These religious-secular pow-wows that go down from time to time in Israel come in a variety of flavors, some more tolerable than others.

The best kinds are the ones with a particular objective: some concrete agreement needs to be hammered out on some well-defined topic. Obviously, even in such contexts there are blowhards and ideologues who make asses of themselves, but generally people are reasonable and – as in a business negotiation – if there’s a deal to be had, you get there eventually.

Less productive than those are the let’s-get-to-know-each-other parties that cropped up after the Rabin assassination. The few of these I’ve been to have basically been opportunities for anti-religious people to vent. You people are uneducated, you people don’t serve in the army, you people teach your kids to hate us, yada yada yada. Oh, that’s not you people? Well, next time we’ll bring some authentic dosim.

But by far the most horrendous such gatherings are the ones organized by do-gooder pseudo-multi-cultural types. This was brought to mind by a meeting being organized by the Israel Democracy Institute, a wildly over-funded organization dedicated to building a broad consensus around a self-serving elitist agenda. That’s quite a trick if you can pull it off and they’re pretty good at it. The purpose of this particular meeting is to find RZ “leaders” who will “encourage discourse” that will heal “the rift” in Israeli society. For those who missed the subtext, the word manhigut (=leadership) is shorthand for “people who can be bought with a bit of kavod”, the word shesa (=rift) is short-hand for “the shvartzes are escaping the plantation” and the word siach (=discourse) is shorthand for “let’s screw around with their heads until they’re convinced that our agenda is good for them”.

I hope I haven’t offended any black people by using that Yiddish epithet. But just to make it up to you, I’m going to let you in on a secret. I hear that the Daughters of the American Revolution are looking for some black leaders with whom to hold a discourse on the racial rift that’s been getting worse and worse ever since Jim Crow ended.