The Need for an Interdisciplinary Field of Hate Studies

My organization, the American Jewish Committee, has a poster of cuddly diapered babies of different skin colors, with the caption “No One Is Born Hating.” We sometimes use this image on billboards or print it in newspapers, especially in the aftermath of a hate crime. I’m probably the only person on staff who hates that poster. No one is born speaking either, but at a certain point we would think it odd if a youngster didn’t develop that capacity. People may need help in figuring out whom to hate, but the instinct to hate is part of who we are. The poster sends the opposite message: that human beings, if not somehow polluted, would not indulge in hate. Hate is a normative part of the human experience. Look at history. Regardless of when, where, under what economic or political system, what major religion is followed, or any other variable, people have always had the capacity to define someone else as an “other,” and hate him, often with deadly results. Yet, despite how much hardship has been caused by hate throughout history, we know much too little about it. With America becoming an increasingly diverse society, with the world witnessing an upsurge in antisemitism and other ideologies and theologies of hate, and with terrorism in most corners of the globe, we need better to understand this phenomenon, and to identify testable rather than gut-instinct and “feel-good” remedies, sooner rather than later.

arguing that while "we do the best we can, there is a sense that we are shooting in the dark. We need a better understanding of what works and why." Ultimately Gonzaga University became that place, and Bill-after he retired from the Coalition-became increasingly active with Gonzaga's Institute for Action Against Hate.
It is fitting, then, that this first International Conference to Establish the Field of Hate Studies, held at Gonzaga, is dedicated to the memory of Bill Wassmuth.

II. DEFINING HATE
What is hate? An easy question, to which there is no easy answer. Renae Cohen, in her monograph "Hate: A Concept Examined," 2 coauthored with Wayne Winborne, noted that there is no commonly accepted definition of prejudice or stereotyping. She wrote that "[h]ate may be best described as a spectrum, with varying degrees of strength and meaning, all sharing the common component of negativity." Hate is, Cohen asserted, sometimes an emotion, sometimes an attitude, and sometimes a behavior. And, she claimed, it has two intersecting dimensions: passive to active, and thought to behavior.
Yes, but what is hate? Cohen's answer: [T]here is so little research examining hate and its related aspects in the social scientific literature that one must look closely at related areas such as prejudice and stereotyping to begin to build a useful body of work on hate. Yet that body of work will still need to be diverse in its content and flexible in its embrace of emerging areas of inquiry. Theories need to strive to synthesize insights from areas such as religion, philosophy and literature. Similarly, research delineating active hate from prejudice and demonstrating an explicit relation between prejudice and hate, or identifying prejudice as a form of hate, is also needed. 3 But Cohen's observation, as good as it is, isn't sufficient. It focuses on the individual alone, not on the individual in the context of the group, or society at large. And it doesn't consider the roles of political machinations and ideological appeals, which can move hatred onto a larger and more dangerous stagefrom that of distasteful attitudes into that of state policies supported by loftysounding theories.
Perhaps hatred is a too-difficult word to define. Sometimes, I'm tempted to use the word "otherism" because we are concerned with how humans relate to people who are "others." Regardless of what we call it, the questions are numerous and the answers too few.
Where does hate-and its various manifestations (racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, etc.)-come from? What motivates individuals to hate? Do we need to hate? If so, why? Hate frequently manifests itself in life-and-death images-fear of death of the group, for example, or willingness, even eagerness, to die in order to harm an "other." 4 How and why do these life/death images work?
Do we need to feel strong emotions, such as hate, in order to feel alive? Is fear of death of group identity an extension of self, or something else? Do hateful ideologies skew our vision, so that dangers to our existence are seen in every aspect of human life, such as culture, religion, social, and global changes?
When and why do different hateful ideologies find common cause (black supremacist and white supremacist, left-wing and right-wing zealots)?
What role does self-esteem play? Is there a correlation between how much we hate the other and how strongly we feel connected to-or good about-our group?
If bigotry has to do with identity, when and how is identity formed, influenced, and changed-or at least managed?
What is the role of education? What should governments and "social change agents," such as religious institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), be doing?
Why are some differences more important for defining others (skin color as opposed to eye color, for example) in some places, while in places where these differences don't exist, others are found? (For example, a study showed that Greek and Turkish Cypriots distinguish each other based on the types of cigarettes smoked.) What is the role of dehumanization in all this? What is the role of demonization? Why are conspiracy theories so prevalent in hateful ideologies? Why is hate of the other so frequently expressed as love of self? If you draw a graph between the human thirst for universality, on one hand, and tribalism, on the other, how does hatred play out on this field? What motivates group hate? What makes it stronger? Weaker? What are the roles of stress, fear, envy, race, power, land, economics, sovereignty, religion, memory, rage, biology, sex?
How do individual pathologies, group pathologies, political ideologies, and theologies mesh?
When and why do people act differently than they feel? (There is a study of restaurateurs saying they wouldn't serve Chinese people, but they did; many white people have black friends at work, but don't invite them home; people surveyed in Louisiana said they wouldn't vote for David Duke, but did.) Is hate ever a good thing? To motivate the Allied Forces in World War II, for example? These, and countless other related questions, are critical. But more important is the framework in which we address them.
We tend to think that if hate is a mental disorder, analysis is the cure. If it is a matter of economics, we need only wait for the next "up" cycle. If it is connected with political events, then wait for or try to effect change. If it is criminal activity from the "racist fringe," call the FBI. If it is a lack of education, educate.
If hate is defined as an individual problem, we turn to psychology; if it is the individual in the context of the group, social psychology; if it is the group, sociology; if it is cultural, anthropology; if it is political, political science; if it is moral, philosophy.
Practically speaking, this is too disjointed an approach. Because when the Bill Wassmuths of the world-let alone the governments, journalists, diplomats, and lawyers-address hate, they are doing so on all these planes simultaneously.
How do we combine these disparate parts into a logical and workable whole? There's no easy answer, but we need to start by identifying the various disciplines that have something valuable to say about hatred, analyzing their component parts, and pulling them together into the larger enterprise of hate studies.
And what exactly is hate studies? A working definition might be: Inquiries into the human capacity to define, and then dehumanize or demonize, an "other," and the processes which inform and give expression to, or can curtail, control or combat, that capacity.

III. ADDRESSING HATE WITHIN THE DISCIPLINES
Various disciplines need to be integrated and cross-pollinated. I have limited literacy in many of these areas, and none in others. My undergraduate major was political science, and I am a lawyer by training. But let me offer a few thoughts about some of the things some of the relevant academic disciplines might offer to this enterprise.

A. Hate from a Historical Perspective
First, history. History is the study of the past, and as such, provides a framework for understanding hatred and how it has manifested itself at different times and places. It focuses our attention on the societal origins of intergroup hate, on the building up and lifespan of various ideologies and theologies, on the role of dehumanization, how institutions are used, and how old battles are recycled symbolically to energize new ones. It also helps us focus on the "triggers," the events that combine the ingredients of hate into a combustible brew.

