Leah Rosenthal

The Institute for InterGroup Understanding exists to help create Intergroup Peace. We need to intellectually overcome our more negative and damaging instinctive behaviors. We instinctively divide the world into Us and Them -- and we react very differently to Us and Them. We protect, defend, accept, and support “Us” -- and we dislike, distrust, attack, and damage “Them.” Those instincts have great power to shape our lives. They have had major impact on our history -- causing us to be who we are and to do what we do in ways that we often do not understand. Understanding those instincts gives us great and needed power over Them. We need that power over those instincts and we need it now. Our mission at the Institute is to teach people how to take advantage and build on the best features of being “Us” -- and to avoid and prevent the worst features of being “Them” -- in every site and setting in America. Our mission is also to help every child in America get the full benefits of early childhood support so that we can have all groups prosper and have the American Dream be a reality and an expectation for us all. PHILOSOPHY The Institute teaches us how our basic sets of InterGroup instincts affect our thinking, our values, our decisions, and our core behaviors. The Institute deals with the issues of racial discrimination, intergroup bias, sexism, misogeny, and damaging and dysfunctional intergroup belief systems and paradigms. The teaching tools for the Institute include half a dozen key books, multiple essays, blogs and thought pieces and some interactive web discussions that focus on those issues. The InterGroup books are available at low cost in hard copy from Amazon and they are free of charge in electronic form from the website. The Institute is also focused on giving every child from every group in America the best chance for lifetime learning and success. Learning and teaching about all of those issues are our core agendas and our reason to exist.