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Lawsuit says DOGE used ChatGPT to flag Jewish-themed humanities grants as ‘DEI’ before canceling them
(JTA) — The Department of Government Efficiency tagged Jewish themes as “DEI” in ChatGPT when searching for federal humanities grants to cancel last year, according to a class-action lawsuit.
The methodology contributed to the cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study violence against women during the Holocaust, postwar Soviet Jewish literature and hundreds of other topics, even as the NEH would soon bestow $10.4 million, its largest-ever grant, to the Tikvah Fund, a politically conservative Jewish cultural project.
The suit brought by the Authors Guild; a member organization for several academic groups including the Association for Jewish Studies; and a number of individual scholars seeks to restore the canceled funding, which comprised around 80% of the NEH’s grants and was cut amid the Elon Musk-led task force’s broader slashing of federal spending last year.
The suit names the NEH, its acting chair, and several DOGE staffers as defendants, including Justin Fox, who the suit alleges was behind the ChatGPT methodology.
While DOGE’s use of keywords to cancel research grants was already known, as was the sweep’s effect on Jewish projects, the suit has revealed new details in its methodology, including staffers’ use of ChatGPT and their contention that works dealing with Judaism are a form of DEI.
In a filing on Friday, attorneys for the plaintiffs said Fox specified that he considered Jewish grants, including those focusing on the Holocaust, part of DEI.
“For a different grant about violence against women during the Holocaust, Fox testified that ChatGPT properly classified the grants as involving DEI, and thus slated it for termination, because it was ‘specifically focused on Jewish cultures’ (as in, it was about the Holocaust) and the ‘voices of the females in that culture,’” reads the filing.
“More generally, Fox stated that he identified as DEI any grant about a specific ‘minority group,’ meaning any particular ‘ethnicity, culture . . . race or gender or religion,’” the filing went on.
“It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture,” Fox stated about one canceled grant for a project about “violence against women during the Holocaust,” as the latest court filing described it. Fox continued, “It’s inherently related to DEI for that reason.”
When asked in a deposition about the criteria for cancellation, the NEH’s acting chair Michael McDonald said he hadn’t known that DOGE used ChatGPT in its selection process, while also noting that he didn’t agree with the assessment that the Holocaust constituted DEI. The final authority for canceling the grants rested with DOGE, not McDonald, depositions indicated.
Fox, the suit alleges, had created his own “Detection List” of identity-based traits, with separate categories for “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” before running the databases through the generative AI software.
His prompt, according to the lawsuit: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” The grants that turned up were all terminated, with only a few exceptions.
Many Jewish-themed projects were among the NEH cancellations, including a grant for “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union,” a translation project that was published in book form last month. The book was singled out during the lawsuit’s discovery phase, which noted, “ChatGPT classified this grant as DEI because ‘[t]his anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust in the USSR.’”
“I find it annoyingly amusing that they weren’t bothering to read the grants themselves — that they needed a machine to give them some sense,” Sasha Senderovich, a University of Washington professor who co-translated the volume with University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign professor Harriet Murav, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Three-quarters of their NEH grant had already been paid out, Senderovich said. He believes the NEH’s decision to cancel his grant was an example of “authoritarian logic.”
The book “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” showcases Jewish literature written in the Soviet Union; at right, Jewish women buy flour before Passover in Moscow in 1965. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)After Senderovich used similar language in a Forward story last year following the cuts, an NEH official called the accusation “tendentious” and accused “wokeness and intersectionality” of being the true authoritarians in a text to McDonald, according to the court filing.
While the DEI justification has generated headlines, Senderovich said, “I think it’s also somewhat misleading to get hung up on what they typed into ChatGPT.”
The NEH’s final grant cancellation list, he noted, included many projects that had not been flagged as DEI. One such cancellation noted by the plaintiffs’ attorneys — which DOGE canceled over McDonald’s objections — was “a grant to advance the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill [sic] University.”
Murav, for her part, told JTA, “I am reeling from these cascading waves of hatred.” She rejected the idea that Jews should be considered part of DEI: “DEI initiatives seek to redress historic failures in American society. DEI efforts in the world of the university are not aimed at American Jews, because American Jews are over-represented in the professions and in the academy.”
Also canceled by DOGE: a project on “the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust,” according to the suit. Documentary filmmaker Marisa Fox, whose own grant for a project matching that description was canceled, bemoaned the Trump administration’s new priorities in the Hollywood Reporter last year.