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JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 3:7 This focus on triggers, or what I call "Dashiell Hammett moments," is an important contribution of the discipline. For those who don't recall Hammett, he wrote detective stories, including The Maltese Falcon. His private-eye hero, when stymied, would "stir things up" and see how they played out, providing new clues. History does this too. Study of these "triggers" or "Dashiell Hammett moments" helps us both identify the types of situations in which hatred may come to the fore, and gain better insights into the ingredients which may simply be awaiting the right catalyst to be activated (much like a dormant volcano near an earthquake zone). When writing about contemporary antisemitism, I frequently cite four "triggers" or "Dashiell Hammett moments": the fall of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Middle East peace process in 2000, the United Nations' World Conference Against Racism in Durban, and the attacks of September 11.
History offers another insight: It is also a discipline abused to promote hatred. Historical events are frequently twisted in credible-sounding ways for nefarious purposes. The prime example of this is Holocaust denial, the brainchild of neo-Nazis and now a growth industry in Arab and Muslim parts of the world. But there are many other examples too: White supremacist teachings, which deny any meaningful role by non-whites in the betterment of the world; Afrocentrist teaching, which denigrates whites and, for purposes of selfesteem, tells young black children that their ancestors were flying glider planes in Egypt 2000 years ago (and that whites have stolen the knowledge of this history from them); and much fundamentalist Islamist teaching, which denies not only contributions of Christians and Jews, but also any historical claim on their parts to any real rights, including but not limited to the right to have any sovereignty over any land once ruled by Muslims.
From the viewpoint of the long gaze of history, a progression of the disciplines emerges. We start with those that focus on the individual, particularly individual psychology and evolutionary psychology. Jim and I agreed on everything except one thing: the "profile" of a militia member. I said that while there were no sociological studies to say definitively who was in the militias, anecdotally I was aware of people from just about every stratum. There were the "losers" one would expect, but I also knew of college graduates and small business owners. Jim disagreed. He said they were almost all the stereotypical products of broken homes and alcohol and drug abuse.

B. The Psychology of Hate
Afterwards, I came to the conclusion that we were both right. I recalled my friend Ken Toole, head of the Montana Human Rights Network, and his excellent metaphor for the militia movement as a "funnel moving through space." He said that at the wide lip of the funnel, there were people who were attracted by the more "mainstream" aspects of the movement, such as its focus on gun rights, an overly intrusive federal government, environmental regulations, and so on. Move a little further into the funnel, and there were the people animated by conspiracy theories in general, and antisemitic conspiracy theories in particular. And at the small end of the funnel were those who were fully engaged by these ideas, ready to pop out and wage war. Coates was probably right that the militia people at the small end of the funnel were more likely those who fit the profile he described, whereas I was right in describing the variety of people throughout the funnel.
But what makes some people-a Timothy McVeigh, a Kamikaze pilot, members of Hizballah, or the 9/11 hijackers-come willingly and with gusto out of the small end, when others do not? In what important ways do they differ? The accepted profile of the Southern Ku Klux Klaner in the 1960s was someone with less than the average education (although educated people certainly belonged to the Klan and the other hateful institutions of the time, such as White Citizens Councils). But studies of suicide bombers show them to be better off and better educated than the general population. 5 What can we learn from psychology in its focus on the important issue of identity and its relationship to hate? We tend to think of people as black or white, Christian or Jew. But we are really a huge bundle of identities, some more important in one situation than another. I'm an American, but I'm also a Jew, and a father, and a husband, and a fisherman. I'm also a basketball fan, and although I'd like to think that always forms a lesser part of my identity than my role as a father, my daughter might disagree, recalling how I once (okay, Most people who act on their hatred seem to have one single aspect of their identity that becomes supercharged and all-important-white supremacists, black supremacists, Islamists. Alvin F. Poussaint, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in 1999 in which he advocated a new psychological tag for these turbocharged haters: people with "extreme racism," which, he argued, should be considered a mental disorder. Reacting to the case of Buford Furrow, the former Aryan Nation member who shot up Jewish kids at a Los Angeles community center and killed a Filipino postal worker, he cited the classic work of Gordon Allport to argue that "the acting out of extermination fantasies [is] readily classifiable as a mental disorder." But here again is the problem of looking at primarily one aspect of hatred, the individual, with the worthwhile goal of reducing the number of people who act out their hatred violently, while largely discounting other concerns. While it might make sense to get the Buford Furrows of the world into treatment in their HMOs, this approach didn't fully consider the legal implications. Under certain circumstances, people can be acquitted of a crime if they show they have a mental disease or defect. Would this proposed new classification, as satisfying as it might be to some psychologists and psychiatrists, actually help acquit some violent racists charged with murder or other serious offenses?
And the narrow focus of the op-ed's author on the individual, failing fully to consider the other related aspects and academic approaches, creates another problem: How would this work on a societal basis? One month after the attacks of September 11, a survey showed that 48 percent of the people of Pakistan believed the newest antisemitic canard: that Israelis/Jews were secretly responsible for 9/11. Should nearly half a country be declared mentally diseased?
The focus on the individual needs to be integrated into a larger framework, but we also must ask the opposite questions, such as: What makes someone stand out in heroic ways to combat hatred? Consider Beth Rickey, a Republican official in Louisiana who couldn't stand that former Ku Klux Klan leader and neo-Nazi David Duke was elected to the legislature as a Republican. At great personal risk she followed him around and exposed him for selling Holocaustdenial literature from his legislative office. Or Anna Rosmus, a high school student from Passau, Germany, who decided to investigate what her town did during the Holocaust, and discovered, at great risk to herself-her house was firebombed-that town officials serving at the time she was doing her research had been involved in unspeakable atrocities and war crimes. Or Irshad Manji, a Canadian Muslim woman who, as a youngster, was told at a madrassa that she had to hate Jews. She said, "What's up with that?" and was told not to question, but only to believe. Since then, she has been on a quest to promote those strains of Islam that encourage questioning, pluralism, and rights. Or Bill Wassmuth, whom I mentioned before. I've had the pleasure to get to know all these brave \\server05\productn\G\GHS\3-1\GHS112.txt and incredible people and to count them among my friends. But what made them see some aspect of hate in institutions or communities that held great meaning for them, and rather than just accept or ignore it, speak out about it, even at great personal risk? These are just a few of the questions about the "individual" that a field of hate studies needs to address.

