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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.
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The post An 1859 fight over how to make matzah has lessons about the threat of AI today appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The de facto annexation of the West Bank is a recipe for utter disaster
The disturbing wave of near-daily attacks by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the West Bank is advancing a quiet but steady effort by the Israeli government to annex the West Bank.
While opposition from President Donald Trump has led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step away from threats to formally annex the territory, his government is now taking gradual steps to accomplish the same goal. Turning a blind eye to settler violence — as violent incidents have escalated, the Israeli government has not prosecuted any Israeli perpetrators since 2020 — is perhaps the most visible warning sign, but far from the only one.
In a classified meeting in late March, Israel’s security cabinet approved 34 new settlements — including illegal outposts that were retroactively legalized — in what constituted the largest number of settlements ever approved at one time by any Israeli government.
In February, the government issued new land registration orders in the West Bank for the first time since 1967, enabling vast swaths of land to be declared state property. At the same time, Israel expanded its jurisdiction over parts of the West Bank that have been under Palestinian control since the Oslo agreements.
And in late 2025, Israel approved plans to establish the highly controversial E1 settlement project, which would divide the West Bank into a northern and southern region, effectively rendering the contiguity of any future Palestinian state obsolete.
So, when Netanyahu claims to view the crisis of settler violence “with great severity” and vows to crack down on that violence to “the fullest extent of the law” — as he did in November 2025 — his words ring hollow. Since the start of the year, Jewish extremists in the West Bank have committed more than 200 violent attacks against Palestinians, with six killed in March alone. Yet despite the widening cracks this issue is causing between Israel and its allies, Israel’s leader has not addressed it since December, when he downplayed the problem as being caused by “a handful of kids,” and said the attacks are overblown by the media.
It’s not just a handful of kids. And if a nation as tiny and embattled as Israel can effectively take on Iran and its proxies across the Middle East, it should be able to tackle a problem of its own making that is threatening not only the lives of innocent Palestinians in the West Bank, but also the relationship between Israel and the United States, and the future of the Jewish state itself.
A death knell for the two-state solution
It is not only critics and international observers who have described Israel’s increasing control over the West Bank as amounting to de facto annexation, and noted that it threatens any remaining prospect for a two state solution. Proponents of these policies have characterized their efforts in much the same way.
The architect of the government’s annexation efforts, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, described recent moves as “bringing down the curtain” on the two-state solution, and “killing the idea of a Palestinian state.” Defense Minister Israel Katz, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, said “we will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state” as he announced the government’s moves in February alongside Smotrich. Katz earlier praised Israel’s “practical sovereignty” over the West Bank.
Eli Cohen, another Likud minister, heralded recent measures for ushering in “de facto” Israeli sovereignty over “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name for the West Bank that is often used in Israel. (That name was used internationally prior to the region’s renaming under the Jordanian occupation that began in 1948.)
Smotrich, who was given oversight of a newly created settlements administration within the defense ministry as part of his coalition agreement with Netanyahu in early 2023, has overseen record levels of settlement construction and expansion. He has also argued that Israel should encourage Palestinian migration from the West Bank, a policy that would amount to ethnic cleansing.
Out-of-control attacks
The IDF Chief of Staff recently called the dramatic escalation of attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank “morally and ethically unacceptable,” saying they are causing “extraordinary strategic damage to the IDF’s efforts.”
For the first time in its history, the IDF was recently forced to divert troops away from an active war zone — in this case, fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon — in order to confront violent settlers in the West Bank. That development was, alarmingly, reminiscent of those that preceded the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, when IDF battalions were disastrously moved away from the Gaza border to the West Bank for the very same reason.
Smotrich and others have often framed attacks by settlers as acts of self-defense. But this year has seen more violence perpetrated by Jews in the West Bank than by Palestinians. And while Palestinian violence against Jews is treated as terrorism, attacks by Jewish extremists are no longer being handled with the seriousness they once were. According to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, between 2020 and 2025, more than 96% of police investigations into settler violence in the West Bank ended without indictments. Only 2% concluded with full or partial convictions.
That’s likely in part because the Israeli police force, which is tasked with combating the rise in attacks by Jewish extremists, has since 2022 been overseen by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a man who spent most of his career as an attorney defending violent Jewish extremists.
Ben-Gvir has worked to ensure that various tools law enforcement agencies once used to deal with Jewish terrorism are no longer available. The use of administrative detention was suspended for Jewish suspects; the Shin Bet’s Jewish extremism department has been sidelined; and Ben-Gvir has effectively outlawed the government from using the term “terrorist” to apply to Jews.
