing civility should be directed toward how Jews spoke to one another, regardless of whether the conversation was political.
“People cut each other off in mid-sentence, they yell at each other, they cut each other down — it’s awful,” he said. “Let’s start our civility campaign right here on that theme.”
How Jews treat one another certainly was a theme that arose throughout the conference.
Oren was confronted by Barbara Weinstein, the legislative director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, about the recent arrests of women who pray at the Western Wall. Oren said the topic was a top priority for him.
“At the end of the day it will require compromise on everyone’s behalf,” he said.
The ambassador also offered a bouquet to J Street, the group with which he clashed during the past year over policies on Iran and Israel’s Gaza war that he had described as “dangerous.” He said he was ready to engage with the group and advised others to follow suit.
Notably, Oren said, because of his engagement, J Street is now more pronouncedly in favor of Iran sanctions and more critical of the United Nations targeting of Israel.