C. The Social Psychology of Hate
Then there is the academic discipline that looks at how the individual functions, not based on his particular personal pathology, but as a creature in social situations: social psychology. As James Waller has noted, this discipline looks at the critical mass, and how in these social situations individual attributes come to the fore.
Let's go back to Ken Toole's funnel. Recall that he described it not as stationary, but as moving through space. The aptness of this description goes beyond the notion that the funnel is a system that scoops people up. What if not all space through which it moves is the same? What if, in some places, the societal norms are more hateful? Logically, more people will be scooped up at the lip, pulled into the self-sustaining world of conspiracy theories (which see any contrary thought as part of the conspiracy), and propelled toward the small end. You don't need a degree in hate studies to know that when societies praise suicide bombers in sermons, on television, on street posters, and in other venues, more people will be coming out the small end.
I reviewed a book for the Washington Post last year entitled Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America by Kenneth R. Timmerman. While there was much about the book I didn't like, I thought Timmerman's description of the impact of societal norms on the individual was artful. As I wrote for the Post: Timmerman debunks the myth that poverty and hopelessness produce terrorism and hatred; rather, the source is genocidal ideas, made mainstream by societal institutions. The glorification of killing Jews by suicide bombing is especially targeted to children, a grotesque form of child abuse. When a Palestinian blew up Jews of all ages at a Passover Seder in Netanya in March 2002, killing 29 and injuring 159, a Saudi government paper "gushed with praise for the bomber," and the Palestinian Authority named a soccer team in his honor. Death notices for suicide bombers "resemble wedding, not funeral, announcements." Timmerman juxtaposes the celebration of the Netanya bomber in Palestinian society with the scene of two sets of Israeli parents waiting at a hospital where lay a girl so horribly wounded that she couldn't be identified, each hoping that maimed child was theirs, because she was at least living. Timmerman's observation about death notices seeming like wedding notices is a valuable insight. So much of hate revolves around images of life and death. And killing an enemy whom you define as a danger to your progeny is clearly seen as a life-affirming act.
Human beings die, and it is natural to fear death. But it is not only the physical death of ourselves and our loved ones that we fear. We also fear the death of our identities. Read white supremacist literature. This is its cornerstone-fear of diminished power, fear of inbreeding with minorities, and so on. Black supremacist literature is infused with similar themes. Every group is concerned with its own death, and this fear is clearly intertwined with how threats are defined.
So much of our culture reflects this life-and-death symbolism. Next time you watch a sports broadcast-especially the playoffs-pay attention to how many times sportscasters make allusions to life and death.
We fear the death of our identity because we love our identity, and, not surprisingly, hate of others is frequently cited as love of self. David Duke says he doesn't hate black folk; he just loves white folk. Louis Farrakhan says he doesn't hate white folk; he just loves black folk.
Consider Matt Hale, the white supremacist leader of the World Church of the Creator, who was asked about his disciple, Benjamin Smith, who had gone on a shooting spree targeting blacks, Asian-Americans, and Jews before dying himself. Hale said, "He was a selfless man who gave his life in resistance to Jewish/mud tyranny. I knew Ben Smith and refuse to condemn this man who, with a pure heart and pure will, struck back against the enemies of our people. Ben Smith certainly did not kill any white people." Or similarly, there was the classic story of a Long Island, New York, resident who saw hippies in his town in the 1960s and said, "We should kill them, or else there will be violence." Or take the many examples throughout history of people feeling comfortable enough to advocate publicly killing babies, whether it be Col. John Chivington in Colorado in 1864 explaining that Indian babies needed to be killed because "nits make lice," or the Nation of Islam's Khalid Mohammad, who spoke about why there might be a need to kill white children in South Africa.
Or, at the most extreme, the claim is made that hating victims is actually loving them. As the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is reported to have commented: If an infidel is allowed to pursue his nefarious role as corrupter on earth until the end of his life, his moral sufferings will go on growing. If we kill him, and we thus prevent the infidel from perpetuating his misdeeds, this death will be to his benefit.
And, clearly, sometimes the hate of the "other" becomes so important that one is willing to harm oneself in order to inflict damage on that "other." The \\server05\productn\G\GHS\3-1\GHS112.txt unknown Seq: 11 1-DEC-04 12:03 willingness of the Palestinian Authority to sacrifice the lives of young people and children in order to kill Jews is an example. I heard this mind-set best described by the story of a man who is granted one wish. He can have anything he desires. He can even wish for more wishes. There's only one caveat: Anything he gets, his neighbor will get double. After thinking for a while he says, "Poke out one of my eyes." It also seems that there's a strong linkage between conspiracy theories and hate. The militia movement was full of conspiracy theories. Antisemitism has historically been driven by them-from ancient claims that Jews poisoned wells to the commonplace belief in many parts of the world that Jews were secretly behind the attacks of September 11.
Social psychology, which looks at the individual in social situations, offers some insights into this problem, and perhaps some suggestions about what to do.
While there is in this academic discipline a treasure trove of research that I'm not going to discuss, such as the work of Theodor Adorno and others after World War II on The Authoritarian Personality, I will briefly mention the "Robbers Cave" experiment, conducted by Muzafer Sherif in the 1950s, which the American Jewish Committee partially funded. Twelve-year-old boys of similar demographic profiles were sent to a summer camp in which they were initially separated into two groups (neither of which realized there was another group) and kept totally apart. Over a period of time they were allowed to discover the existence of the other group. Negative stereotypes about the "other" group grew. But toward the end of the experiment, they had to cooperate together on a "superordinate" goal, namely a problem with the drinking water at the camp that could be fixed only if they worked on it together. It seemed the need to work together on something critically important created an overarching identity which broke down many of the stereotypes the campers had held before.
Over my years at AJC, I've seen many examples of this social psychology principle in practice: how the creation of superordinate goals, or rather the need for a common identity, can make or break an initiative. The longest-lasting of our intergroup efforts, such as black-Jewish dialogue groups, have been the ones that included another connection, such as black-Jewish business people. And one of the cleverest responses to bigotry on campus was an initiative designed by then-Barnard president Ellen Futter, who pulled together a group of students reflecting the diversity of her campus. She gave them the task of going to other schools and investigating how they handled such problems, and then reporting back. She took leaders who might have seen one another as antagonists, or at least competitors, and instead pulled them together with a common mission and task.
I recognized a similar phenomenon in New York in the days and weeks after September 11. The sharing of the common experience of learning how to \\server05\productn\G\GHS\3-1\GHS112.txt cope with living (staying?) in a city that had just been attacked seemed to make people from different backgrounds interact more with, and be kinder to, one another. Fewer horns honked. Even my barber, whom I always suspected of some racist tendencies, commented about how 9/11 made him feel more open to black New Yorkers, as they had gone through the same trauma as he. I recalled the TV show Star Trek, and how there was never any real problem between the earthlings of various ethnicities and religions, because they all had to cooperate to fend off threats by the Klingons. Here was social psychology on TV, and on the sidewalks of New York. Social psychology also teaches that there's something very basic in the human makeup about how we identify ourselves and "others." There have been many experiments in which people have been assigned to one group or another through random and meaningless means, such as a coin flip. Despite understanding how they were selected, despite having no competition for resources, despite knowing that the groups would never see each other again, people still stereotyped their group as better, smarter and more attractive than the "other." This human capacity is easily manipulated by authority figures. The experiment of Stanley Milgram and the investigations of those that built upon it are classic. People thought they were giving a subject an electric shock. Despite the protests of the subject, who complained, "My heart!" and "Let me out of here!", most people kept on giving what they thought were shocks because the authority figure (the experimenter) said he'd take all responsibility, that it was important that the experiment not be terminated, and other such excuses. Most people felt uncomfortable continuing to inflict the shocks, but they did so nonetheless.
There are also studies in social psychology that show that hatred is more easily manifested when people are in groups and lose "individualization." As Evan Harrington pointed out in his remarks prepared for Gonzaga University's Conference to Establish the Field of Hate Studies, 6 when attackers of blacks in the South wore masks, they generally became more violent and aggressive. And an analysis of newspaper articles from the South showed a direct correlation between the size of a crowd attending a lynching and the level of violence, including dismemberment.
Somehow mixed in with all this is the power of symbols and their political ramifications. One of the conflicts between the boys in the Robbers Cave experiment was over a flag, a symbol, and we see such behavior in real life, too.
I've been involved for many years with a group trying to retire racist sports mascots, most of them Indian. One of the most contentious battles has been at the University of Illinois, with its Chief Illiniwik of the "fighting Illini." He's a prancing and dancing mascot and is very offensive to Indian people. He sports eagle feathers, which are an important religious item. This would be the same as if some team were named the "Christians" and had a person (A Mus- lim? A Jew?) in a Pope costume frolicking about with crucifixes. Or if the New York Yankees were instead the "New York Jews," with stereotypical depictions on items from caps to toilet paper, playing at Synagogue Stadium, with a crowd-pleasing motion of the "Torah Scroll" and free yarmulkes on "kippah" day. Yet despite the clear bigotry of this mascot, there is a powerful attachment to it and a denial of what it means. I spoke at a conference on this at the University and remarked that I simply didn't understand why it was so hard to let go. I understood the pull of tradition, the power of symbols, and the role of identity. But a university's main job is to attract and teach quality students. This fight only created distraction and controversy, which would not help that main mission. And I hazarded to guess that when choosing where to spend tens of thousands of dollars on tuition, students considering the University of Illinois focused on the quality of the education, the courses the school offered, the stature of its faculty, the prospects for jobs, and many other things. I seriously doubted that many chose the school because they thought, "It has a cool mascot." So why was the fight over the symbol so tenacious?
Or consider the 1988 presidential race. Ed Koch, then the mayor of New York, stated that "any Jew or supporter of Israel would be crazy if they supported or voted for Jackson." That statement was undoubtedly true at that time. Jesse Jackson had a record which included calling New York "Hymietown," and, shortly after visiting the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, said he was "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust." Despite the basic truth of Koch's comments, he was attacked, and ended up losing the next mayoral campaign because of it. Why? Because he wasn't seen as attacking Jackson the man, but rather Jackson as the symbol of a whole group's identity and aspirations.
Or consider the fact that the last two campaigns to take the radical step of changing the United States Constitution have been concerned with symbolic issues that animate proponents powerfully, but have very little impact in the world in which we live or on the terrorism that we fear to die from: flag burning and gay weddings.
Conversely, we need to understand the power and workings of symbols so that we can use them better for combating hatred, most particularly what social psychology and other disciplines tell us about how they relate to our identities and institutions. There's the classic story of Billings, Montana, in which the window of a Jewish family had been shattered because their young son had put up a picture of a menorah at Chanukah time. The town adopted the symbol-the newspaper published it, and people put it up on their homes to make a statement against hate and to display unity of the community. The campaign was so successful that the little Jewish boy at the center of this episode, seeing all the menorahs around town, told his mom that he didn't know there were so many \\server05\productn\G\GHS\3-1\GHS112.txt Jewish people in Billings. She replied, "No, there aren't so many Jews here; these are our friends." But this episode would not have come about if the police chief, who had worked for many years in Portland, Oregon, had not learned the lessons from that city's unfortunate experience with hate crimes: 1) If they are not denounced strongly, they will inevitably increase. 2) It is essential for those in positions of authority to take action against hate. Hate crimes are frequently thought of as purely a law enforcement matter-find the culprit, prosecute him or her, and push for a strong sentence. But the police chief, Wayne Inman, whether he knew it or not, applied lessons from social psychology, with great success.
One day, when this Billings response was still in the news, I asked Inman how he got others-especially those with children-to put menorahs in their windows. Wouldn't that just make them more likely targets for the hate groups? He said, "Yes, but I also tell them that the more people who put up the menorahs, the less chance there is that any individual house will be targeted." He helped create a communal identity in which people were willing to take risks that at the same time reduced the risk to their neighbors, and by encouraging others to follow their example, further reduced the risk to themselves.

