Eradicate Hate Global Summit continues for fifth year

Resilience. Intervention. Partnership.

According to Brette Steele, president of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit, those three themes will be explored at this year’s conference, Sept. 15-17 at the David Lawrence Convention Center.

Billed as a “unique, multidisciplinary forum to share ideas and build working relationships to drive the development and deployment of effective solutions to reduce hate-fueled violence,” the summit was created in 2021 by Laura Ellsworth and Mark Nordenberg in response to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

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“Day 1 is all about the resilience of targeted communities,” Steele said. “Day 2 is levels of intervention and recognizing that there are many different ways we can approach preventing violence … Day 3 is building impactful partnerships.”

Sept. 15, she said, will include a panel featuring eight survivors of different types of hate-fueled violence, “including, of course, the Tree of Life.”

All the panelists, Steele said, will talk of their experience with hate-fueled violence and how it has motivated them to prevent future acts of similar violence.

The day will also include various breakout sessions and an announcement from the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate Extremism and Radicalization.

“I’m not allowed to say much about it now,” Steele said, “but what I can say is that it is going to be taking place in the house of the former commandant of Auschwitz, located on the outer wall of Auschwitz, and it is an exciting announcement about the future use of that house.”

Day 2 will focus on intervention from several different aspects, Steele said, including the role of states, corporations and international partnerships in light of an apparent withdrawal by the federal government in that sphere.

Included in the second day’s agenda is the conversation “Fighting hate with humanity,” featuring Lonnie Ali and Daniel Lubetzky. Ali was the fourth wife of boxer Muhammad Ali and a Muslim; Lubetzky is a Jewish Mexican American entrepreneur who was featured on the show “Shark Tank.”

David Goldman, founder and chairman of Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, will discuss how various professions contributed to the conditions that led to the Holocaust.

Day 3 opens with remarks from keynote speaker Irwin Cotler, the former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, the inaugural Canadian special envoy for combatting antisemitism, and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

“Not in Our Town” executive producer Patrice O’Neill will also speak on the final day. The filmmaker produced the documentary “Repairing the World: Stories from the Tree of Life,” for her PBS series.

Concurrent with the start of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit is the Student Summit, now in its third year, hosting more than 340 students from 36 schools in the region.

The Student Summit has grown each year. Its initial offering included 14 schools; last year, 29 schools participated.

“Each year all of the schools from the previous year register,” Steele said. “We’re very excited about how it’s grown over time.”

To the casual observer, the Eradicate Hate Global Summit might seem like a once-a-year event that convenes top experts each September and then vanishes until the following year. But that’s not the case.

The organization’s working groups, now in their third year, are an example of the type of ongoing effort that occurs between each summit.

This year, working groups will meet on all three days of the summit, providing updates on what they’ve done between conventions.

There are now approximately 14 groups, and some have already produced results.

“We had a working group on building capacity of mental health practitioners to prevent occupation field violence,” Steele said. “They produced the first-ever continuing education course for the American Psychological Association on preventing hate-fueled violence. That will be going live in November.”

Another working group will unveil at this year’s summit a toolkit for judges on how to manage violent extremism in the courtroom “when people are using their trials as a platform to further espouse their violent beliefs and call for violence,” Steele explained.

Still another working group will take a deep dive into the 764 movement, a decentralized, international, online sextortion network that targets girls and is ideologically aligned with the terror network the Order of Nine Angels.

Over time, some of the working groups have completed their work; others continue for multiple years with a new set of concrete deliverables, Ellsworth said.

The work of the summit, Steele said, continues each year.

“We are here doing the work the Global Summit will continue, as will our year-round programming,” she said.

More information about the Eradicate Hate Global Summit, its speakers and agenda can be found on the organization’s website. PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.