Nearly three years into this unconscionable spike in Jew-hatred, cultivated through decades of academic anti-Zionism, universities still don’t get it. Until they respond as teachers running educational institutions not bureaucrats running Communist re-education camps, the crisis will fester.

This summer, when a Cornell student refused a second job interview with: “Not interested in working for a jew…,” the response to him was too political and legalistic. Exposed, he doubled down, telling The Cornell Daily Sun that he realized the interviewers were Jewish based on their “first and last name, LinkedIn, and physiognomy” – the last word uniting today’s manosphere with yesterday’s Nazis.

Defending free speech while fighting bigotry and avoiding thought-policing isn’t easy. But a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article about the incident illustrated academics’ overly-politicized and disappointingly sterile approach. Thirty percent of the op-ed bashed President Trump and his appointees, assuming that Cornell officials only investigated this as a possible “bias incident” to placate the administration.

Cornell, the author argued, “should not be ‘investigating’ anyone for what they have said. Its own ‘Core Values’ statement declares that ‘free and open inquiry and expression’ — even of ‘ideas some may consider wrong or offensive’ — is fundamental to the university.” Warning of a slippery slope, while shifting the conversation from bigoted language to inflammatory political remarks, the author wondered: If Cornell “penalizes” the student “for declaring that he doesn’t want to work for Jews, who will be next? Someone who says Israel is committing genocide? Or that the university should boycott it?”

This clever category switch is absurd, given how universities spent years squelching speech. Academics have repeatedly – and unacceptably — bullied those with dissenting views on issues of race, gender, immigration, among other politically-correct causes – while protecting blacks, women, gays, but often not Jews. In 2020, students boycotted a Cornell University Law Professor, William Jacobson, for calling Black Lives Matters’ founders “anti-American, anti-capitalist activists.” His dean denounced him.

Other professors have suffered macro-career disruptions over supposed micro-aggressions – one veteran UCLA prof endured student sit-ins and was saddled with extra colleagues encroaching on his course for correcting grammar in papers.

While avoiding such assaults on free speech in the future, universities must also acknowledge their record of selective outrage.

In the Cornell case, apply a simple substitution test for consistency. Flip a switch. Replace “black,” “woman,” “gay,” “lesbian,” or “trans” in the sentence “Not interested in working for a jew.” Similarly, the student escalated on X, tweeting: “My experiences with Jews have not been pleasant….” Wouldn’t it be “bias” if he overgeneralized about others, saying “my experiences” with blacks or women or Catholics or Latinos “have not been pleasant?” Universities’ assault on bigotry cannot depend on “the context” — when “context” essentially means “it’s OK to target Jews.”

Hysteria and browbeating don’t help. Modeling that spirit, the employer who received the bigoted response posted it without the student’s name. “He’s just a student, he might not know any better — it could be people in his environment, or on social media he saw something about Jewish people and he is just following the wave,” the spurned boss, Gabe Einhorn, told the Cornell Sun. (Others online outed the student).

And this case is particularly confusing. Refusing a Jew because you’re a bigot isn’t “discrimination.” The student didn’t offend a fellow Cornellian, which dilutes the assault on the “community.”

Also, the student sought employment privately – does it concern Cornell if the university placement office helped, but is it irrelevant if he networked independently? Does placing Cornell’s name on his CV make anything he does on the job relevant to the university? Does that involvement end with graduation?

Fighting bigotry requires balance, perspective, wisdom. The cancel culture craze revealed how suffocating it is to police every word, gesture, interaction, and how self-destructive it is when universities divert massive resources into creating bureaucracies monitoring students’ thoughts. Moreover, it’s always better to err on the side of fostering free speech than banning it.

Here, then, is the misfire in the anti-bias conversation, that highlights one of the modern universities’ greatest failures. These are educational institutions. But most universities have allowed bureaucrats – in Washington and on campus – to hijack what could be “teachable moments.” Technical legalistic bureaucratese keeps eclipsing the moral language and character building that should be ingrained into campus culture.

Cornell[s “mission” is “to educate the next generation of global citizens….” Global citizens are cultivated by thoughtful, challenging professors committed to educating not punishing. Did any of this student’s professors or fellow students – Jewish or non-Jewish — contact him, explaining why the statement embarrassed him and the university, then inspire him to be better? And, did any one within the Jewish community, formally or inflormally, do the same, explaining how, especially today, such matter-of-fact bigotry is so morally repulsive?

