Speakers included pundits who have been quoted and linked all over the blogosphere the last few months, like Daniel Goldhagen, Hillel Halkin, Paul Berman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Christopher Caldwell, David Harris, Martin Peretz, Simon Schama, Josef Joffe, Todd Gitlin, Ian Buruma, Anthony Julius, Jaroslaw Anders, David Pryce-Jones, Azar Nafisi, David Kertzer, Mark Lilla, Alain Finkielkraut, and others.
(These names are each linked to other articles they have written on anti-semitism or related subjects - go here for the conference recordings.)
Here are transcripts of four of the speeches. Leon Weiseltier's in particular is excellent.
A roundup of media coverage of the conference and my impressions from attending.
UPDATE: Antisemitism conferences are all the rage this summer. There was one in LA the same week as the YIVO conference, and a World Conference on Antisemitism was just held in Vienna. (Gee, the town my mom and her mom fled from in 1939. . . . ) Sorry I'm being facetious; it's not all listening to lots of presentations and jawing in the halls - these conferences do pool together and consolidate all the data on the last 3 years of antisemitic incitements and attacks all over the world, and it is sobering (and enraging) just to view the picture created by the data as a coherent whole instead of as a string of individual incidents. The presentors' theories about the reasons for the upsurge can sometimes be translated into useful approaches for combating it. The networking that goes on may also facilitate action.
The Vienna conference was convened by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, with 55 participating nations - The conference home page has .pdf files of presentations from Israel, Norway, Greece, Estonia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Ukraine, and several NGOs.
All right, I'm impressed. They all showed up and acted concerned. I find it interesting that the German Green Party is taking ownership of this issue.
Germany's commissioner for human rights policy, Claudia Roth . . . a Green Party member of the Bundestag, was quoted in the report as admonishing Vienna for failing to take this "good opportunity to look at its own history of antisemitism critically" and for not ensuring that the conference received "greater publicity."Rudolph Giuliani, who headed the American delegation,
Roth appeared to be exploiting longstanding political tensions between the two countries, which have been exacerbated in recent days because of rivalry between Germany's left-wing government and Austria's right-wing coalition. But Roth's criticism appeared to be also an extension of a deliberate policy of her Green Party of allying itself with the Jewish community. That attitude is most visibly embodied in the actions of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the Green Party leader who has emerged over the last two years as the leading defender of Israel in European politics.
called on countries to pass hate crimes legislation that would increase penalties, establish educational programs dealing with anti-Semitism and discipline debate so that disagreements over actions in the Middle East do not result in “demonizing attacks on the Jewish people and Israel.”This dissenting view of hate-crime laws has a point. France already has statutes against hate-crimes. In France, the problem is that the police and courts are not only not enforcing those statutes, but they are not enforcing crimes against people and property either. A synagogue is torched and they say, "oh just some teen vandalism, not worth investigating." Jewish kids get beaten up and called dirty Jew, "oh just kids fighting, no big deal."
And some people tried to use the French hate-crime law to prevent Oriana Fallaci's anti-Islamist book from being published there.
Hate-crime laws are like anti-porn laws: worth nothing if they aren't enforced, but can be used against anyone for anything if they are enforced. On the one hand, they are good for sending a signal about public policy ("what we as a nation will not tolerate"). On the other hand, the signal probably doesn't impress the people the policy is aimed at. However, there are always people in the middle, who may be susceptible to bigotry, but who may be deterred by a hate crime statute. I remain ambivalent about their effectiveness and impact on civil liberties, given that such statutes are not stopping hate crimes in France.
However, I do think this is a good idea:
Giuliani called for countries to compile hate crime statistics in a uniform way and analyze them regularly to gauge efforts to combat such crimes. . . . He noted that the United States has developed such a mechanism and if Europe followed suit, the same methods could be used for handling hate crimes against other minorities.
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