Uncategorized
An 1859 fight over how to make matzah has lessons about the threat of AI today
(JTA) — In the last few months the world has been dazzled by an astonishing sequence of AI systems capable of performing all kinds of difficult tasks — writing code, composing poetry, generating artwork, passing exams — with a level of competence that rivals or exceeds what humans can do. The existence of these AIs has prompted all manner of soul-searching about the nature of humanity. It has also made many people wonder which human tasks are about to be taken over by machines.
The capabilities of these AIs are new and revolutionary, but the story of machines taking over human jobs is not. In Jewish history the most important story of that transition has to do with matzah, and it’s a story that carries important lessons for the present day.
Starting 164 years ago, dozens of European rabbis engaged in a furious debate that would not be fully resolved until the beginning of the 20th century. Matzah, which for millennia had been made by human hands in accordance with the narrow constraints of Jewish law, could now be processed with a series of machines that promised huge savings of time and money. As town after town adopted these machines, opposition began to rise, until it exploded in 1859 with the publication of “An Alert for Israel,” a collection of letters from prestigious rabbis, who adamantly argued that for anyone interested in following the laws of Passover a matzah made with a machine was no better than a loaf of bread.
The arguments for this position were many, but all will sound familiar to anyone following the AI conversation. Like today, some objected to the machines just because they were new and different, but most had more specific concerns. First, there was the matter of lost jobs. In many parts of Europe matzah was made by the poorest members of society, who were given the job as a way to help them raise money before one of the most cost-intensive holidays of the year. Ceding this job to machines would take work from those who could least afford it.
It takes about 20 seconds in a 1,300-degree, coal-and-wood-fired oven to bake shmurah matzah to perfection. (Uriel Heilman)
Beyond economics, there was concern that the machines just weren’t as reliable as people, especially given the rules around matzah-making outlined in Jewish law. What if bits of dough got trapped in the gears, quietly leavening for hours and unknowingly ruining whole batches of matzah in the process? What if the trays warmed the dough too fast? Without proper oversight, how could you trust your own food?
Finally, some objected to the loss of a literal human touch. Jewish law stated that matzah was supposed to be made by people who knew they were baking matzah. A machine, no matter how sophisticated, didn’t “know” anything. How could you eat matzah on Passover knowing that this most important food was made by a mindless machine?
The responses didn’t take long to arrive. “A Cancellation of the Alert,” a collection published the very same yearr, forcefully argued that machine matzah was perfectly fine — and possibly even better than the human product. No, inventions aren’t inherently bad. No, the machines wouldn’t harm the poor, because the machines made matzah less expensive for everyone. No, the machines weren’t prone to error — and they certainly weren’t more error-prone than lazy, careless humans. No, the machines didn’t know what they were doing — but the people who built them did, and wasn’t that enough?
The machines eventually won, but then something happened that I don’t think either side anticipated. With Manichewitz’s machine matzahs claiming most of the American market by the early 20th century, it was now the handmade matzah makers who were on the back foot; it was they and not the machines who needed to demonstrate that they were up to the difficult task of preparing this food with the efficiency and reliability of the machines.
The result is more than a little tragic. Matzah is the Jewish food with the deepest origins of all — deeper than brisket, deeper than latkes, deeper even than challah — and yet it is the ritual food most likely to be picked up at the supermarket and least likely to be made at home. While there are still communities today that exclusively eat handmade matzah, even this job is now largely outsourced to just a few companies that resemble their machine-driven counterparts in scale. While teachers will sometimes demonstrate how to make matzah for educational purposes, across the religious spectrum the era of locally made matzah is over.
Despite the fact that it’s hard to imagine a simpler baked good — matzah is just flour and water, and it’s literally illegal to spend more than 18 minutes making it — its production is treated as though it is only slightly less complicated than constructing a jet engine, and people are worried about shortages as though matzah were a natural resource or an advanced microchip. The transition has been so complete that we barely remember there was a transition at all.
Baked matzah coming out of the oven at Streit’s Matzo factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, date unknown. (Courtesy Streit’s Matzo)
Did the rabbis pushing for machine matzah know this was going to happen? Almost certainly not. The economic impact of machine labor is relatively easy to predict, but the psychological and cultural effects are a lot harder. There was probably no way of knowing how machines would change the way we thought about matzah in the long run, but today it’s clear that automating this ancient task has changed our own relationship to Passover’s central food — and because the change has resulted in a lot of alienation from matzah production, I’m not so sure it was a change for the better. Making matzah locally could have been a way to feel connected to the ancient Israelites, who left Egypt so fast that they didn’t have time to make anything else. Instead of emulating this ad-hoc food, we optimized it for cost and efficiency, in the process turning matzah into just another specialty cracker on the grocery store shelf. Was it really worth it?