“I’ve seen firsthand how meeting a Holocaust survivor, whether in person or through a project, can dispel the most deep-seated antisemitic beliefs,” Fox — no apparent relation to the DOGE staffer — wrote then. “But if the NEH, NEA and local humanities councils are defunded, the platforms that can bridge divides will be severely limited. And so, too, will our chances of stemming hate’s rising tide.”
Even as staffers appeared to classify Jews as “DEI,” the NEH is moving forward with its support of Tikvah-aligned Jewish scholars. Ruth Wisse, a prominent Yiddish and Jewish cultural scholar, emeritus Harvard professor and senior fellow at Tikvah, is set to deliver the NEH’s annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities later this month at what has been rechristened the “Trump Kennedy Center.” Wisse’s lecture is titled “A Message from the ‘Blue and White’ in the ‘Red, White, and Blue,’” a reference to the colors of the Israeli and American flags.
A request for comment to Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen was not returned as of press time. Tikvah had a previously unreported connection to NEH senior leadership, the deposition shows: Dorothea Wolfson, who has worked with Tikvah and directs a program established by a former Tikvah board chair, is married to Adam Wolfson, the NEH’s assistant chair for programs. Adam Wolfson said in the deposition that he had made introductions but wasn’t involved in the grant selection.
As it shines a spotlight on DOGE’s practices, the suit also brings a different long-simmering debate to the forefront: whether Jews are considered part of “DEI,” the broad suite of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at universities and other institutions that conservatives have railed against.
Some prominent Jewish voices, including current CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, have argued that DEI practices are at least latently antisemitic because their practitioners do not consider Jews an underrepresented minority. The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus antisemitism has frequently been paired with anti-DEI initiatives.
Yet at the same time, a broader anti-DEI push on the right has also ensnared Jewish projects, or generated confusion among university administrators as to whether Jewish events should be canceled on campuses where DEI is outlawed.
Fox, according to investigations of DOGE staffers last year, is a former investment banker whose DOGE tenure also included stints overseeing cuts at USAID and the General Services Administration. His NEH tenure coincided with a directive for that organization to eliminate $175 million in federal grant funding. The DOGE project largely wound down following its architect Musk’s official exit from government a few months into its tenure, decimating numerous federal agencies and jeopardizing some initiatives to benefit Jews.
“It’s just ridiculous. You have these kids being told just go in and cut as much as you can,” Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Author’s Guild, told JTA about the DOGE maneuvers. “They were given no real instruction.”
The guild is one of several organizations that have co-signed onto the lawsuit, which is requesting the refunding of the grants. It is now awaiting a judge’s ruling on a summary judgment that would avoid a trial.
Among several individual authors represented by the guild in the suit is Jewish author and independent scholar William Goldstein, founding editor of the New York Times’ Books website, whose NEH grant was meant to fund a biography of Jewish LGBTQ playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer.
The post Lawsuit says DOGE used ChatGPT to flag Jewish-themed humanities grants as ‘DEI’ before canceling them appeared first on The Forward.
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He was a hidden child during WWII. The French town that saved him lost his painting and rediscovered a chapter of its history.
The day Isabelle Siméon cleared out a basement storage area in the town hall in Houdan, France, and found a rolled-up painting on top of a bookcase, she discovered a forgotten piece of history. My father, Philip Orenstein, a professor of art at Rutgers University, had started work on that painting in 1989 and donated it to the town in 1994 at an event marking the 50th anniversary of its liberation by American forces.
My father donated the painting because he felt a deep debt to the town that saved his life during the Second World War. A hidden child in Houdan from 1942-45, my father was saved by a parish priest who threatened to excommunicate anyone in this small market town who informed the occupying Germans about the Jewish children, resistance fighters, or downed allied pilots concealed there, or other acts of resistance. And by a farming family — the Trouvers — that took in children of French POWs, including Jews.
Yet by 2024, when Siméon, a municipal official, made her discovery, the town had forgotten not only the painting that had gone straight into storage, but its proud history of sheltering Jewish children and its heroic French resistance priest Abbé Pierre Condé. A dramatic page in the town’s 1,200 years of recorded history was lost. Even among the Jewish community in Yvelines, the bucolic region immediately to the west of Paris, the story was unknown. In France, the story of the hidden children, Jewish children sent to the countryside or small towns under various pretexts to avoid detection by Nazi occupants is well known. Several towns have established national reputations as places of refuge. But not Houdan and not elsewhere in Yvelines according to Valérie Boussard, president of the Council of Jewish Communities of Yvelines.