Next month, most universities will welcome their new students with orientations. Most will offer anti-bias or sensitivity training reflecting today’s ideological circus, with all the soul of a computer instruction manual. Just as modern professors and administrators fail to build their community through bold, out-of-the-box, “I-thou” moments, these training sessions will fail to begin fostering what’s really needed to create diverse communities filled with critical thought and mutual respect.

It’s better to assign great, thought-provoking books than to list dos-and-don’ts. Today’s bureaucratic, hyper-politicized, and cowardly professoriate forgets that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson taught: “Character is higher than intellect…. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.”

Then again, perhaps these paint-by-numbers posturing sessions are precisely the orientation students need to grab their credentials and parrot back the certitudes imposed by far too many in today’s classroom.

Published in the Jewish Journal

The post Professors Should Fight Campus Jew-Hatred as Educators, Not Bureaucrats first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Last week, I spent part of a morning visiting four pharmacies to collect my father’s regular medications.

It was an ordinary family errand, the kind countless households run without a second thought. Yet by the time I reached the final counter, I was listening less to my own list than to the medication names being repeated around me. Cipralex (escitalopram) for depression and anxiety. Bondormin (brotizolam) for severe insomnia. Lipitor (atorvastatin) to lower cholesterol. Vector (valsartan) for high blood pressure.

Different faces, different ailments. Yet by the fourth pharmacy, the names had stopped sounding like unrelated prescriptions. Heard together, they suggested a kind of national medical record. No four pharmacies can diagnose a country. But they can offer a glimpse of the hidden toll of prolonged conflict: a burden that draws far less notice than combat, statecraft, or parliamentary debate.

Israelis have grown used to measuring the price of conflict in familiar ways. We follow the fate of the hostages. We count the dead and the wounded. We track economic losses and the shifting fronts. These are the visible scars.

Far less attention is paid to the damage that accumulates quietly inside the human body. Since October 2023, the lives of many Israelis have been measured not only by calendars but by sirens, mobilizations, funerals, evacuations, and the anxious wait for the next emergency.

What began with the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust evolved into months of reserve duty, repeated missile barrages, mass displacement, wars in Gaza and Lebanon, two military operations against Iran, and an almost uninterrupted state of national emergency.

Wars shape foreign policy. Long wars reshape societies.

The European debate has become sharply attuned to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies. It has devoted far less attention to the Israeli society that has been transformed by the years of conflict in which those policies have unfolded.

That quieter dimension of Israeli life rarely enters the broader conversation. Instead, much of Europe’s debate about Israel revolves around the occupied territories, settler violence, humanitarian law, military operations, trade measures, research cooperation, and targeted sanctions.

These are legitimate issues, and every democracy at war should expect scrutiny. Yet the intensity of these debates can sometimes obscure the society that lives beyond them. Beneath the headlines are millions of Israelis who go to work each morning, take children to school, care for elderly parents, and search for fragments of ordinary life while uncertainty has become a permanent companion. One can strongly oppose decisions made by the Israeli government while also recognizing the psychological burden carried by Israeli society.

These positions are not incompatible. To recognize the wounds carried by Israeli civilians is not to deny the suffering of Palestinians. It is to resist a politics in which empathy is treated as a limited resource. Compassion for civilians should never depend on agreement over policy.

Perhaps this helps explain why Israelis and Europeans so often speak past one another. EU institutions and much of the European public debate tend to interpret Israel through the lenses of international and humanitarian law, diplomacy, and statecraft. Israelis, by contrast, experience the consequences in their homes, workplaces, schools, hospitals, and neighborhood pharmacies.

The same events arrive in Brussels as questions of policy and in Beersheba as questions of the pulse.

Beyond the pharmacy counter

The European Union was built to free its member states from the cycle of war that had scarred the continent for centuries. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine shattered the assumption that large-scale interstate conflict had become a relic of Europe’s past. Across the continent, governments once again speak of deterrence, defense, and rearmament.

Yet for most Europeans, war remains something observed just beyond their borders rather than woven into the fabric of everyday life. For Israelis, it is part of daily existence. That difference shapes more than foreign policy. It shapes how societies perceive risk, define security, and understand what it means to live a normal life.