It’s probably a bit much to say that OpenAI is just a modern Manischewitz, but the parallels between the debate about machine-generated matzah and the present debate about machine-generated everything are useful for considering how short-term policy choices around AI won’t necessarily capture all of the technology’s long-term effects on how human beings want to spend their time. When we relinquish an activity to an AI for economic reasons, we may eventually come to believe that humans are no longer qualified to do the task at all.
Then as now we must balance our economic needs against our ideas about what kinds of activities make for a good and fulfilling life.
—
The post An 1859 fight over how to make matzah has lessons about the threat of AI today appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Havana Slams US Over Charges Cuban Troops Are Fighting in Ukraine
A Cuban flag is displayed near the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba September 17, 2025. REUTERS/Norlys Perez
Cuba’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday said US claims that its troops were fighting in Ukraine were unfounded, and released for the first time information on legal proceedings against Cubans for mercenary activity in the war in Eastern Europe.
Communist Cuba has openly sided with its ally Russia in the conflict in Ukraine while also calling for peace talks.
Reports of Cubans on the battlefield first surfaced in 2023, resulting in an investigation in Cuba. Havana later stated that these Cubans were mercenaries.
“In the period from 2023 to 2025, nine criminal proceedings have been presented to the Cuban courts for the crime of mercenarism, against 40 defendants,” Saturday’s statement said.
“Trials have been held in eight cases, of which five resulted in convictions against 26 defendants, with sentences ranging from five to 14 years’ imprisonment. Three processes are pending the Court’s ruling, and one case is pending trial,” the foreign ministry said in the statement.
The United Nations is preparing to vote this month on a non-binding resolution calling on Washington to lift its decades-long embargo on Cuba. The resolution has been passed in the General Assembly with wide margins year after year since 1992.
The General Assembly adopted the resolution last year, with 187 countries voting in favor. The U.S. and Israel were the only countries that voted against it, while Moldova abstained.
A US State Department cable to diplomatic missions lobbying against the resolution states that Cuban soldiers are fighting alongside Russia in Ukraine.
“After North Korea, Cuba is the largest contributor of foreign troops to Russia’s aggression, with an estimated 1,000-5,000 Cubans fighting in Ukraine,” said the cable, which was first reported by Reuters on Monday.
The Cuban foreign ministry statement said “Cuba is not part of the armed conflict in Ukraine, nor does it participate with military personnel there, or in any other country.”
The ministry admitted it did not know how many nationals were involved on either side of the conflict, but said it had “a practice of zero tolerance for mercenarism, trafficking in persons and the participation of its nationals in any armed confrontation in another country.”
Uncategorized
How a Quiet Dutch Retiree Helped Uncover Nazi-Stolen Art in Argentina
FILE PHOTO: Curator Ariel Bassano addresses the media next to a portrait of Contessa Colleoni, attributed to Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi, an iconic painting stolen decades ago by the Nazis, following its recovery by Argentine officials after it was spotted in a real estate photo, in Mar del Plata, Argentina September 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jose Scalzo/File Photo
Dutch systems specialist Paul Post had glimpsed the notebooks that contained his father’s Nazi-era diaries before, but when he rediscovered them in an attic 15 years ago, the recent retiree finally had time to closely examine them.
Post, 74, had no idea that they would ultimately lead to Argentina, where in September the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi official was charged with concealing an 18th-century painting looted during the Holocaust.
In his diaries, Post’s father described working in the Netherlands’ diamond bureau when it was taken over by the Nazis. As Post began researching the events, one name jumped out: the Nazi official Friedrich Kadgien.
Kadgien oversaw the Nazi looting of diamonds and gold from occupied countries. Post began to follow Kadgien’s wanderings after the war, hoping to solve the mystery of the diamonds that historians say are still missing. He learned by chance that Kadgien was believed to have also possessed looted art.
The hunt led him and Dutch journalists to the peaceful residential neighborhood home of Patricia Kadgien, 60, in the seaside town of Mar del Plata in Buenos Aires province, where “Portrait of a Lady” had been hanging prominently in her living room. The reporters spotted it in a real estate listing in August.
