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How Joanna Stern gets it done — with some help from AI
Early in the morning on the day of the first Seder this year, I got on a train to New Jersey with a bag of potatoes and a cunning plan to outsource their cooking.
I was on my way to interview journalist and tech-maven Joanna Stern. In her new book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, she notes, while using the Posha AI cooking robot, that “robots won’t kill us with lasers, they’ll kill us with salt.” Together we would see whether Posha was up to some Seder food preparation that would sustain rather than poison both the Stern and the Friedman tables.
Stern, 42, for 12 years the consumer tech reporter at the Wall Street Journal, spent a year saying yes to a series of AI experiments. Some of those experiments — the AI boyfriend (with consent from her wife), the AI therapist (with advice from her therapist), the AI research assistant (she dispensed with her human assistant) — were generative AI. Others, like the Posha, lawnmower and Waymo driverless cars use different types of AI which Stern helpfully identifies at the outset.
Stern was in the process of starting up her new media company, which she had not even yet officially named “New Things.” In 2025 she had lived her life with AI and the book about the experience was coming out in May 2026, super speed for the publishing industry. As a fellow Solomon Schechter alum of sorts (she was a student, I was a teacher, a decade apart, different schools), I didn’t want to bother her too much in the hectic period as she published and publicized a book, launched a new media outlet and recorded a number of videos in partnership with NBC. So we got together on a morning when otherwise we would just have both been prepping in different kitchens in different states.
For the potatoes we enlisted the Posha, which looks like a microwave had a baby with a food processor. In the book Stern describes it like this.
“If you’re picturing a humanoid Gordon Ramsay, stop. Think giant countertop toaster oven, with a single pot and burner. The ‘robot’ lives in the system’s software, which controls stirring attachments, ingredient containers that dump food into the pot like a tiny automated dump truck, and a spinning spice rack that spits out seasoning in short, aggressive bursts. Bolted to the front is a small Android tablet.”
(“Bolted” is unfair, there’s a molded structure, but it still feels like an appliance rather than a window into the future of cooking.)
We chatted while cutting up ingredients — AI can’t shop or chop, it can only do “the fun stuff” — and then, while it was cooking we discussed the time that she’d spent with AI. She’d moved back to New Jersey to raise her kids close to her childhood home, but the world of the near future that she had been peering into didn’t seem like it was going to resemble much of what we knew in the last millennium.
I asked her whether, after her experiences of last year, she was in any way optimistic. She was cautious about AI: “There’s this completely Utopia version and there’s this completely Dystopia version and we’re somewhere gonna land in the middle.”
Viewed this way, our AI-driven robot future is a more extreme version of our already flawed human society. That’s borne out by the competing chapters in her book about medical AI intervention. She feels that dentists who use AI to read x-rays end up using the technology’s more precise analysis to up-sell procedures. In her chapter named “Machine Eyes and My Complicated Breasts,” Stern is more complimentary about a machine system for reading mammograms that is scrupulous, never tired and highly detail oriented. The AI found some objects that doctors might have missed but, in the end, it seems clear that she just trusts the medical system and breast radiologists more than American dentistry and dentists.
As we bemoaned AI’s abysmal ability to shop — and the utter inability of the 1X humanoid robot from Neo that she tested last year to either do the washing up or load the dishwasher (she has since tried another one, better at dancing than cleaning, alas) — we discussed how dramatically the new technology can reshape the landscape. After all, robots are already royalty in factories which are designed for their efficiency, rather than for uncertain and fragile fleshy water bags like us. If we designed homes so that machines could function optimally, perhaps they could chop, shop, clean, tidy, wash.
Stern was unconvinced, pointing out that other systems like Roomba or the automated driving system of Waymo had worked out how to navigate the human world quite effectively.
Relatedly, as it turned out, I wondered whether there were any of the experiments that she had continued because they had proved helpful. The AI boyfriend who lives in a particular iPhone, for example, she assured me had not been turned on for many months! (Tip for the top from Stern: “Don’t fall in love with a robot.”)
The one significant thing that Stern told me she continued to use regularly was the phone AI interface in the car. If she’s driving to an interview she will ask her AI to do research on her subjects, brainstorm what questions to ask and try different responses to their answers. I began to wish I had done a similar thing with Claude on the way to see her, but then again, actually reading her book, watching her videos and reading her columns gave me a richer, fresher way of responding to her in person. I was finding out who she was, not holding her to account.
We moved into the sitting room while Posha stirred and mixed and cooked. Stern’s video persona is an engaging mixture of curiosity, expertise and mild comic self-deprecation. Rather than the po-faced techies who open boxes and test stuff on YouTube, Stern is playful and has fun with the objects, subjects, and the video format. She has a fondness for the dumb and the pun that would definitely get labeled dad jokes if she were male.