The EU will continue debating Israel’s policies, and rightly so. But if it wishes to understand the society it critiques, it must also look beyond government offices in Jerusalem and diplomatic briefings. That understanding begins not only in the corridors of government but also in rehabilitation wards, psychiatric clinics, emergency rooms, and yes, even in neighborhood pharmacies.

If prolonged conflict has created a shared challenge, it has also created common ground. Despite profound disagreements, Israel and Europe continue to work together in medicine, trauma care, mental health, and biomedical research. At a time when calls have grown in parts of Europe to restrict Israel’s participation in European research frameworks, including Horizon Europe, policymakers should take special care not to weaken civilian medical, trauma, mental-health, and biomedical partnerships.

These efforts address shared human challenges that transcend politics. They are among the few areas in which cooperation benefits both societies, regardless of their political differences. As I carried my father’s medication home, I realized that the names I had heard throughout the morning were telling a story that extended far beyond the pharmacy counter.

Historians will record the battles, the ceasefires, and the treaties. Political scientists, international relations specialists, and legal scholars will debate strategy, deterrence, and international law. They should. But another archive exists, one that rarely appears in history books. It is written not in official statements or military reports, but in the prescriptions that pass quietly from pharmacist to patient each day.

I walked into those four pharmacies to collect medication for my father. I walked out thinking about a country. What I heard that morning was not evidence of a nation growing weaker. It was a reminder that the deepest wounds of war are not always visible. Long after the sirens fall silent and the headlines fade, conflict leaves its mark on hearts, minds, and bodies. That may prove to be its longest afterlife.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Europe, Israel, and the medical record of a nation first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Any graduate of a respectable Israeli kindergarten has learned that the Second Temple was destroyed “because of baseless hatred.” Every adult Israeli knows to warn against its recurrence in our time. But history tells a different story. The destruction of the Second Temple – followed some 60 years later by the near-destruction of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel after the Bar Kokhba revolt was crushed – resulted chiefly from nationalist and religious zealotry. Then as now, this fanaticism imperils the Jewish state.

When the extremes set the terms of public discourse – and, more dangerously, of politics – they can bring renewed Jewish sovereignty to an end. Only the determination of a moderate majority, committed to the broadest possible common ground, can safeguard and strengthen Israel as it approaches its centennial.

The destruction of the Second Temple, the devastation of Jewish life in the Land of Israel, and the onset of 2,000 years of exile are well-documented historical events. Like every major historical event, there wasn’t a single cause. Still, if we distill the factors that ultimately produced the catastrophe from the multitude of surviving sources, two stand out: the collapse of internal Jewish governance and the religious and nationalist zealotry that eroded it.

These forces drove the process, made the destruction possible, and greatly accelerated it. The burning of one another’s food stores in Jerusalem by extremists from rival camps is the starkest symbol of their conduct over many years. Had we interviewed them, they would have insisted that nothing they did was “baseless.” Like rigid ideologues everywhere, each possessed a coherent worldview that drove them to fanaticism, civil war, and blindness to external threats.

The parallels with Israel on Tisha B’Av 5786 are frightening. Israelis plainly fear that cohesion is eroding and society is unraveling. According to JPPI’s Israeli Society Index, 55 percent of Israelis consider internal division the gravest threat facing the country, compared with 23% who cite the Iranian threat. No less than 80% are worried about Israel’s social condition. The good news is that most Israelis also believe that “on the issues that matter, most Israelis agree with one another.” In other words, at the heart of Israeli society is a broad public that regards our deepest disputes as solvable.

But today, too, the zealots are the problem. Across every hard issue dividing Israeli society – in foreign affairs and public policy, but above all in domestic disputes – extremists will do everything they can to thwart compromise or accommodation. The battle over the judiciary is a glaring example; it has already dragged us toward the abyss of civil war. Legal experts and experienced politicians know full well that compromise and solutions are possible – and could have been reached throughout the past several years. It was fanatics on both the right and the left who were prepared to “die” over every last jot and tittle.

Another example is Israeli policy in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Everyone familiar with the issue understands that the far right’s tacit backing of Jewish terrorism could cost Israel dangerously international isolation. Yet here, too, the zealots set the tone. And all this while the enemy is at the gates and Israel is fighting on seven fronts.