Her attorney, Carlos Murias, told Reuters that she did not know about claims the painting had been looted from the collection of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker and she has denied having hidden it.
Nazi-related discoveries like this occasionally pop up in Argentina, which after the war received both Holocaust survivors and dozens of Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele. In February, President Javier Milei met with representatives of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who asked for help accessing materials to investigate Nazi banking activities in Argentina. And last May, the Supreme Court announced it had found thousands of Nazi labor organization membership booklets in its basement archive.
Post’s unlikely role in the painting’s discovery underscores the complexities of finding Nazi-looted art today. An estimated 600,000 pieces were stolen from Jewish families, and more than 100,000 have never been returned.
“I’m just an amateur, I’m not a historian, nothing at all,” said Post. “I knew I was right on Kadgien.”
A FATHER’S WAR DIARIES RESURFACE
In 2010, Post’s family was cleaning out his mother’s house in Driehuis, a town just outside of Amsterdam. In the attic, they found three diaries written by his father, who died in 1976 at age 60.
In the diaries, Wim Post recounted how in 1942 the Nazis ordered the country’s diamond traders to turn over their precious stones, confiscating about 71,000 carats at the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange.
Paul Post, then recently retired from Hewlett-Packard, began visiting the Netherlands’ national archives to research the diamond confiscation. There he came across Kadgien’s name.
Shortly before Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Kadgien fled to Switzerland, where officials received a tip that he had carried out large transfers of diamonds, according to Regula Bochsler, a historian in Zurich. But in 1950, Kadgien received a visa to travel to Brazil, ultimately making his way to Buenos Aires.
Post reached out to the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad to share his father’s account of the diamond raid, and in 2015, investigative reporter Cyril Rosman published a piece about the diaries. Post later published “The Diamond Heist,” a book on the subject.
In 2020, Post noticed that the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands listed Kadgien online as possibly having possessed “Portrait of a Lady” by the Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi — although art historians have said the painter was likely his contemporary Giacomo Ceruti — as well as an Abraham Mignon still life. He met with the agency’s researcher Perry Schrier, and told him he had tracked Kadgien’s family to Mar del Plata. But Schrier, who confirmed he had met with Post, couldn’t help him.
“I said, ‘I think I know the location, where it could be, and that is in Argentina,’” recalled Post. “But he said, ‘Yeah, ok, it could be possible, but how can we know that it is on the wall in their homes?’”
In June 2024, Post contacted Yael Weitz, an attorney for Goudstikker’s family. In an email exchange seen by Reuters, he offered to provide leads on the two missing paintings if she could provide him with information on Kadgien. She ultimately said that her team didn’t have anything to share.
Post then turned to journalists again. Last April, he reached out to Rosman with more information on Kadgien’s post-war travels. They had tried to contact Kadgien’s daughters in Argentina through the years and Rosman asked Peter Schouten, a freelance journalist in Buenos Aires, to try again.
“We were not looking for the paintings in particular,” said Rosman. “At that time we were mostly thinking about the diamonds that were looted, so we wanted to know what happened to that.”
When Schouten rang the bell at Patricia Kadgien’s home in August, there was no answer. But he saw a for-sale sign in her yard. The reporters checked the real-estate listing and spotted the painting in one of the photos of the property. They could barely believe their luck.
“I thought, ok, is it really this simple, a picture that’s missing for 80 years is here above a couch in the living room?” said Rosman.
The day after they published a story on the painting’s discovery, police raided the home. But in the painting’s place was a tapestry of horses. Eight days later, Kadgien’s attorney handed the painting over to authorities.
Federal prosecutors have charged Patricia Kadgien, who runs a small clothing business, and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, a go-kart mechanic, with aggravated concealment and are investigating more than 20 drawings and prints, as well as two portraits, also seized from their home and from the home of Patricia’s sister in Mar del Plata.
“The attitude was to hide the painting,” the case’s prosecutor, Carlos Martinez, told Reuters. “We think that isn’t indicative of someone that doesn’t know what they have.”
COMPETING CLAIMS TO THE PAINTING
Goudstikker’s family have fought for decades to get his paintings back.
The art collector died when he fell into the hold of a boat as he was fleeing the advancing Nazis with his family in May 1940. But in a small black book, he had listed “Portrait of a Lady” along with more than 1,000 pieces in his collection.