Mostly, in her articles and videos she has explored the world of what is for sale but — especially after one interview with Apple execs about Siri, in which she said “You have more engineers, more money than any company, why couldn’t you make it work?” — she was called “Tech Mommy” because she knew her stuff, made it simple and held the child-like, big-eyed men of tech to account.
Sitting on her sofas — in the good room, nokh — Stern was more serious and thoughtful than her online persona. She was setting up a new business, with all the HR palaver that entailed; she was still doing the work of making videos and keeping on top of tech; she had to liaise with family about the Seder; she had her sick kid at home — not too bad, but feeling sorry for himself. He had been practicing and would be especially disappointed to miss out on the Four Questions at Seder, maybe he could FaceTime in to do it?
I wondered what sort of world we were making for our children. Beyond the collapse of entry level jobs — for the book Stern “hired a human reporting assistant [Maya Tribbitt] and then replaced her with an AI reporting assistant” — we decided we didn’t quite know. Stern, though, had been thinking about her chosen career recently. Yes, she had been thinking about it so she could position her brand for her new venture but she had also been reflecting on what she had achieved at the Journal: “Consumer tech is not really ‘what phone to buy’ or ‘what’s the best TV’ it’s now what are the impacts that it has. I wish I had worked more on that earlier in my career.”
So, if not the big future, a world shaped by AI, a world for the robots that we happen to live in, what’s next?
“The next step is wearable devices, the Meta Ray Bans take hands-free photos and videos. I wear them pretty much every day. Mostly just because they’re good sunglasses and then they have a camera so it’s easy to take family photos and videos.”
And also, “microphones in everything.” Stern gestured at some of the devices lying around, stand-ins for all the new devices that will need command interfaces: the best way to control them is verbally. For years we were told that our phones were not listening to us: “They don’t need to listen through our microphones. We have all this other data that we give them.” But now, Stern says, Alexa and Siri are just the thin end of the wedge. Everything will be miked and potentially listened to. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s so easy. We can easily do it.’… Whether or not they’re actually listening, they can.”
The alert went off on the cookbot and we took out the perfectly herbed potatoes from Posha. It had barely saved us time or effort but Stern, without prejudice, noted that there were certain longer, more complex recipes that the family enjoyed where it did, regularly, save her time. Stern put hers in a dish to take to her parents and I put mine in my aluminum tray for the train.
The allure of tech as we have known it until now is that it helps us to do what we want to do faster, quicker and with greater scope. At the moment, AI-driven robots like Posha or the Gabba stuffed toy from Curio are in their infancy, finding their way in the human world. One of the endearing features of the humanoid robot that Stern tested was how helpless it was. Instead of a scolding, it needed support and love from Tech Mommy.
On the other hand Gabba, the toy that talks to kids using some parental pre-programming and an uplink to ChatGPT, seems like it could be fun, or just pretty creepy. Stern gave one to her son Alex (aged 4) for Hanukkah and before it had a chance to become creepy, he decided that it was deeply annoying and destroyed it. (In the book, Stern adduces the dialog that led to the destruction and it is indeed warranted!)
But as the tech rapidly improves it will be harder to destroy both physically and emotionally. It’s not clear what impact they will have, but these robots are not going to be helpless, useless or destructible for much longer and, as always, Humpty Dumpty’s question resonates: “The question is, which is to be master — that’s all.”
We called a human-driven car to take me to the human-driven train. I took my tray and rode home with my robotically-cooked potatoes. That evening we tasted the respectably crisp, rosemary-herbed chunks and they were welcome at our feast celebrating liberation from bondage.
At Seders, we place ordinary but symbolic objects — eggs, oranges, glasses of wine — at the center of attention to force ourselves to ask uncomfortable questions about freedom: who has it, who lacks it, and what obligations come with it? The potatoes at this year’s Seder became a prompt to wonder not only about human freedom, but about our relationship to AI and the coming world of robots — and whether, in creating increasingly intelligent machines, we might surrender parts of our own humanity along the way.
The post How Joanna Stern gets it done — with some help from AI appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Brazen Attacks’: Antisemitism Turns Increasingly Violent in the West
CCTV footage of a Jewish man getting stabbed by an attacker in Golders Green area, which is home to a large Jewish population, in London, Britain, April 29, 2026, in this screengrab taken from a social media video. Photo: Social Media/via REUTERS
Across North America and Europe, antisemitism appears to be entering a new, more dangerous phase, with Jewish communities facing a growing wave of shootings, assaults, arson attacks, and violent intimidation even as overall incident totals in some countries begin to dip after the surge that followed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities in Israel.