Just as Yom Kippur is the appointed time for personal self-examination, Tisha B’Av is the occasion for social and national reckoning. On the day when, twice in our history, Jewish sovereignty was lost, we Israelis should gather in the shadow of mourning and fasting to take stock of our national life. We must look into the mirror of both distant and recent history, recognize the terrible consequences of burning our storehouses – literal and symbolic – and choose a worthy path. This is not a call for bland centrism. It is a call to reject fanatical extremists and choose a national life grounded in fellowship and in a renewed emphasis on what unites us.

Published in TOI

The post Zealotry – not baseless hatred – will lead to Israel’s collapse first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

According to a well-known folk tale, Napoleon once passed a synagogue on Tisha B’Av and was surprised to hear weeping and lamentation. When he learned that the mourners were grieving the destruction of the Temple two thousand years earlier, he reportedly said, with awe, that a people capable of weeping over so ancient a loss would one day rebuild what it had lost. In this legend, memory is a force for renewal.

But this year, on Tisha B’Av 5786, we must fear that we have forgotten. We will fast and observe the customs of our national day of mourning. We will go through the motions, yet the conclusion is unavoidable: we have forgotten.

Jewish tradition attributes the loss of sovereignty in our two previous commonwealths to the hatred within us, which ate away at the Jews’ ability to withstand their enemies. The burning of Jerusalem’s granaries while the enemy besieged the city remains the starkest symbol of the madness to which fraternal hatred can lead. Today, too, we risk setting fire to the granaries of sovereignty – undermining the rule of law, eroding trust in state institutions, and weakening governance – once again, while at war with our enemies.

According to a recent JPPI survey, a majority of Israelis (55%) believe that the greatest threat to our future lies not beyond the country’s borders – in security threats and global antisemitism – but within us. In their view, the chief danger comes not from Khamenei or Mamdani, but from the choices and actions inside our shared home. That intuition is not unfounded, but it requires precision:

The danger does not stem from disagreement itself, but from the way we manage it. Public life has become an arena for a “zero-sum game”: either I prevail or I am defeated. Each camp is thoroughly convinced that the other’s victory would make our shared home unlivable. This apocalyptic reading of reality – to which many have become addicted – is fertile ground for fanaticism. And fanaticism, as Jewish history teaches, is the true battering ram against the walls of sovereignty.

Disagreement is not a defect to be corrected; it is an inseparable part of a living society. The real question is whether we can disagree without negating the legitimacy of the other side, without turning it into an enemy to be crushed. This requires empathy – not agreement. Empathy means recognizing that those who think differently from us also act from a worldview, a set of values, and a sincere concern for the country’s future. Try a painful exercise: If you vote on the left, are you prepared to say that Bezalel Smotrich may be wrong, but seeks the good no less than you do? If you vote on the right, can you say the same of Yair Golan? My guess is that each side is offended by the very comparison. And that is precisely the problem.

Empathy alone, however, is not enough. A polarized society needs agreed-upon rules of the game for managing its disputes. Israel needs a “thin constitution” – a basic constitutional framework that would establish a durable consensus on how public life is conducted. Had such a framework been in place, it would have blocked the kind of sweeping constitutional overhaul attempted by the outgoing coalition. It would likewise dispel the mirror-image fear that, if today’s opposition wins the next election, it will impose an overhaul – a political revolution – of its own.

In the absence of agreed-upon rules for managing disagreement, each side fears that if it does not vanquish the other today, it will be trounced tomorrow. That fear creates a vicious cycle in which each camp uses its power to remake reality unilaterally in its own image – and in doing so assails the walls of Jerusalem in our generation.

The three weeks between the Seventeenth of Tammuz, when the walls of Jerusalem were breached, and Tisha B’Av, when the Temple was destroyed, are known as Bein HaMetzarim – “Between the Straits.” The phrase comes from the Book of Lamentations (1:3): “All her pursuers overtook her in the straits.” How tragic that the pursuers threatening our future, then as now, are ourselves. Will we know how to remember what fanaticism wrought in earlier generations and break the curse?

After the election, we can begin repairing the damage by binding ourselves to entrenched rules for managing our disagreements – a “thin constitution.”