D. A Sociological Approach
While it is imperative to understand how people behave in groups, it is also important to understand how groups behave and position themselves, which brings us to sociology.
As Kathleen Blee noted in the address she prepared for Gonzaga University's Conference to Establish the Field of Hate Studies, 7 group hate is a process which goes through stages, among them naming and labeling an "enemy" in a negative way, and myth-making about them. This need not be connected to our individual observations of people. For example, someone can be horribly homophobic and have a gay friend. One may sympathize with an individual (such as an immigrant in a desperate plight) but hate the abstract group to which that person belongs. Where different groups live, work or go to school, or how they otherwise interact or don't interact which each other, are factors that also impact how the groups look at one another.
Blee also observed that not all group prejudices work the same way. Her extensive interviews with white supremacists revealed that, regardless of whether their reasons have any empirical validity, people can cite "concrete references" in their lives for bigotry against black people. They will say things such as, "When I was in fourth grade, this black girl took up too much of the seat, or played her music too loud, and then I realized the problem with black people." But antisemitism "has no concrete reference in their lives," Blee says. People may have joined a white supremacist group casually, for social reasons, but once inside they learn the "secret" about the Jews. This learning of the "secrets" has a key role in binding them together. Clearly, antisemitism, which has a long-standing and-to the hater-"logical" storyline about Jews conspiring to harm non-Jews through various means, provides them an explanation for what they see as wrong in the world, and in turn, helps strengthen their group identity.
Sociology also helps us understand attitudes between and among groups. What one group thinks of another, over time, is important, especially as our society grows and changes. But an increasing concern is whether one of the main tools we use to gauge these trends-attitudinal surveys-has adapted sufficiently over time. I'm not sure some are asking the right questions anymore.
For one thing, when these instruments look at issues of hatred, their construction is often faulty. When David Duke was running for public office in the 1990s, many people who told those conducting surveys that they would not vote for him, did indeed do so. There is some authority to suggest that people are less likely to answer surveys honestly if they fell that their answers might be interpreted as being racist. 8 Those of us monitoring Duke thought it prudent to double his numbers in polls when figuring strategy, and that was a wise choice. But how does one recalibrate other types of attitudinal surveys focusing on hate?
I'm particularly concerned with the design of attitudinal surveys that purport to ascertain what people think about Jews. Classically, if respondents express a certain number of stereotypes, they are classified as antisemitic. That leaves aside the fact that most people are certainly antisemitic or anti-black to one degree or another; it's not a simple "yes" or "no" question, as the polls suggest, but a matter of gradation.
But the problem is also one of definitions. A recent Anti-Defamation League survey said that while 17 percent of Americans were antisemitic, only 3 percent of college students were. But during the period when that survey was taken, the ADL and many other Jewish organizations, including the one I work for, were spending an inordinate amount of time tackling antisemitism on campus. Did this mean that this 3 percent were more active than the average antisemite? Possibly. But a more likely explanation was that the poll was looking at "classically" antisemitic attitudes, such as whether Jews stick together more than most Americans, whether they're not as honest, or have irritating faults, or like to be heads of things, or have too much power.
The problems on campus were not coming from those who felt that Jews were greasy or slimy, or who wouldn't live next door to or wouldn't marry a Jew. They were from those who didn't have a problem with a Jew individually, but whose antisemitism was manifest in its collective expression, namely in the State of Israel. This is not to say that criticism of Israel is necessarily antisemitism. It clearly is not, as anyone who has read Israeli papers knows. But to single out only one people on the globe as not having the right of self-determi- nation, or holding the state to a standard of behavior not applied to any other nation, is a form of bigotry that doesn't get picked up in the classic models looking at intergroup attitudes. 9 As I said, I know antisemitism best because I spend most of my time working as an anti-antisemite. But I have to wonder whether there are similar problems with survey instruments that look at bigoted or hateful attitudes toward other groups as well.
So far, I've just touched on a few areas in which history, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, and sociology have important things to say about hatred, with some observations about how they might each better inform other disciplines that also grapple with hate. There's much more each of these academic areas offers, and there are many others that have contributions to make too, among them economics, philosophy, and anthropology.
But rather than focus on those today-we certainly will at future conferences-I want to review a few areas of a second category of disciplines, those that have connections to institutions that can have an impact on hatred, for better or worse.

