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The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) participated in a specialized training session in Philadelphia on Thursday attended by around 80 law enforcement officers from across southeastern Pennsylvania.
The purpose of the forum, held at the Alan Horowitz “Sixth Man” Center, was to teach police how to recognize and address antisemitism in all its contemporary forms and offer strategies and tools to prevent, respond to, and counter it.
Speakers included Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday, Senior Counsel to the Pennsylvania Attorney General Greg Rowe, Philadelphia Police Chief Kevin Bethel, Abington Township Police Chief Patrick Molloy, CAM Director of Interfaith Outreach and Engagement EJ Kimball, George Washington Program on Extremism Senior Research Fellow David Collins, and Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Philadelphia Regional Director Andrew Goretsky.
The event took place a day after the anniversary of the October 7th massacre in Israel, which triggered a global spike of antisemitism that continues to persist three years later.
In his presentation, Kimball called the post-10/7 surge a “new baseline, entrenched at historically-high levels.”
“That makes it more important than ever to stand with our law enforcement partners and equip them with the tools to address this evolving threat,” he noted. “Recognizing a crime is easy. Identifying the motivation behind it is the challenge. Today’s antisemitism is supercharged, often relying on coded language in which terms like ‘Zionists’ or ‘Israel’ are used as proxies for ‘the Jews.’ To protect Jewish communities from antisemitic hate crimes and acts of violence, law enforcement must be able to understand these symbols and slogans.”
CAM works hand-in-hand with law enforcement authorities on a daily basis to secure and nurture Jewish life around the world.
Similar CAM-organized law enforcement seminars have been conducted over the last two years in New York, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Virginia.
For more information about CAM’s law enforcement training program and to arrange for a session in your state, city, or town, please send an email to: info@combatantisemitism.org
Further reading:
At CAM Law Enforcement Forum in Manhattan, Police Officers Trained to Identify Antisemitic Extremism
More Than 80 Police Officers From Across State of Georgia Join CAM-Led Antisemitism Training Forum