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Between the Straits: The Danger Within first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Are you a “Zionist”? Most Jews in Israel would answer with a resounding “yes.” Afterward, if we asked them what exactly that means, it isn’t certain they’d have a good answer. Truly, what is a Zionist? Zionism was a movement with a singular goal: to establish a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. That goal was achieved. Now, one can suggest at least three paths forward. First: the goal was achieved, and therefore there is no longer a need for “Zionism.” Second: the goal was achieved, but it requires ongoing maintenance, and supporting the prosperity of the national home of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel is “Zionism” in our times. Third: the goal was achieved, and therefore Zionism has changed its face, and now has a different objective or definition. What is this new definition? That, of course, is up for debate.

Either way, it is clear there is good reason to ponder what “Zionism” means, and perhaps consequently, the question of “Am I a Zionist?” Most of us are too sloppy or lazy to give a serious, methodical answer to this question. Therefore, for most of us, the almost automatic declaration of “I am a Zionist” is a gesture of sentiment more than an ideological stance. We are Zionists because we assume, largely correctly, that those who call themselves Zionists are on our side, and those who say they aren’t are against us.

Now we ask: Is this true? We can provide a rather nontrivial answer to this question when we examine recent surveys of Jews in the United States. Let’s look at two surveys. One is the JPPI Voice of the Jewish People Index, which samples a group of “connected” Jews. The second, from last week, is by NORC in partnership with the AP. This is a survey conducted among all Americans, but it includes a particularly large group (about 1,200) of American Jews, representing the broader spectrum of connected, less connected and even highly disconnected U.S. Jews.

The JPPI survey focuses on connected Jews, which guarantees in advance that there will be relatively few Jews holding a negative sentiment toward Zionism. But the survey asked not only the “are you a Zionist” question, but also whether “your Jewish friends” are Zionists. This is a question where to some extent, the “connectedness” bias becomes less pronounced. When connected Jews testify about friends, some of whom might be connected but others likely are not, we can see the difference. While 72% of connected Jews say “I am a Zionist,” only 43% say “most of my Jewish friends are Zionists.” Another 29% say their friends are “somewhat Zionist.” And this data point inches closer to the numbers seen in the NORC survey of all U.S. Jews. In that poll, 23% of Jews, less than a quarter, say the term “Zionist” describes their position very accurately (13%) or accurately (10%).

If they aren’t Zionists, are they antizionists? It turns out most of them aren’t; a fifth of Jews say the label “antizionist” suits them to some degree. And yet, against that one-fifth stand another four-fifths, eight out of ten Jews, for whom “antizionist” does not fit either.

Here we return to our original question: Is someone who doesn’t feel “Zionist” probably against us? And now we will answer explicitly: No. The Jews of America prove it. On one hand, many of them do not want to apply the “Zionist” label to themselves. On the other hand, few apply the “antizionist” label to themselves. If so, what are these Jews? The NORC survey offered a third definiton. It is good that it did, because we can learn quite a bit from it. It offered not only “Zionist” and “antizonist” (each in a separate question), it also offered “supporter of Israel as a Jewish state.” Meaning, not the familiar brand “Zionist,” but an explicit statement about Israel.

Seventy-three percent of Jews say they “support Israel as a Jewish state.” Half of them said this statement describes their position very well or well. Another 23% said “quite well.” Only 16% said no (11% didn’t know how to answer). Here, we have answered the question: A vast number of Jews who do not want to wear the “Zionist” garment support “Israel as a Jewish state.” Relatively few Jews do not support “Israel as a Jewish state.”

From this, a few conclusions. First: we can calm down. A large majority of U.S. Jews still support “Israel as a Jewish state.” The loud voices we hear, heralding a supposed sea change – that American Jews have turned hostile to Israel – are fringe voices that receive an echo vastly exaggerated in proportion to their real power. Second: the Zionism brand is in trouble, and it needs to be handled in one of two ways. One option is to simply abandon it. Sometimes a brand undergoes a semantic shift that is pointless to try and stop. We can switch to using a different word. A second option is to fight for it, which requires clarifying, teaching, and embedding its meaning. Do you want to convince Jews, and the world, that Zionism is a cause worth supporting? Explain what “Zionism” is, and perhaps it will turn out that the world is actually on our side.

Something I wrote in Hebrew

We found that Israelis are still able to agree with one another. Here’s what I wrote:

There is a consensus on two very important matters. The (bad) agreement with Iran is a significant issue; we must consider its implications and prepare for its consequences. The encouraging (calling it “good” seems a bit of a stretch to me) agreement with Lebanon is also a significant issue, one worth drawing a measure of optimism from in light of otherwise bleak regional developments. But even more than the consensus itself, what is encouraging is the pragmatism of the Israelis examining these two agreements. It is encouraging to see their ability to judge these deals on their actual merits, rather than on the identity of the politician who failed at them (yes, Netanyahu), or succeeded at them (yes, also Netanyahu).

