I

magine my dismay when I realized recently that I’d missed the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism, which took place in Israel over three days this past March. Note to self: I must be more careful about noting these important kinds of events on my scheduling calendar.

What’s that you say? You don’t even know what the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism is? According to its publicity materials, it’s the “premier biennial international gathering for assessing the state of anti-Semitism globally and formulating effective forms of societal and governmental response.”

The GloFo brings together “political leaders, heads of civil society, clergy, journalists, diplomats, educators, researchers, and concerned citizens dedicated to the advance of tolerance towards the other in public life and the defeat of anti-Semitism and other forms of racial and ethnic hatred.” And then they go home.

The tab, of course, for these three days in the fun and sun of Israel is picked up by the attendees’ respective non-profit organizations or, in politicians’ cases, the taxpaying public. While the old saw has it that Jewish holidays can be summed up with, “They tried to kill us. We outlived them. Let’s eat,” GloFo takes things to the next level: “After all these years, they’re still trying to kill us. We’ll hold a yearly conference in a warm place, where we’ll assess their attempts and formulate effective forms of response. And after a full day of that, let’s go to an upscale bar for drinks.”

If the reader detects the slightest whiff of cynicism, even a faint scent of ill will, in my tone, it’s not because this is a ludicrous gathering of deluded individuals on all-expenses-paid junkets where they hobnob and preen self-importantly, using the pretense of a deadly serious issue to engage in essentially mindless discussions that lead nowhere and result in nothing (although, come to think of it, that’s reason enough for a serving of cynicism right there).

It’s not because of what happened at GloFo, but what didn’t. Over those three days, you see, there were precisely 90 speakers. I counted the number on the GloFo website so that you don’t have to.

The roster includes a wide spectrum of people: moral leaders, clergy, human rights activists, artists, scientists, writers, coming at this most serious of topics from many different angles. There were more than a few Orthodox Jews among them, too.

The sessions, too, cast the widest possible net. A sampling: The Persistence of Christian Theological Anti-Semitism in the Mainline Protestant Church; The Persistence of Anti-Semitism in the Sports Arena; Web Anti-Semitism and Cyberhate; Revisionism and the Politics of Holocaust Remembrance; Anti-Semitism in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Neither Jew-haters of the right nor of the left were spared the withering censure of this conference. There were sessions on “The Denial of Jewish History in International Organizations: The case of Jerusalem in the United Nations and UNESCO,” “Anti-Semitism in the Far Left — Intersectionality as a Cover for Hate Speech in Current Progressive Activism,” “Anti-Semitism in Arabic Language Mass Media” and “Confronting Neo-Nazism and Anti-Semitism of the Extreme Right in the United States and Elsewhere.”

Of course, what would a global forum of such stature be without a couple of really rousing sessions — the kind of discussions that are so provocative and trailblazing, so chock full of nuts-and-bolts, practical solutions that they literally get participants out of their seats and up on their feet, arguing and cheering and booing? That’s what I imagine was happening at sessions like “The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism — Expanding Adoption and Utilization of an Important Policy Tool.”

My personal favorite, the one I’m most sorry I missed by not having attended GloFo, was “The Anti-Semitism Measurement Project — Creating a Unitary and Standardized Tool.” Finally, someone came up with a tool with which to hit that ahntesemit, that roosha, over the head when he starts approaching you menacingly on the D train. And when the cops show up and give you a hard time about carrying a concealed weapon, you just flash your GloFo convention badge, tell them it’s an authorized anti-anti-Semitism tool and you’re off the hook.

All of the foregoing is what was covered in the millions of words spoken by 90 speakers and hundreds of attendees during tens of sessions at GloFo. But to reveal the topic on which not even one word was uttered, I turn it over to Armin Rosen, who attended GloFo and survived to write about it in Tablet. At the end of a long piece on the conference, he writes:

More irritating was the total absence of any discussion, from what I could tell, of the anti-Haredi bigotry that constitutes some of the most frequent and worrying yet completely ignored anti-Semitism in the democratic world. During a single week in April, three Jewish men were assaulted in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, the home of the Chabad Hasidic movement; in 2017, the village of Bloomingburg in New York state paid $2.9 million in damages after it became clear that local government was conspiring to keep out a Haredi residential development.

Because the Haredim are the most obviously Jewish people on earth, they are frequent victims of anti-Semitism and a warning signal about the presence of submerged bigotries. Anti-Haredi incidents expose the limits of even a very tolerant society’s philo-Semitism. And yet the specific problem received no special treatment, or even a single mention at the Forum.

And in case you were wondering, Armin Rosen isn’t Orthodox, so far as I can tell, so he’s especially trustworthy.

I don’t believe that the organizers of GloFo thought about devoting a session to anti-chareidi bigotry and then shelved the idea. Much more likely, it never occurred to them, both because they’re not even aware such a phenomenon exists, and because to them, chareidim are only slightly less alien than extraterrestrial beings. And that’s unspeakably sad.

At times, I read statements by fellow Jews about chareidim that, viewed objectively, can only be described as vicious, the kinds of dehumanizing statements they probably wouldn’t dare write in generalizing about any other ethnic or religious group. Yet, my sense is that these writers have no real awareness of what they’re doing and how they sound.

Just this week, I came across an instance of this in an essay in Modern Age by political historian Jonathan Bronitsky. His topic was whether the Orthodox Jewish community can be a useful model for non-Jewish communities of faith seeking to preserve their distinctive value systems by creating self-contained communities within American society. The piece’s overall tone is not unsympathetic.

But toward the end, he writes: “Of course, Hareidi Judaism isn’t without its problems. Widespread welfare abuse and tax evasion, particularly among the Hasidim, are blots on the observant Jewish community as a whole.”

Excuse me? Our community is indeed not without its problems, one of which is too high an incidence of financial wrongdoing. But it’s one thing for me to assert that, and quite another for this writer to level allegations about “widespread” criminal activity with no statistics to support him (because they don’t exist) and no baseline by which to know whether he’s referring to 1% or 7% or 33% of a community of hundreds of thousands.

More to the point, I don’t believe he’d so casually smear any other community with so serious an unsubstantiated charge. But it’s that whipping boy called “the Hareidim” that he’s talking about, so somehow it’s okay.

This, from someone who also embarrasses himself by writing: “With fewer and fewer Hareidi Jews pursuing higher secular education…, it is unclear to whom the members of their community will be able to turn for legal and medical services, given their general distrust of the ‘outside world.’ ” Really now, if someone’s going to libel an entire community, he’d be wise not to so blatantly advertise his risible ignorance of it.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 712. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com