After spending more than a year to find my father based only on his signature and then restoring the painting, the Tannery (La Tannerie) gallery in Houdan is now hosting an exhibition through Nov. 1 to celebrate the restoration of this painting and this forgotten page of the town’s history.
Houdan today has changed. For many Parisians, this part of France serves as a country retreat and Houdan has fought hard to preserve its ancient town center. The result is a small town that continues to serve as a delightful regional hub with open air markets, restaurants situated in old farm buildings, an enormous fair each September, and increasingly fancy small shops, perhaps akin to the Cotswolds in England.
I accompanied my father to Houdan for the opening of his exhibition on Sept. 10 and stood with my extended family and Mayor Jean-Marie Tétart who proudly announced the future installation of the painting to a pride of place in the town hall. A former parliamentarian, Tétart seeks for Houdan the recognition it deserves as a place that, when times were at their hardest, resisted antisemitism and sought to repair the world. Even today.
Yet the town’s proud embrace of my father, his work, and this vital chapter of its history raises an important question: How was this history lost in the first place? And why was it rediscovered only now?
According to my father, the hidden child whose family survived the war and then emigrated to Brooklyn, France was simply not ready to receive this history before. It was not until 1995 that France officially took responsibility for the Vel d’Hiv roundup in Paris that claimed the lives of my father’s cousin Henri Herzhorn and thousands of other children who died in the French concentration camp in Drancy in inhumane conditions or in Auschwitz, their final destination. My father intended the seven murals that he painted starting in the 1990s to force France to recognize this history.
Paradoxically, with the dramatic rise of antisemitism that has deeply worried the French Jewish community, this history and the history of those who resisted resonates even more loudly. With every online or physical or verbal attack, the Jewish community and its allies in France respond with acts of memory.
My father’s work is at once personal and political, mixing family imagery with images of the grand politics of the day and oddly juxtaposed popular culture references. His murals stun the viewer with outsized images of a DeGaulle and Pétain or the D-Day landings, overlaid with family photos, Parisian graffiti, posters, and film advertisements. The colorful, powerful, and emotional images rush together and appear to jump off a graffitied wall in Paris as you are passing by.
“The Big Cheese,” his painting in Houdan, features an outsized image of the Ile de France steamship sailing across a brightly tricolored French flag background. The ship that bore him and his family to New York appears to be racing away from images of the iron cross, yellow stars, Drancy, and Karl Marx towards Mt. Rushmore, Max Beckman, and Statue of Liberty sunglasses. The work is colorful and epic in composition, on the one hand, while also inlaid with engaging and perplexing historical symbols designed to draw one in from afar and up close. My father has always dwelt on this history.
“As I worked on the seven canvases I describe as murals — my major body of work — I constantly thought of my cousin Henri Herzhorn, whom I had never met, as well as the more than 4,000 Parisian children who were victims of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup — my contemporaries, who, like me, left France,” my father said when he was in Houdan.
Today, though France seems open to revisiting this history, mysteries still remain. Particularly the postwar life and fate of Abbé Pierre Condé. I spoke with Monsignor Luc Crepy, the Bishop of Versailles for Yvelines, who has begun to research Houdan’s wartime hero together with the current Curé of Houdan, Father Pierre Bothuan. Condé left behind a published journal recording the major events of the war, occupation, and liberation of Houdan. After that, he too disappeared from collective memory.
Growing up in my father’s house, surrounded by this history, I came away from Houdan shocked at the distances we have traveled and the voids that remain. My father and his older brother Stephen, a former professor of nuclear physics at CUNY — hidden with him in Houdan — never expected to survive 1944, let alone to return there in 2026. The house where they lived lay just beside a small bridge that the Germans planned to dynamite after D-Day to slow the advance of Patton’s army. Yet the town’s postman cut the wires and my father and uncle survived to consider the contemporary relevance of a lost painting and a lost history to a lost world in need of repair.
The post He was a hidden child during WWII. The French town that saved him lost his painting and rediscovered a chapter of its history. appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu to confront Mamdani’s call to arrest him in U.N. address this week
(JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday accused New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani of supporting Hamas and inciting violence against Jews, setting up a showdown between the Israeli leader and one of the most prominent American pro-Palestinian politicians ahead of Netanyahu’s visit to the city.
Netanyahu said he would respond to Mamdani’s criticism of him and Israel during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, when he will visit New York for the first time since Mamdani took office.