Published in the Jewish Journal

The post Can You Be a Zionist Without Zionism? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

For the full episode (in Hebrew) click here.

The post Podcast: The United States Celebrates 250 Years of Independence first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

For nearly three years, I have lived in a state of suspended breath. My son has spent the last three months in southern Lebanon, defending our northern borders from Hezbollah. Last Shabbat, one of my students died of his wounds; a drone fragment took his life.

These are not statistics to me. They are the people I love, the people I teach, and the people whose absence leaves a void that can never be filled.

I am one mother and one educator among many who have been carrying the weight of this war on our shoulders. We – the public that serves in the military, drives the economy, and sustains our communities – know that the future of Israel rests on shared commitment. We are a shrinking share of the public, yet we continue to give until we have nothing left to give.

When this war began, there was a brief, powerful moment of unity. We believed that the existential threat would finally force a consensus: that every capable citizen must stand up and contribute to the defense of the state.

But as the war dragged on, it became agonizingly clear that too much of the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) political leadership has fought to preserve a reality separate from the one borne by the families who serve. Their political priority has not been the manpower crisis at the borders, but the preservation of an exemption system that allows one community to remain detached from the most fundamental civic and military duties, while still benefiting from public funding and state support.

Now, with the advancement of Basic Law: Torah Study, the government is attempting to give constitutional force to this detachment. The proposal would elevate Torah study as a form of national service, using lofty, sacred language to justify an exemption that feels like a slap in the face to those of us who bury our dead. This is not an argument against Torah study, nor against the haredi public. It is an argument against a political arrangement that uses Torah to absolve one part of Israeli society from obligations borne, in blood, by another.

As someone who has dedicated my life to the study and teaching of Torah, Jewish philosophy, and Zionist thought, I reject this legislation not despite my love of Torah but because of it. I teach students, secular and religious, men and women, that Torah study is meant to be a light that informs our actions in the world, not a shield to hide behind. I have never taught that Torah and civic duty are in conflict. They are meant to be the twin pillars of a functioning Jewish society.

Our Sages taught that derech eretz (social and ethical conduct) precedes the Torah. Our Sages warn us: “If there is no Torah, there is no derech eretz; and if there is no derech eretz, there is no Torah” (Ethics of the Fathers 3:17).

These are not two separate domains that can be uncoupled at the convenience of politicians. They are a single moral ecosystem. By pushing this law, the Knesset risks severing the two. It transforms the Torah into an empty vessel, a political tool used to evade the most basic obligation of a citizen: to share the burden of survival. How can Zionist parties, who ask our children to risk their lives on the front lines, support a law that so blatantly disregards the sacrifice of the serving public?

The advancement of this law is not a religious triumph. It is a profound moral abdication. By turning Torah learning into a legal exemption for civic evasion, our leaders are committing a violent divorce between the holiness of our tradition and the fundamental duty of derech eretz. They are signaling that, for some, the preservation of a separate civic arrangement outweighs shared responsibility for the survival of the Jewish state. For those of us on the front lines, burying our students and waiting for our children’s return, the message is clear: While we fight to ensure the state of Israel has a future, our government is dismantling the shared covenant that makes that future worth fighting for.

We are not only losing our youth to the battlefield. We are losing our moral language to a politics that dares to call exemption “service.”

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Derech eretz lost – Why the proposed Basic Law betrays our sacred covenant first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” is an important contribution to the growing global debate about AI. By placing artificial intelligence in continuity with “Rerum Novarum,” the landmark 1891 encyclical that addressed the social consequences of industrialization, the Pope argues that AI is the defining technological challenge of our age. Like the factory system in the 19th century, AI is transforming work, education, knowledge and human relationships.

The Vatican’s tone is cautious. It warns that AI can concentrate power, weaken human responsibility and reduce people to data points and economic functions. These concerns deserve serious attention. AI is not morally neutral, and its impact will depend on the values of those who design, regulate and use it.