E. Religious Studies
Religious studies is one of those disciplines. Religion encompasses both the best and the worst of human interaction with hatred. It has set norms for universal human dignity, and it has justified the most barbaric carnage as taking place in the supreme service of God. Religion's intersection with hatred can be most dangerous when theology and ideology are combined. It is then not only identity and politics that command hatred, but also the Supreme Being.
Furthermore, when we speak about religion, we don't mean only matters of theology and theory, but we also look at religious institutions, as they have an impact on the individual, the individual in conjunction with the group, the group, political, and many other considerations.
One of the good things that came out of the controversy over Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ was that I got to meet Father John Pawlikowski. I learned from him that what the Church could do and not do was influenced, perhaps dictated, by a great many interlocking factors, among them a sense of institutional inertia due to the health of the Pope, the ascendancy of conservatives within the Church, and many other related challenges. So figuring out how to avoid religion's being used to promote hatred, and how to empower it to combat it is a complex matter involving institutional concerns as well as purely theological ones.
Over my lifetime, despite some incidents to the contrary, the history of interreligious affairs has been a story of great success, especially in Jewish-Catholic relations. I recall my mother, a pediatric hematologist, relating how she had a young patient who asked her to help him memorize his catechism, Here was a woman who loved her religion, but saw its institutions and theological vision being taken over by people who discriminated against women, hated Jews and other non-Muslims, justified violence to achieve their goals, and beat down any impulse for pluralism or thought in favor of blind faith and obedience. How could we not help a woman who was trying to use religion to combat hate? But some of my colleagues argued that because Manji was outside the mainstream religious structure and was further looked down upon as a woman and a lesbian, we should avoid any association with her if we were to be "credible." Ultimately, we helped Manji and that didn't hurt our interfaith work, but the question raised in this debate-How do religious organizations best support the voices against hatred, both among their coreligionists and in other religions?is a complex one.
And what about government? In the United States, church and state are separate, but that doesn't mean that government doesn't have a role. AJC, for example, exposed the fact that Saudi textbooks routinely promote antisemitism, anti-Americanism and anti-Christianity. That our ally is preaching hatred in the name of Islam to its populace has a real impact. Beyond the observation that the nationality of the majority of the September 11 hijackers was Saudi, there is the fact that peace in the Middle East can be achieved only if people see the conflict as a territorial one (territory can always be divided), and not if one side trains its populace to see the other as demonic. Shouldn't our government be paying more attention to this problem?
European countries have a particular challenge in this regard. Foreign countries fund foreign-born imams who preach genocidal messages to their congregants. This is both a diplomatic and an internal challenge. Yet not much has been done, and the few "answers" suggested to date have serious flaws and shortcomings.
The French have outlawed Muslim head scarfs in public schools, under the theory that this enactment will help reinforce secularism. 10 But isn't there also the danger that by focusing on a religious symbol, as opposed to hateful practices and teachings, the government will further radicalize its Muslim population? I can imagine if someone passed a law clearly targeting the religious symbols of any group, coreligionists who might not wear the symbol would feel as if they, their values, and their ability to practice their faith were under attack, and would be angered. History, social psychology, and other disciplines certainly would have something to say about the wisdom of this legislation. Along these same lines, I had a conversation a few months after the attacks of September 11 with the justice minister of a Western European country with a significant Muslim population, some of whom had documented and well-publicized connections with Al Qaeda figures. I told him that before the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI had very little interest in the militia movement, despite warnings of dangerous and illegal activity provided to the agency by AJC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other organizations. After the bombing, however, the FBI woke up and infiltrated agents into groups that had both the means and plans for acts of domestic terrorism. Many were shut down with successful prosecutions.
How, I asked the minister, did he plan to deal with the similar challenge in his country? While the post-Oklahoma City law enforcement model was an obvious answer, how could it be applied in the much more difficult venue of extremist mosques? After all, with the militias, law enforcement infiltrators looked like the people they were investigating and spoke the same language. What law enforcement strategy did he envision to get around the linguistic and cultural differences between law enforcement and Islamists planning acts of terror? He said they were considering legislation to compel prayer and other activity to be conducted in the main (official) language. I was stunned. Could you imagine what would happen in the U.S. if there were radical Jewish groups bent on terrorism, and the U.S. government dictated that prayer couldn't be conducted in Hebrew, but only in English?
It seems to me that how we understand and deal with religion-and especially how government institutions do so-will be an increasingly important matter, and something in which an integrated field of hate studies could make a major contribution.