In what historians describe as a forced sale after his death, top Nazi official Hermann Goering purchased about 800 of Goudstikker’s paintings. Weitz, the attorney who represents Goudstikker’s family, said that Goering’s associate, Alois Miedl, sold “Portrait of a Lady” to Kadgien in 1944.
The family has recovered 300 to 350 works of art, including 200 that had been mostly hanging in museums that the Netherlands agreed to return in 2006.
Charlene von Saher, Goudstikker’s granddaughter who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, said her family informed the Kadgiens of their claim to “Portrait of a Lady” after the journalists published their story. Paolo Plebani, curator at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, said it is worth upwards of $100,000, but attorneys for the Goudstikker family said it is impossible to determine the value before examining the condition and confirming the artist’s identity.
“I just hope that they would be people who would feel like doing the right thing and correcting a historical injustice,” von Saher told Reuters, saying that the discovery was “like a movie.”
But Patricia Kadgien hasn’t relented. She has filed a claim in civil court that says her father’s sister-in-law bought the painting from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne in 1943. It said the painting was “legitimately possessed” by her father and that she inherited it after he died. The museum told Reuters the painting was never part of its collection.
The claim said that she removed the painting from her home “for security reasons,” thinking she was the victim of “a virtual scam” when she started receiving calls from a journalist in August.
As for Post, he still wants to know what happened to the diamonds that were tied to Kadgien. Martinez, the prosecutor, said authorities did not find jewels of value or from the war-period in the Mar del Plata home.
Saskia Coenen Snyder, a Dutch professor of modern Jewish history at the University of South Carolina, said it is very hard to prove that Nazis took diamonds with them to South America. “I’ll give him credit for at least spending years of his time pursuing, uncovering stories and truths that not everybody wants to do or has been able to,” she said of Post. “He’s a bit of a pit bull.”
Uncategorized
Gazans Stream Back Home as Israel-Hamas Ceasefire Holds
Palestinians gather to collect aid supplies from trucks that entered Gaza, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip October 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Thousands of Palestinians streamed north along the coast of Gaza on Saturday, trekking by foot, car and cart back to their abandoned homes as a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian terrorist group Hamas appeared to be holding.
Israeli troops pulled back under the first phase of a US-brokered agreement reached this week to end the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people and left much of the enclave in ruins.
“It is an indescribable feeling; praise be to God,” said Nabila Basal as she traveled by foot with her daughter, who she said had suffered a head wound in the war. “We are very, very happy that the war has stopped, and the suffering has ended.”
US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Gaza early Saturday to observe the Israeli military redeployment, Israeli Army Radio reported, citing a security source.
He was joined by the head of the US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), Admiral Brad Cooper, who said in a statement that his visit was part of the establishment of a task force that would support stabilization efforts in Gaza, though US troops would not be deployed inside the enclave.
CLOCK TICKING ON RELEASE OF HOSTAGES
Once the Israeli forces had completed their redeployment on Friday, which keeps them out of major urban areas but still in control of roughly half the enclave, the clock began ticking for Hamas to release its hostages within 72 hours.
“We are very excited, waiting for our son and for all the 48 hostages,” said Hagai Angrest, whose son Matan is among the 20 Israeli hostages believed to still be alive. “We are waiting for the phone call.”
Twenty-six hostages have been declared dead in absentia and the fate of two more is unknown.
According to the agreement, after the hostages are handed over, Israel will free 250 Palestinians serving long sentences in its prisons and 1,700 detainees captured during the war.
Hundreds of trucks per day are expected to surge into Gaza carrying food and medical aid, according to the agreement.
TRUMP EXPECTED TO TRAVEL TO ISRAEL AND EGYPT
But questions remain about whether the ceasefire and hostage-prisoner exchange deal, the biggest step yet towards ending two years of war, will lead to a lasting peace under Trump’s 20-point plan.
Much could still go wrong. Further steps in Trump’s plan have yet to be agreed. These include how the demolished Gaza Strip is to be ruled when fighting ends, and the ultimate fate of Hamas, which has rejected Israel’s demands it disarm.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump expressed confidence the ceasefire would hold, saying: “They’re all tired of the fighting.” He said he believed there was a “consensus” on the next steps but acknowledged some details still have to be worked out.
During the Hamas attack on Israeli communities, military bases and a music festival on October 7, 2023, terrorists killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and captured 251 hostages.
Trump is expected to visit the region on Monday and address the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the first US president to do so since George W. Bush in 2008.
Trump said he would also travel to Egypt and that other world leaders were expected to be present.