Yet for Jews, in Israel and across the Diaspora, the conversation should not stop with warnings. Another urgent question is what good AI can do for Judaism, Jewish learning, and Jewish peoplehood. At a moment when so much attention is devoted to apocalyptic predictions and distant scenarios, Jews should also ask how this technology might serve the texts, relationships and responsibilities that have long sustained Jewish life.

Judaism has long been known as the tradition of the “People of the Book.” The study of texts is not a peripheral activity in Jewish life; it is one of its defining features. From the Bible and Talmud to medieval commentaries, responsa literature, philosophy and modern scholarship, Jewish identity has been shaped through reading, interpretation, debate and transmission. Learning is not simply an intellectual pursuit but a religious and cultural obligation, central to the formation of the Jewish person.

As Prof. Moshe Koppel has noted, AI can help scan and digitize old books, correct textual errors, identify citations, expand abbreviations, add punctuation and uncover connections across thousands of volumes of Jewish literature. Much of this work is already being pioneered through Dicta, the nonprofit research lab he founded, which develops digital tools for studying rabbinic texts. Tasks that once required years of specialized expertise may increasingly become available to students, educators and interested readers around the world.

The implications are significant. A student with a limited background could navigate complex rabbinic texts with greater confidence. Researchers could trace ideas across centuries of Jewish writing in seconds rather than months. Teachers could create customized educational materials adapted to different ages, languages and levels of knowledge. A student in Buenos Aires might read a Hebrew source sheet with explanations in Spanish; a rabbi in a small European community might prepare a class drawing on responsa literature that was previously difficult to access. AI has the potential not merely to preserve Jewish learning but to broaden access to it.

This is particularly important at a time when many Jews feel distant from traditional texts. AI may lower barriers that have long discouraged engagement. It can help translate difficult Hebrew and Aramaic passages, explain references and guide readers through unfamiliar intellectual terrain. Used wisely, it could bring more people into the world of Torah study. The goal should not be to make Torah study effortless. It should be to make the first steps less forbidding while preserving the discipline, patience and argument that meaningful Jewish learning requires.

AI also presents opportunities for strengthening Jewish peoplehood. Advances in translation technology may dramatically reduce barriers between Hebrew-speaking Israelis, English-speaking North Americans, European Jews, Latin American communities and others. AI could make Israeli scholarship, Hebrew-language educational resources and contemporary debates far more accessible to Jews around the world, while helping Israelis engage more deeply with the ideas and experiences of Diaspora communities. These tools could strengthen the sense that Jews everywhere are participating in a shared conversation despite differences of language and geography.

None of this means that Judaism should embrace AI uncritically. Translation can carry words across borders without necessarily carrying context, trust or the emotional weight that different Jewish communities bring to the same debate. In education, AI may encourage intellectual shortcuts, weaken the habits of close reading and sustained argument and tempt students to substitute generated answers for genuine learning. In Jewish study especially, there is a risk that the struggle with the ancient text – the very process through which understanding is formed – will be replaced by instant summaries and simplified conclusions.

Likewise, while AI can help connect Israel and the Diaspora, it can also make real connection harder to attain if technological mediation replaces personal encounter. Digital tools can translate texts, summarize debates and facilitate communication across distance, but they cannot substitute for the trust built through face-to-face conversation, shared study, visits, hospitality and sustained relationship.

The Vatican has offered an important warning about what AI may mean for humanity as a whole. Jews should take those concerns seriously. But our task is also more particular. A Jewish response to AI should begin neither with panic nor with technological enthusiasm, but with the question of whether this tool can help human beings become more responsible, more learned and more bound to one another.

Artificial intelligence may be the defining technology of our generation. The challenge is not only to prevent its harms. It is also to imagine what goods it should serve. Used wisely, AI could deepen Torah study, open inherited texts to new readers, bridge Hebrew and Diaspora conversations, and give educators new ways to serve their communities. But it will do so only if we remember that technology can assist learning, not replace it.

This is why the Jewish conversation about AI cannot remain abstract. Jewish communal institutions, universities, rabbinical schools, educational networks, philanthropies and research centers should begin convening this conversation now. We need working groups that bring together rabbis, educators, technologists, ethicists, scholars of Jewish thought and communal leaders to ask how AI should be used in schools, synagogues, yeshivot, Hillels, JCCs and Jewish learning platforms.

