The President’s Conference: facing tomorrow both good and bad
Posted on May 19, 2008 • By Miriam Schwab
Category: Art and Culture View Comments
Last week, I attended The President’s Conference, which was titled “Facing Tomorrow.” For the uninitiated, The President’s Conference was a two-and-a-half-day gala affair where leading Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers, politicians, and moneyed men (yes, 9.9 times out of 10 they were men) got together to ponder the future of the Jewish people, both in Israel and in the Diaspora.
The conference was organized by The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI), a Jerusalem-based think tank that was commissioned by Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, to put the whole thing together. JPPPI planned the content, and hired Promarket to produce the other parts of the event. Charley J. Levine, CEO of Lone Star Communications (how can a PR agency not have a website?) managed the conference’s international media and public relations, and the caterer was a company called Taste and Color. The budget: $21 million, entirely provided by donors. U.S. billionaire Sheldon Adelson, contributed $3 million and was named honorary conference president, and he and his wife Miriam got to address Bush at the “we love Bush and the US event” (which I mention below).
The guest list was a veritable who’s who, and included the following people:
- George W. Bush
- Henry Kissinger
- Bernard-Henri Levy
- Elie Wiesel
- Susan Decker (Yahoo)
- Sergey Brin (Google)
- Rupert Murdoch
- Nathan Englander
- Jonathan Safran Foer
- Abe Foxman (ADL)
- Tony Blair
- Mikhael Gorbachev
- Rachel Fish
- Alan Dershowitz
- And more.
All of the sessions can be viewed online.
Was the conference good or bad?
I think that is is important to consider whether this conference was a good thing or a bad thing, particularly due to the price tag. $21 million thrown at what was basically a big fancy party in a country where children go hungry, and whole cities live under daily siege, needs some kind of justification. When I asked someone at the conference what they thought about this, they said that conferences are a fact of life, and you just have to accept them. But $21m conferences are not a fact of life in Israel.
So in true party pooper fashion, let’s take a look at the positive and negative aspects of having The President’s Conference, and then you can decide for yourselves:
The Good:
- A Jewish State reaching the 60 year milestone in the hostile Middle East, surviving numerous wars and attacks, and even thriving, is a cause for celebration. The State of Israel deserves some sort of high-level event that takes a good look at where we came from, and where we’re going.
- For conference participants, the arrival of luminaries and heads of state from around the world to show solidarity and support for Israel was a great morale booster
- $21m was poured into the Israeli economy.
- 60 businesses and organizations had the opportunity to display their innovative technologies and offerings to conference participants. In addition, I am sure that a lot of new business opportunities were formed during networking at the conference.
- It took place in Jerusalem, and caused thousands of people to visit the country’s capital, which is both good for the city’s economy (apparently the hotels were booked solid during the conference), and is a de facto type of recognition of Jerusalem as the country’s capital.
- Many interesting ideas did come out of the conference panels and discussions that could potentially impact positively on the future of the Jewish People.
- The donors probably wouldn’t have donated this money to the poor and needy anyway (unfortunately), so it’s not like there’s anything to discuss.
- I got to meet fascinating people that I’d probably not have an opportunity to meet otherwise, including a nobel laureate, an Australian MP, a fabulous woman from PayPal, and a leading Israeli politician.
The Bad:
- I think this conference was way too lavish, and less money could have been spent on it. It seemed socially unconscionable that we were partying at a national event while others in our nation were being bombed or didn’t have food to eat. Did we really need to get fancy briefcases with commemorative special issue stamps and a unique greeting card from Yaakov Agam? A little “hardship” on our parts would have made us seem more in touch with the outside world, a little less like people in a gilded tower. I mean, we didn’t even know about the Grad that had fallen on Ashkelon until that evening!
- The Peres worshipping – it’s true that only a statesman like Peres could have pulled something like this off, with such a high calibre of leaders who schlepped to Israel from all over the world. But I found the Peres-worshipping that was present at almost every panel and plenary to be a bit hard to stomach. Like most politicians, Peres has his fair share of scandals, and like most humans, he’s not perfect. But people really were falling all over themselves for him. I always find personality worshipping weird.
- If the main goal of the conference was to put Israel on the map, and to make the world realize that Israel’s not so bad, it was a failure. Peres asserted that “the conference promoted Israel around the world,” and in a mini-survey of conference participants, many said that they were so proud that Peres had managed to give Israel such good PR. Unfortunately, it seems that only the participants of the conference knew about it! Many people in Israel were unaware of the conference, and people I spoke to in New York knew nothing about it! And anyways, two days later Jimmy Carter is already publishing popular articles about Israel being the cause of all the world’s woes, so any popularity we garnered has quickly faded.
- Why-oh-why do all Israeli ceremonies have to be so corny? The opening ceremony and the “we love Bush and the US” ceremony both contained the usual: cute little girls dancing/singing, adults singing emotional songs about peace/hope/love, etc. But the “we love Bush and US” ceremony took the cake with two male dancers representing the countries flitting and fluttering about the stage to the tune of “You’ve Got a Friend,” while lovingly beckoning each other. @HarryR twittered: “So it turns out the usa and israel are gay,” and said “the interpretive dance of america and israel as a gay bi-racial couple was one of the greatest moments of my life.” Esther Kustanowitz got some of it on tape, and ponders the fate of the person who commissioned that piece:
- Olmert was spending way too much time at the conference for a guy being investigated by the police. I think he was there three times in two days! Shouldn’t he be running the country or something, or trying to figure out a way to help the people in Sderot live without the shadow of daily kassam rockets? The worst was when the camera caught him winking at someone while we were all singing Israel’s anthem. Not much of an example of good citizenship for our children.
Will something come of it all?
The question is whether something substantial will come out of this whole event. Will the ideas raised become part of a bigger strategic plan, or just fade away? I really do hope that our policy planners and leaders paid attention, because some fascinating ideas related to democracy, economics, science and identity were voiced that could have significant impacts on our entire nation.
In my next posts I’ll review the ideas and people that I found most interesting during the conference.
More coverage of the conference:
Official Facing Tomorrow website
Facing Tomorrow videos on Haaretz.com
Facing Tomorrow on the JPPPI website
eJewishPhilanthropy covers the President’s Conference
EstherK at Urban Kvetch covers the President’s Conference
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great post! I feel like I was there. I was wondering what that chefetz chashud was – glad to know it’s your briefcase from the conference. olmert winked?! who did he wink at? was it you? And as for the gay prancing around, i really wish I was there for that – unfortunately, the video that you posted from EstherK isn’t working for me
Miriam,
I think you made a number of valid points in both the good and bad. My perspective, btw, is that at least in the Jewish world (which I recognize was just one segment of the Conference planning) the good far outweighed the bad. Some excellent questions were raised in (semi) public; the networking was incredible and this will all ultimately help the diaspora community and Israel.
Just to add my two cents about media coverage. Lone Star (and I agree with you on the no website) was hired strictly for English language PR. I have been working with them since Pesach and they have done a superb job. A second firm was hired for Hebrew PR within Israel; from what you say perhaps they did not perform as well.
As to the foreign press, my only experience is with the Washington Post and they had at least two stories that I know that spoke of the Conference, who was here, aims etc. More probably could have been done in the U.S., but I suspect if you review the stories filed by the 110 member White House Press Corps there are probably several references to the Conference within this broader coverage. However, many Jews in the U.S. are simply not interested in reading about Bush’s foreign travel, even if to Israel.