In Canada, early 2026 data already indicate the country is on track to see its most violent year against the Jewish community in recent memory, with more violent antisemitic attacks recorded so far this year than during all of 2025, according to the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada.
In total, 11 violent antisemitic attacks have already been recorded across the country since the start of 2026, surpassing the 10 violent incidents documented during all of last year, when more than 6,800 antisemitic cases were reported nationwide.
“These brazen attacks on Jewish Canadians are a sign of a crisis of antisemitism that has spiraled out of control,” Simon Wolle, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada, said in a statement.
“Violence such as this, which has escalated from targeting synagogues to targeting Jewish people directly, does not occur in a vacuum. It is what happens when governments fail to act despite mounting evidence that antisemitism is becoming more normalized and dangerous,” Wolle continued.
Last week, a group of Jewish worshippers standing outside the Congregation Chasidei Bobov synagogue in Montreal was targeted in a drive-by shooting, leaving one person with minor injuries.
A week earlier, three visibly Jewish residents were targeted in a separate antisemitic attack when suspects opened fire with a gel-pellet gun, causing minor injuries.
In the United States, overall antisemitic incidents declined in 2025, but violent attacks against American Jews remained at alarmingly elevated levels, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
In total, 6,274 antisemitic incidents — including assaults, harassment, and vandalism — were recorded across the country last year, averaging roughly 17 incidents every day.
While antisemitic assaults rose modestly by 4 percent to 203 incidents in 2025, attackers increasingly wielded deadly weapons, with such cases surging nearly 40 percent compared to the previous year.
According to the ADL’s recent report, this broader escalation was marked by the return of fatal antisemitic violence in the US, with Jewish victims killed in such attacks for the first time since 2019.
Last May, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead in Washington, DC, followed weeks later by a firebombing in Colorado that killed one person and left 13 others injured.
In Spain, an anonymous group has launched an interactive online map called “BarcelonaZ,” which its creators describe as a mapping of “Zionism” across Barcelona, prompting growing concern within the local Jewish community over an increase in targeted attacks and violence.
The interactive tool functions as a geolocated blacklist of Jewish, Israeli, or allegedly Israel-linked businesses and organizations, which its creators accuse of complicity in what they describe as a “genocide” in Gaza.
On the platform, each entry includes a business name, address, category, links, contact details, and political accusations, which Jewish leaders have denounced as resembling a modern-day “Nazi list.”
The map has intensified an already hostile climate in Spain, where reports of antisemitic harassment and violence have surged in recent months. In one of the latest incidents, an unknown individual attempted to set fire to a Jewish-owned pizzeria in Madrid while customers were still dining inside.
In the United Kingdom, Jewish communities have also faced a mounting wave of antisemitic violence, intimidation, and street-level harassment amid growing fears over public safety.
Recently, an increasingly popular antisemitic TikTok trend in London has led to arrests and convictions after young men filmed themselves using cash to mock and harass members of Orthodox Jewish communities.
Videos circulating on social media show young men walking through heavily Jewish areas of London carrying fishing rods with money attached to the line in an apparent attempt to “fish for Jews.”
In a separate incident over the weekend in Stamford Hill, north London, a man allegedly whipped several Haredi Jewish women with a belt before spitting at volunteer responders who arrived at the scene. Witnesses said he also shouted racist insults, antisemitic slurs, and threats at both the victims and the volunteers.
Hours later, in nearby Amhurst Park in north London, a Jewish child was allegedly assaulted outside a school after a woman screamed antisemitic insults and punched the minor.
These latest incidents come amid a wider surge in antisemitic violence in London, including the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green — an attack that prompted the British government to raise the national terrorism threat level from “substantial” to “severe” for the first time in over four years.
Across the English Channel, three teenage boys assaulted a 14-year-old Jewish girl and threatened to kill her in the Parisian suburb of Sarcelles in March. The attack occurred weeks after a 13-year-old boy on his way to synagogue in Paris was brutally beaten by a knife-wielding assailant. France has seen several high-profile antisemitic attacks over the past year.
Meanwhile, the commissioner to combat antisemitism in the German state of Hesse sounded the alarm in January after an arson attack on a local synagogue in the town of Giessen, warning that it reflected a “growing pogrom-like atmosphere” threatening Jewish life across Germany. The environment has become so hostile that the Jewish community in Potsdam, a city just outside Berlin, fears it may not be safe to open a new Jewish daycare center amid growing security concerns.
In Ireland, the Jewish community has also reported a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, with community leaders warning that violent threats and intimidation are becoming increasingly commonplace.