F. Political Science Observations
Next, a few thoughts about political science. All hate beyond the purely individual, has of course a political purpose. And hate has frequently been used for political ends. Look at the history of any country or any conflict to find countless examples.
But there are other matters that should concern us too. Let me illustrate by discussing one aspect of the political purposes of antisemitism. Antisemitism has three forms-religious, racial, and political. The first is sometimes known as anti-Judaism; the second is best evidenced by Nazism, Christian Identity, and other related hatreds. Neither, of course, can be divorced from its political utility and history. But antisemitism's "political" form-anti-Zionism-is the least understood and in recent years probably the most resurgent. Zionism, by the way, means nothing more than the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. It says nothing about the country's borders, policies or practices. It is merely an affirmation of the right of Jews (like the right of Palestinians or any other people) to self-determination in a land of their own. Anti-Zionism is a belief that Jews (usually alone among the peoples of the globe) do not have that right to self-determination. It takes the discrimination practiced historically against the Jews as individuals and employs it against their collective identity. Of course, it is okay to criticize Israel, but only by the same standard that one would criticize the policies of the United States, Egypt, or any other country. Frequently this purely political type of antisemitism uses the same tropes as the older kinds-seeing Jews conspiring to harm non-Jews through devious means and control of key societal institutions.
I mention all this because it is clear that even people who have an antiracist political stance can be hateful, as was evidenced at the United Nations' World Conference against Racism in Durban in the summer of 2001. Representatives of human rights groups from around the world convened, and the language of human rights was hijacked in order to demonize Israel and the Jews within it. Groups that could be counted on to criticize white supremacist groups who peddled Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were conspicuously silent when these very volumes were distributed in Arabic. Groups that would be quick to pounce on promoters of an anti-gay or antiwoman agenda were blind to these policies among groups, such as Hamas, which also preach the need to destroy Israel. So even for some who know better, certain types of hate will matter less when political considerations trump values.
Let me add one more instance which has great resonance. You may recall that after the collapse of the Middle East peace process in 2000 there were many attacks on Jews and Jewish-linked property around the world, but in no place more than in France. French government officials told us that the "solution" to the attacks was for there to be peace in the Middle East. 11 Now, of course, every well-meaning person wants that, but is that a credible answer when people are being stabbed, cemeteries desecrated, and synagogues burned? Would we have accepted that answer from the federal government in the 1960s-that the lynching of black folk would end when the races learned to live together? Political views sometimes even trump basic law enforcement principles, such as recognizing the danger to society itself when hate crimes run unchecked.
The most important political science questions involve governments. For example, the spring before the September 11 attacks I had asked a senior State Department official why the United States did nothing when the major newspapers of Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries frequently ran articles depicting Jews in the same dehumanizing way the Nazis did-describing them as vermin, accusing them of attacking non-Jews to steal their blood, and so forth. If the U.S. wants peace, I argued, you can't make peace with the devil, and that's what most readers of these papers will see Jews as. "What would you like us to do?" he asked. "Pull out the air bases from Saudi Arabia?" Clearly, there are things our government can do to extract a "cost" for promoting hatred short of pulling out air bases (which were later closed anyway after the second war in Iraq began). Here was an example of how other policies-such as an energy policy that still leaves us dependent on foreign oil-limit our capacity to confront hate.
There are also lessons to be learned from Israel's support of Hamas as a counterforce to the PLO and the U.S.'s support of Islamist groups in Afghanistan, armed and funded to fight the Soviet Union. You do not need a degree in hate studies to know that arming zealous religious/political movements for short-term reasons is not a good long-term strategy, because they have their own hateful agenda which sooner or later will come to the fore. But did those who were making the political calculations at the time-Americans wondering how best to cause trouble to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the endgame of the "Cold War," or Israelis wondering how to weaken a growing PLO through competition-even ponder the long-term countervailing considerations a historian, social psychologist, or religious studies expert might have put forward?
It has been said that the U.S. government had a good plan for toppling Saddam Hussein, but not much of a plan in the aftermath. Imagine if, before the shooting started, the government had fully consulted experts in hate to consider the possible impact, including the still-looming danger, evidenced recently in the former Yugoslavia, of the breakup of a country held together by a strongman, opening a Pandora's Box of competing religious fundamentalists with guns.
Government on the local level could also be greatly improved by a field of hate studies. When a city is about to open a new park, it has to consider the environmental impact. Why shouldn't it also be required to consider the intergroup impact? There is an opportunity here to bring together different communities in a constructive way-say through basketball games-to reduce tensions and improve understanding and cooperation.
If I had one pragmatic wish for the field of hate studies, it would be this: that it would institutionalize the review of proposed government policies to see how they might impact matters of hate. Government officials would routinely ask questions such as: "Will this proposed policy tap into the triggers that history warns us about, or worsen intergroup relations?" And, conversely, they'd ask, "Can this proposed policy be implemented in a way that can improve intergroup relations, marginalize haters, and reinforce ideas of community?"

G. The Impact of Law
Related to politics is the field of law. The rule of law, of course, is essential for freedom and democracy. Law regulates society and defines norms. What I worry about, however, is that "law" and "hate" don't mesh as well as they should. While hate crime legislation-both the counting of hate crimes and the increased sentence for those who select victims based on their race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, or disability-is very important, that shouldn't be the sum total of how we look at hate through law. 12 Law, I fear, is too frequently a "black hole" that sucks away other, perhaps more important, initiatives to combat hate-initiatives that other disciplines should be more aggressive in proposing.
In the late 1980s many college campuses in the United States promoted "hate speech codes." This functional criminal law of the college campus would have outlawed hateful expression. Aside from their constitutional infirmities (violating the right of free speech enshrined in the First Amendment), these codes were also a subterfuge. Administrators could point to the new regulation and say they had addressed the issue of hate on campus. By doing so, they ignored important steps such as changing the curriculum, surveying students in order to understand their experiences, preparing students who would be mingling with people of different backgrounds perhaps for the first time, training staff, creating hotlines, and other labor-intensive initiatives.
Likewise, many countries that don't have First Amendment-like guarantees of free expression have proposed banning hate sites on the Internet. Aside from the technical difficulty (read impossibility) of doing so, why shouldn't the focus instead be on teaching children and others the skills necessary to identify and reject hate on the Internet? Countries require a certain minimal driver's education before getting behind the wheel of a car, among other reasons, so that the driver will recognize anticipated dangers and be prepared to respond appropriately. Wouldn't it make sense to insure that students are trained to navigate the Internet, with all its dangers, rather than hope that a huge cyberspace delete switch will somehow magically take care of the problem?
Too often we default to thinking that the law is the only, or the best, answer to a societal problem. Passing a law is relatively easy and straightforward: Some legislative body votes, some executive signs a piece of paper, and the law becomes reality. A thriving field of hate studies would help suggest other options that might better address the underlying concerns, and in the process, make solutions proposed by social psychologists and educators seem not only logical, but also, as we learn to turn to these fields for answers, less challenging to implement.
The interdisciplinary approach of hate studies would, conversely, expand the appropriate uses of law. For example, hate crime legislation now requires the federal government to collect statistics annually and encourages the states to provide the data. But should data collection, as important as it is for spotting annual trends and for prompting once-a-year stories on the release of the statistics, be enough? What if the information were put on a Web site in a database, updated with new information regularly? Wouldn't this provide an opportunity for religious institutions to find out about and "adopt" a particular hate crime in \\server05\productn\G\GHS\3-1\GHS112.txt their region, helping to make the victim whole and keeping attention on the case until a culprit is identified and convicted? What if the database were sortable, so that journalists, academics and others could see regularly if there were more of certain types of hate crimes in one area or another, or different rates of apprehension and conviction? What if the cases were tagged by state and date, so that if one was reported in the newspaper or otherwise came to light and wasn't included in the database, it could be noted, thereby encouraging regions that don't report hate crimes now to do so? By taking the teachings of other fields, and considering the implications of this data on the individual, on the individual within the group, and between groups, this dry legal data could have a much greater utility.