Mamdani on Monday renewed his demand for the arrest of Netanyahu, who he called “a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people” in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. He acknowledged that he did not have the authority to carry out a warrant for Netanyahu issued by the International Criminal Court, but said the warrant should still be “honored” to protect “accountability” to international laws.
“If the International Criminal Court deems someone worthy of an arrest because of a violation of those laws, then who are we to say that anyone should be above that?” said Mamdani.
Netanyahu responded in a video statement, “Shame on you for supporting the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people. Shame on you for inciting riots against New York Jews.” A number of prominent New York Jewish figures have asked Mamdani to tamp down his rhetoric about Israel, linking it to rising violent attacks on Jews. Mamdani has said that he is mayor for all New Yorkers, including Jews, and denounces antisemitism.
“I’m coming to the U.N., I’m going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers, and I’m going to tell the truth about you,” added Netanyahu.
Mamdani pledged during his mayoral campaign last year that he would seek to arrest Netanyahu if he visited, but admitted in July that the city could not legally do so.
The ICC issued its warrant for Netanyahu in 2024, accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The United States and Israel are not signatories of the treaty that created the ICC in 2002 and do not recognize its jurisdiction.
Netanyahu has prominently featured Mamdani in campaign ads as he currently seeks reelection in Israel, framing the mayor as both a pro-terror extremist and a leader reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
Netanyahu is set for one of his shortest trips to the United States, where he is not slated to meet with President Donald Trump, according to The Jerusalem Post. He is currently scheduled to leave New York on the same day he arrives. Protests are expected both outside the United Nations and inside during Netanyahu’s speech, which last year saw representatives from dozens of countries walk out.
Meanwhile, Mamdani had his third meeting with Trump on Monday, continuing a rapport between the two populist leaders on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Despite their stark differences on issues including immigration enforcement, Trump praised Mamdani during a press conference on the lawn of Gracie Mansion.
“I want him to be a great mayor, and he’s certainly got potential,” Trump told reporters before shaking Mamdani’s hand and patting his arm.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue
Voters may react differently to a Jewish politician who publicly practices their faith than to one who simply identifies as Jewish, a new poll found. The distinction could matter for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a possible 2028 presidential candidate who has made his Jewish faith central to his public life and service.
The Politico poll of 2,002 U.S. adults showed that Democratic voters were less likely to vote for a candidate who regularly attends synagogue than for a candidate not practicing a religion or attending services once a year. Among Republicans, however, a candidate who regularly attends synagogue performed better than one who attends only once a year.
The survey, conducted online in partnership with the London-based polling firm Public First between August 8 and 14, asked respondents to choose between hypothetical candidates with different characteristics, including political ideology, age, race, profession, sexual orientation and religious practice. The sample has a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.2%.
The poll offers a window into how religious observance may shape the way voters view a Jewish candidate. In an earlier poll conducted by the same firm in May, among 2,038 voters, candidates were identified simply by religion rather than how often or where they worshipped. Being identified as Jewish hurt a hypothetical candidate among voters in both parties compared with being identified as Christian.
The findings could be particularly relevant to Shapiro, the popular Pennsylvania governor running for reelection this fall. He maintains a traditional Conservative Jewish lifestyle, keeps kosher and is a longtime member of Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, outside Philadelphia. In his recent memoir, Where We Keep the Light, Shapiro detailed experiences shaped by and tied closely to his Jewish identity, including his vetting as a vice presidential candidate in 2024.
Shapiro has been viewed as a potential first Jewish president since his gubernatorial campaign in 2022 and is one of three prominent Jewish Democrats — along with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — mentioned as possible 2028 presidential candidates.
Religious identity, particularly Christianity, has become more central in Republican politics since President Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Trump and his Cabinet have made religious faith a prominent part of his administration’s agenda. He created a White House Faith Office to work with religious organizations and established a Justice Department task force focused specifically on what the administration calls anti-Christian bias. At the same time, an increasingly vocal faction on the far right has made Christian nationalism and antisemitism central to its politics.
The Politico poll does not explain why Republican voters responded differently to Jewish candidates based on how often they attended synagogue. But the gap aligns with the broader split in positions among conservatives who have warmly embraced visibly religious and politically conservative Jews, while criticizing liberal or less observant Jews over their politics and commitment to Judaism.
Trump has repeatedly drawn that distinction himself. During the 2024 election, for example, he said that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats “hate their religion.”
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