One Irish Jew said he and his wife no longer attend community events together out of fear that a mass-casualty antisemitic attack could leave their young son orphaned — a stark reflection of the deepening sense of insecurity gripping parts of Ireland’s Jewish community.
“If there were another community that felt that sense of siege and that they had to take steps to protect themselves in moments where they’re visible, I think there would be a sense of moral outrage about it,” Sunday Times journalist Jon Ihle told “The Claire Byrne Show.”
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Debating Zionism is fair. Protesting Israel’s president at commencement crosses the line
I am grateful for Noam Pianko’s recent essay, “Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually.” Pianko argued that criticism of a small group of graduating seniors at the Jewish Theological Seminary who objected to JTS’s invitation to Israeli President Isaac Herzog to serve as this year’s commencement speaker was misguided, citing JTS’s long history of internal debates over Zionism.
I was among those critics. In a May 3 blog post for The Times of Israel I argued that even six students publicly opposing Herzog’s presence was six too many — not because Jewish institutions should avoid debate, but because there is a difference between debate premised on a shared commitment to Jewish peoplehood, and debate that rejects of one of Jewish peoplehood’s central expressions.
Pianko rightly reminds readers that JTS has never been ideologically monolithic. Its history includes tensions between tradition and change, particularism and universalism, theology and modernity. Those tensions are part of what has made JTS so influential in American Jewish life for nearly 140 years.
The history of debate over Zionism within the seminary’s intellectual culture does not weaken my concern. It sharpens it.
The crucial issue is conceptual precision. Expressions of skepticism about Zionism in earlier periods of JTS history were often very different from today’s anti-Zionism.
In some cases, they reflected a classical religious view that Jewish return and sovereignty would come through a messianic process rather than through human political action. That position was a theological claim about timing and agency, not a negation of Jewish national aspiration. In others, like Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism, for example, an emphasis was put on Jewish renewal through language, spirit and civilization, while questioning whether political statehood should be the immediate or primary goal. That was an internal argument about how Jewish national life should unfold — not over whether such a life was valid.
Contemporary anti-Zionism, in contrast, frequently challenges the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself. That is not simply another version of an older seminary debate. It is a different claim with different consequences.
To be clear, the students’ letter is not a simple declaration of anti Zionism, and it should not be caricatured as such. Their stated concerns include the devastation of the war in Gaza, the moral responsibilities of Jewish leadership, and the fear that honoring Herzog without sufficient public reckoning sends the wrong message about Palestinian suffering.
Those concerns deserve serious engagement. But seriousness also requires asking what this protest communicates in institutional context. At a moment when the Jewish people and Israel’s legitimacy are under intense assault, opposing the presence of Israel’s president at a flagship Jewish seminary risks turning anguish over Israeli policy into a symbolic rejection of Israel’s legitimacy as a central part of Jewish life. That is the line I believe JTS must be careful not to blur.
So while Pianko is right to highlight ideological range in JTS’s past, we should not flatten the past into the present.
Zionism did not become central to Jewish life by accident. It emerged as the primary vehicle through which the Jewish people reclaimed agency, safety and a collective future after centuries of vulnerability. The establishment of the state of Israel transformed Jewish existence. That fact does not erase earlier debates, but it does change the center of gravity.
Institutions like JTS have a responsibility to teach that complexity honestly — which Herzog’s presence at commencement, and thoughtful, well-informed debates around it, will help to do. Seminaries should expose students to the range of Jewish thought, including theological reservations, cultural critiques and internal disagreements about Zionism.
At issue is not whether the varieties and history of Zionism should be debated at JTS. Of course they should. Instead, this incident is a reminder that a flagship institution of Jewish learning can and should remain clear that Jewish peoplehood, Jewish sovereignty and the state of Israel are not peripheral to contemporary Jewish identity. They are central.
The post Debating Zionism is fair. Protesting Israel’s president at commencement crosses the line appeared first on The Forward.
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UK Man in Court Charged With Arson at Former London Synagogue
Orthodox Jews stand by a police cordon, after a man was arrested following a stabbing incident in the Golders Green area, which is home to a large Jewish population, in London, Britain, April 29, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
A British man charged over an arson attack at a former synagogue in east London last week was in contact with someone using an Iraqi phone number shortly before the fire, prosecutors told a London court on Tuesday.
Moses Edwards, 45, appeared in the dock at Westminster Magistrates’ Court and was remanded in custody until a further hearing next month. He gave no indication of any plea.
The fire at the former East London Central Synagogue was caused by wine bottles filled with an accelerant, which exploded damaging the outside of the building, prosecutors said.
The incident followed a series of arson attacks on Jewish targets in previous weeks, with police saying they were investigating possible Iran links to some of the fires.