H. The Role of Journalism
Final in our brief survey of academic areas tied to institutions is journalism. It is a major means through which people get their information. Regardless of the complexities of the situation and the fairness of the depiction, for example, I'm sure that when Al Jazeera shows pictures of an armed Israeli soldier together with a Palestinian youth, it has a huge impact.
But we also know that journalism can have a key role in combating hatred. You will recall that when the Jewish child in Billings, Montana, had his window shattered because it sported a picture of a menorah during Chanukah time, it was the local paper that printed pictures of menorahs and encouraged all the citizens of Billings to display them.
One of the best models of coverage of hate groups occurred right here in Spokane, Washington. Bill Morlin's reportage of the militia movement was superb. He and his colleagues at the Spokesman-Review made the militia members seem human and understandable, and not, as in so many other papers, cartoonish. You could recognize them as your neighbors, but you also comprehended the danger they posed.
Journalists should be trained with the tools of hate studies in order better to report matters related to hate, and also to help translate the growing knowledge of hate studies experts to the general public in useful ways. Perhaps as hate studies becomes established, there could be journalists' retreats for those who cover the "hate" beat to spend time with hate studies experts.
While I'm glad that others will amplify the possible contributions of the fields I've touched on in this address, I'm disappointed that we don't have enough time at this initial conference on the establishment of the field of hate studies to have presentations from experts in other disciplines with much to offer, such as biology, anthropology, economics, and education. Education, I believe, is critical. It is the usual "default" method for dealing with hatred, and I have many questions and concerns.
A few years ago, before the collapse of the Middle East peace process, there was a series of attacks on immigrants and also on some Jews in Germany. My agency, which has produced an anti-bias curriculum called "Hands Across the Campus," was considering exporting this product to Germany, and I was asked my opinion. I was also asked about the possibility of working with another U.S.-based educational organization, Facing History and Ourselves, to combat the problem of hateful youngsters engaging in violence against racial and religious minorities there.
My first question was whether educational programs that used the Holocaust as part of their lesson plan would be transferable to Germany, where the Holocaust was part of its national history. But then I asked an even more basic question: How do we know these educational programs work?
We had never conducted a long-term study to see whether the lessons learned from "Hands Across the Campus" actually stuck. Nor had there been such a study of the Anti-Defamation League's "A World of Difference" program, nor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Teaching Tolerance." All of them had been evaluated to gauge what the teachers thought of them, but none to see whether they worked on the students over time.
The Carnegie Foundation, however, had funded one short-term study of "Facing History." It looked during one school year at 212 eighth-grade "Facing History" students, and compared them with 134 similar non-Facing History students.
While the study focused mostly at the program's impact on violence, it also included a scale on racism. Leaving aside some problems with the scaleit included opposition to affirmative action as an indication of racism (which it can be, but need not be)-its findings were intriguing. It found that girl students and those classified as "nonfighters" emerged from the program less racist, but the program made no difference for boys, and (as with the control group) those classified as "fighters" actually became more racist while going through the program. And, as I said, there was no follow-up to see if even the minimal positive effects on girls and nonfighters (clearly not the type who were causing Germans their problem, by the way) held over time.
If someone ran a pharmaceutical company that said, "I have this pill which will cure disease X. We haven't actually done any long-term studies, but trust us," there would be a legal word to describe such a statement: negligent.
Unfortunately, there are ample precedents for costly educational initiatives having no lasting impact. As Cookie Stephan noted in her paper, "The Evaluation of Multicultural Education Programs: Techniques and a Meta-Analysis," 13 the school-based anti-smoking campaign has been in place for over a quarter \\server05\productn\G\GHS\3-1\GHS112.txt century, and has been regularly praised. It uses puppet play about second-hand smoke in elementary school, role-play on saying "no" in middle school, and testimony from tobacco trials in high school. A fifteen-year study was conducted covering 8,400 students. The result? Those who went through the program were just as likely to smoke as those who did not.
Stephan also cited the DARE program, which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, popularly known as "just say no." The program started in 1983. Three-quarters of the elementary schools in the United States use it. Over $126 million has been spent on it. And it turns out, kids who went through this program were just as likely to use drugs as those who didn't. As one commentator noted, what felt good didn't do good.
Stephan conducted a meta-analysis of the small number of studies on antibias curricula. None of these were long-term studies, and her conclusion-that these curricula likely help reduce prejudice-is suspect because, as she herself points out, "It is almost certain that evaluations showing no or negative differences were conducted but did not see print." She also stressed that there was little data on the differences between the programs. Some use text, others experiential models, for example. Some are used in one grade, some in another. Even if these programs did work, there is too little data to direct which type of program, targeted to which gender at which age level, would be the best investment.
The goal of the creation of a field of hate studies is to understand how hate works, and how most effectively to combat it. Fighting hate is a zero-sum game. Money spent on one type of program-including educational programs-cannot be spent elsewhere. It is a priority for the field of hate studies to encourage long-term testing of the prescriptions we fund to combat hate, and to see if they, in fact, work.

III. IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
Finally, why is the creation of the field of hate studies critical now? There are many answers, but let me offer four.
First, isolated answers regarding hate tend to be incomplete. Consider Jerrold Post, whom I admire and enjoyed working with during the heyday of the militia movement. He heads the political psychology program at George Washington University. Post said: A little skepticism is healthy, but a deep craving for enemies is a spiritual crutch. You start with alienated or unsuccessful people, feed them mindnumbing suspicions and rationalizations, and before you know it, you've got "patriotic resisters" who say government is an agent of the anti-Christ. 14 That may describe some of the militia folk, but it hardly explains Osama bin Laden or the suicide bombers who blew up themselves and many Israelis shortly after finishing a college exam. Or, as I mentioned, there is Poussaint's claim about "extreme racism," arguing that by classifying it as a mental disorder more people can be treated. But he did not fully consider whether this would help violent criminals have a viable defense, or cause us to diagnose millions of people (such as 48 percent of Pakistanis who believe the antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy theories) as suffering from a mental disease.
Second, by the middle of this century-if you believe the demographic projections-the United States will be a country in which the majority of the population will be nonwhite. How many Americans will be fearful of this change, and how many of them will be drawn to racist and antisemitic theologies and ideologies, such as Christian Identity and Christian Patriotism, which are now fringe phenomena, but which offer them a sense of power and purpose? While Pat Buchanan, who played into some of these fears during the 2000 presidential election, didn't get any traction, look at Jean-Marie Le Pen in France or Joerg Haider in Austria to gauge what problems may be in store for us in the decades ahead.
Third, the events of September 11, 2001, were a wake-up call on many fronts. First, they made clear the dangers of mass murder from terrorists driven by hatred. A handful of people died during the first Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Thousands died in the attack of 2001. Is this a progression? Will the next attack kill tens of thousands, or more? There is near certainty that, soon or later, there will be a biological, chemical, or nuclear attack by terrorists, who see a holy mission in mass murders, and past atrocities as goals to be surpassed. How do we better understand and reduce their ability to work and attract adherents? How do we make sure that, if we have to sacrifice some liberties for increased security, we make logical, useful, and not hysterical choices? These are not abstract questions. I think about them every time I ride the train over the Manhattan Bridge, peering out at the changed face of the New York skyline, sometimes recalling that the bridge-with thousands of people on it at any time in cars, trucks, buses, and subway trains-is itself a potential target.
And fourth, there is the growth of antisemitism. I have been working on a new book on antisemitism, which I started in the summer of 2000. Back then many people were saying that antisemitism was "dead." And as if to prove their point, Senator Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew yet, ran as a vice-presidential candidate on a major American ticket, with no backlash. I wanted to write a book to make the point that, while antisemitism was clearly a lesser problem than it was a generation or two ago, it was foolhardy to think that a hatred that has had great utility for a variety of purposes over the last two millennia, and which in each generation seems to offer new and updated conspiracy theories on the same general themes, would somehow disappear. I need not make that case anymore. The attacks on Jews worldwide after the collapse of the peace process-especially in parts of Europe-made the case. The virtual orgy of antisemitism at the World Conference against Racism in Durban, where the language of anti-racism was hijacked by human rights activists to argue that in to be a good anti-racist one must demonize and vilify Israel and the Jews who support its right to exist, made the case. The events of September 11, and the overnight belief by many around the globe that Jews/ Israelis were behind this horror, made the case.
Stop and think about this for a minute: After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, an identical theory popped up overnight: the claim that the federal government had bombed the building, proven by the "fact" that all federal law enforcement officials, including FBI agents and U.S. Marshals, had been warned not to go into the Murrah building that day. But only people in the militias believed this conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory about the events of 9/11 is a mainstream belief in many parts of the world, echoed and amplified not only by the "man on the street," but by religious, journalistic, and government leaders in many countries. Imagine the difficult situation we'd be in today as Americans if militia-think were a mainstream phenomenon shared by our leaders. That's the situation regarding Jews in many parts of the world, and a reason that I'm thankful that there are so few Jews left in the various Arab countries that expelled them after the creation of the State of Israel, despite their having lived there for thousands of years. And it is also why I worry about the impact of antisemitism beyond its effect on Jews. History teaches that the level of anti-Semitism is a miner's canary for the health of societies; and that while hateful movements frequently start with Jews, they never end there.
For all these reasons, and others, I'm concerned that the climate is amenable to the growth of hatred over the next decades, and that therefore now is a critical time for us to become much smarter about how we approach it.