Encouragingly, some of this work is already underway. The Jewish People Policy Institute, for example, is developing a book project on the AI and broader technological revolution and the future of the Jewish people, bringing together scholars from different countries and disciplines to reflect on how emerging technologies may reshape Jewish education, identity, peoplehood, religious life and communal institutions. Just as importantly, such work asks how Jewish thought, values and practices might contribute to a more constructive understanding of the technological revolution itself.

That is the kind of effort we need more of. The question is not whether Jewish communities will use AI; they already are. The question is whether we will adopt these tools passively, or shape them deliberately according to Jewish values, Jewish learning and Jewish responsibility.

Published in the Jewish Journal

The post What Can AI Do for Us? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Last week, we celebrated Shavuot, the festival commemorating the giving of the Torah. The Sages called it the “elixir of life.”

But an honest assessment of the Israeli reality shows that it is becoming, in some hands, an elixir of violence and death, of exploiting others and shirking responsibility. Yeshiva heads and TikTok rabbis are leading large groups of believers down a path that heads in the opposite direction from the Torah path.

The festival of Shavuot, and these days in particular, are an opportunity to recalibrate our moral compass and steer those who seek to receive the Torah toward better places – out of responsibility for a country whose Jewish identity and values should be a moral beacon to the world. The data increasingly shows that young Israelis, and Israelis in general, want more Judaism. The Jewish People Policy Institute’s Israeli Society Index, for example, found that 35% of young people say their belief in God has strengthened because of the war; 33% report observing more Jewish practices; 38% pray more; and 27% read the Bible more.

Among traditional and religious young people, the numbers are even higher. These findings join a long line of social and demographic indicators. Israel was, and remains, a Western and secular state. However, the religious turn among many Israelis is felt everywhere: Jewish-traditional symbols, rituals, and language are becoming a more natural and accepted part of the identity of many Israelis. But what kind of Judaism do these “strengthening” secular and traditional Israelis consume? A scroll through the “Judaism feed” of Israeli TikTok yields depressing conclusions. The language of many of the rabbinic “preachers,” who command large audiences of believer-followers and rack up millions of views, is often violent and crude.

Alongside the glorification of mitzvah observance, many of these videos negate the other – the secular Jew, and certainly the non-Jew – and, here and there, implicit calls for violence against anyone who does not fall into line with this religious “theology.” The most extreme result, but one that lays bare the distortion of Jewish values, is the horrific footage from the Independence Day murder scene of Yemanu Binyamin Zelka, the 21-year-old Ethiopian Israeli. Videos from outside the pizza shop, where Zelka worked, show a pack of bloodthirsty youths, tzitzit fluttering from beneath their shirts, beating Zelka and ultimately murdering him in cold blood.

Another grave result – also a growing phenomenon – is violent attacks on businesses that operate on Shabbat. Jewish terrorists in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) pose a different kind of challenge in the name of Torah. The images are familiar and harsh: hilltop youths with oversized kippot and wild sidelocks (peyot) lynching Palestinians or committing “price-tag” attacks in their villages, leaving trails of smoke and destruction behind them.

Here, too, a dangerous brew of false doctrine and racist nationalism – concocted by the young but nourished by their rabbis – leads to disastrous outcomes far removed from the Torah of Sinai, its commandments, and any semblance of Jewish values. And finally, there is the distorted Torah of many haredim (ultra-Orthodox): a Torah whose spokesmen are “the great sages of the generation,” but which should make any Jewish heart shudder. In this Torah, the commandment “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor” has been erased, allowing many to carry on with their lives while their non-haredi brethren buckle under the burden of war and sacrifice, defending them.

That directs their young people, and their vast broader community, to disavow any responsibility for the whole of Israeli society and any share in carrying its burden. In the name of heaven, it often teaches them to treat the State of Israel like a feudal lord whom one may, and even must, cheat and steal from. The Torah of Sinai and the Jewish values it espouses are the very heart of our national heritage. The Torah we received at Sinai has 70 faces. The task of every generation is to interpret it and adapt it to its time and place. Our generation has been given a historic mission and responsibility.

Judaism the moral foundation for Israel

Judaism, expressed also through the Torah, is no longer the private affair of the believer or of the community in the ghetto. It is the central moral foundation for renewed Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Therefore, we are obliged to reveal its luminous and ethical face: the face grounded in the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself” – even when the other does not share our values or belong to our people. We must not turn it into an elixir of death.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Israeli society must reclaim the Torah’s moral core first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.