KiTov: A Pragmatic-Intellectual Program for the Common Good, in collaboration with the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem
The debates and disagreements that have characterized Israeli society in recent years affect the entire country. The only way forward with such deep diversity of worldview is through a democracy of relationships. A democracy of relationships requires us to leave our comfort zones and our sense of the correctness of our own path, and to seek to connect to the worlds of others, even when our differences seem unbridgeable.
This approach offers a real opportunity for a new social discourse.
The Kitov Program is based on the premise that the only way to escape the polarizing culture war is to deal seriously and candidly with the challenge of living together – through discourse and dialogue between those with different life experiences and worldviews.
What is the KiTov Program?
The program brings together trailblazers from all fields of thought and action, who understand that a one-sided victory is a recipe for disaster, and feel that the discussion and response to the question of a shared society in Israel need to be deepened, diversified, and rethought.
We bring together deeply diverse cohorts of leaders who represent all identities and all positions on the core questions facing Israeli society. This is not a dialogue group, but a conceptual and well-founded program that offers essential milestones and a new roadmap for dealing with the question of living together. The shared learning in the program seeks to allow learners to stay together in a deep understanding of opposing positions.
This is not merely theoretical learning. The diverse group itself is the central ground on which the learning is based. Alongside the study and discourse, we seek to outline a horizon of action, practice, and application.
On October 7, 2023, as Israel faced a particularly dark moment, we went from a polarized society to a society ravaged by sorrow and pain, from a society in which each side was convinced of its own rightness to a society in which the ground was trembling beneath our feet and everything that had seemed certain now seemed on the verge of shattering.
And yet, and perhaps precisely because of this, we set out with the plan. We gathered ourselves, Jews, Muslims, Haredim, secularists, right-wingers, and left-wingers. We were excited, and we were worried. We were all certain of one thing: We must meet, and we must do it now.
Program Leaders
Cohort 1
The first cohort of KiTov launched on November 12, 2023, at a joint meeting at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, and ended on June 30, 2024 with a study tour in Haifa. In between, in-depth discussions took place on questions such as: How do you create a democracy that is based on human relationships? What are the points of connection and shared values between liberalism and conservatism? How do you channel the fury of ideological debate to find practical solutions that simply meet people’s needs?
In May 2024, we had a 9-day study tour of Washington, DC under the title “Journey into the Polarization” — an in-depth study of the history of social polarization in the United States. We explored the internal conflicts within American Jewry regarding the war in Israel, which in fact echoed the internal conflicts within the group. Thus, theory and practice came together, and most importantly, the understanding that this is how we live together — listening to what people define as precious and important, not giving up our stake in the game, not canceling either side, and to never stop trying.