IV. WHAT A FIELD OF HATE STUDIES MIGHT ACCOMPLISH
What might a field of hate studies do to help such a mission? It might provide better answers to the series of questions I asked toward the beginning of this paper. It might create a common vocabulary among the various academic disciplines, thus encouraging an integrated system of knowledge and research. It might help us gain a more complete understanding of the various components of hatred, and provide testable theories to guide the actions of individuals, groups, and institutions-including governments. It might spur woefully needed research on education, and not only help debunk myths on which we may well be wasting great resources and energy, but also help define the approaches that work and refine, improve, and institutionalize them. (For if some educational approaches work, it makes no sense for outside groups to bring them into schools here or there, any more than it would make sense to \\server05\productn\G\GHS\3-1\GHS112.txt trust the teaching of reading or math only to nonprofits, rather than have it as a core part of the school mission and curricula.) An integrated field of hate studies might come up with new initiatives, such as a program of national service for high school seniors, perhaps taking kids during the last month of their senior year, which is generally party-time anyway, and sending them to different parts of the country to work with local communities. Imagine sending a Jewish kid from New York and an African American kid from Chicago and an American Indian kid from South Dakota and a Mexican American kid from Oregon to work together to help rural poor in the South build a new school or community center. This would be social psychology come alive-the superordinate goal from the Robbers Cave experiment institutionalized. Would America be a less hateful place if all eighteenyear-olds, no matter how impoverished or disadvantaged, shared an experience of helping others? Would there be less bigotry on campus if all incoming firstyear college students had similar experiences working as a team with people of different backgrounds to improve America, far away from their homes?
My hope is that the removal of the blinders that afflict each of the different disciplines that touch on hate would expand our thinking, not only about what we know, but also about what we can do, to improve our world, to make it less hateful and dangerous.
For instance, the last time I checked, the FBI profiled serial killers, but made no effort to profile hate crime offenders. Would it make sense to have such knowledge, not only to increase the chances of apprehending those who commit hate crimes, but also to find out how to better identify people at serious risk for such behavior and help them beforehand?
Or, consider, that as a society we quantify almost everything, but I've never heard any statistic about the annual cost of hate. How does one compute such a thing? What should be included? Here is where the field of economics could play a valuable role. I wouldn't be surprised if "hate," however computed, costs Americans billions per year. If we could somehow quantify this and issue an annual report on this cost, it might be a very useful enterprise.
And shouldn't we also encourage governments and other groups to assess the impact of important decisions on intergroup hate-both as to the possibility that their actions might exacerbate the problem and also to identify opportunities to pull people together in a way designed to break down stereotypes?
And why couldn't a field of hate studies produce an annual report card on hate in America, incorporating important factors identified by each of the component academic areas?
Wouldn't such a field also help guide important government policies, including those directed toward immigration, integration, and intergroup relations (let alone foreign policy, which too often has reaffirmed the law of unintended consequences)? You don't need a degree in hate studies, for example, to \\server05\productn\G\GHS\3-1\GHS112.txt understand that it would be only a short period before most Iraqis no longer thought of Americans as "liberators," and instead considered us "occupiers." On campus, a field of hate studies would allow in-house "case studies," especially when hateful things are advocated by speakers, including faculty.
Most importantly, an integrated field would help spur research and new programs. Hate is clearly going to become an increasingly urgent issue-one impacting whether we live or die, not only how we live. We need to treat this problem with the seriousness it deserves.

V. HOW TO MAKE THE NEW FIELD OF HATE STUDIES A REALITY
So, how do we pull all this together? How do we better identify ways each academic area can better inform and improve the others? Here are some initial thoughts.
We can encourage faculty who deal with issues of hate on each campus to create forums-including classes taught from multiple disciplines-to address the issue.
We can encourage faculty from each discipline to help compile a checklist of questions and approaches that each academic area offers, and that might be useful to scholars from different disciplines--a "crib sheet," if you will.
We can encourage universities to allow students to major in "hate," and graduate with a degree in "hate studies," in the short term, by taking courses in different disciplines with that central theme, and over the long term, by taking courses affiliated with such a department.
We can define urgent challenges and issues in need of research and scholarship, and encourage people from different disciplines to tackle the same topic, and then combine their analyses and findings.
As an institute launching this field, we could issue an annual prize to the institution or individual doing the most to help increase our understanding of hatred, thus helping recognize and publicize important achievements.
We-as academics and others supporting the creation of hate studiescould put together teams from different disciplines who, on an annual basis, could meet with leadership of various nongovernmental organizations and help them review their policy initiatives and concerns through the lens of hate studies.
We can help groups that see themselves as distinct-Jews, blacks, Latinos, women, gays, and others-increase not only their understanding of the interrelationship of the types of hate that afflict them, but also their knowledge about how better to construct systems that will fight this interlocked challenge.
And, perhaps the next time the U.S. is prepared to embark on a major initiative such as the war in Iraq, experts in "hate studies"-regardless of whether they support or oppose the plan of action-can help the government and the country (through academic forums, articles in journals and newspapers, television programs, Internet sites, and other means) think through the consequences regarding hatred and terrorism, and better anticipate the challenges and how to deal with them most effectively. In short, there is an overabundance of both questions to define hate studies, and urgent real-world needs that such a field can help address. I'm pleased to be working with you as, together, we-the Gonzaga Institute Against Hate, the American Jewish Committee, and all the people gathered here from around the country-start on this grand project.