More bad signs: David Zini, the man Netanyahu tapped to replace the previous head of the Shin Bet — whom he fired — is from the same far-right movement as Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
A policy of de facto control
The fact that the government is effectively allowing these attacks to continue on a near-daily basis with virtually no accountability points to a clear and unsettling conclusion: permanent Israeli control of the West Bank, home to 3.8 million Palestinians and half a million Israelis, is part of the government’s agenda.
Proponents of annexation often describe it as a necessary response to terrorism that will keep Israel safer. Annexation, they insist, would send a strong message to those who seek to destroy the Jewish state.
But in reality, annexation is itself a threat to the Jewish state.
The founders of the state of Israel were very clear: it would not only be a democracy, but the world’s only country with a Jewish majority. Annexing the West Bank would effectively mean that Israel is no longer a majority Jewish state. And if Palestinian residents were not given the full rights of citizenship — unlikely, under the most far-right government in Israeli history — it would mean that Israel was no longer a democracy.
The idea that annexation would somehow stop terrorism or keep Israelis safer is delusional. Not only would it increase tensions and violence, but it would also empower Israel’s harshest critics, weaken its crucial international alliances, further erode its dwindling support among Americans and bitterly divide the Jewish diaspora. Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans — and American Jews — support a two-state solution to the conflict and oppose annexation efforts.
Israel itself is not currently an apartheid state. All citizens of Israel — whether they are Arab, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, black or white — have equal rights. Yet the West Bank already complicates that picture. Palestinian residents of the West Bank live under the Palestinian Authority, and are not Israeli citizens. Jewish residents of the West Bank are Israeli citizens. While Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military law under the Israeli justice system, Jewish residents operate under civilian law.
If Israel annexed the West Bank, there could be no more debate: Israel would become an apartheid state.
It is true that Judea and Samaria is the heartland of ancient Israel, home to more biblical Jewish sites than anywhere else. It is also true that Israel captured the territory in a war of self-defense from Jordan, which occupied the territory after seizing it in the war of 1948. And it is true that Palestinian leaders have rejected numerous offers of statehood over the past century, all of which would have granted near-total Palestinian control of the West Bank.
Those facts do not grant Israel the cause or right to apply sovereignty to an area inhabited by millions of people who do not wish to be under its control.
The rise in extremist violence, the impunity that has met these attacks, and open calls for “sovereignty” are not separate developments. They are part of the same dangerous trajectory — one that is leading to an undemocratic state that is becoming unrecognizable to many who love it dearly.
The post The de facto annexation of the West Bank is a recipe for utter disaster appeared first on The Forward.
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I’m an Iranian Student at Yale: Here Is the Problem With the University’s Discourse
Yale University Law School in New Haven, Conn. Photo: Juan Paulo Gutierrez/Flickr.
On April 7, the Yale MacMillan Center hosted a panel titled, “The War on Iran: A Roundtable Discussion.” The speakers repeatedly made false claims about Iran’s modern history and politics. When these claims were challenged by Iranians in the audience, they were met with dismissal and mockery.
This panel epitomizes a larger problem with how Iran is discussed at Yale. Our academic culture has allowed perceived expertise to shield weak and morally suspect arguments, while the voices of Iranians are only tolerated if they reinforce an established narrative.
Laura Robson, Elihu Professor of Global Affairs and History, started by saying she was “not an Iran expert.” She then described Iran’s 1953 government change as the United States collaborating with the British government to remove the democratically elected Prime Minister, “Mustafa” Mossadegh, in favor of the return of an autocratic monarchy.
This is inaccurate, not only because Robson actually meant “Mohammad” Mossadegh, but also because he was never democratically elected. When confronted, the professor claimed that descriptions of anybody, even beyond Iran, as democratically elected need to come with asterisks, morally equivocating dictators with other democratically elected leaders. She continued by saying there’s no question that the regime that the US replaced him with [Pahlavi 1953-1979] was more repressive than the one that came before it.
While criticisms regarding treatment of political prisoners apply to both the Pahlavi and Mossadegh periods, Robson omitted the fact that under Pahlavi, women gained the right to vote, run for office, and divorce. The legal marriage age was raised from 13 to 18. The first public gay wedding in the Middle East was held in Tehran, and the couple was congratulated by the Empress.
Arash Azizi, a fellow at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, said that former Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif speaks on behalf of the Iranian people, when the mass protests that occurred earlier this year — in which tens of thousands of people were killed — show that the regime clearly lacks popular support. This is something universally acknowledged by even those who oppose the current war.
The controversial US Special Envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, claimed that sanctions and war “have not done one iota” to weaken the Iranian regime or reduce its violence, and returned to the same conclusion he has defended for years: that blind faith in endless negotiation remains the only path forward regardless of past failures.
Contrary to this claim, the sanctions have significantly weakened the regime economically and constrained its terror proxies, and their conduct during this war shows how untrustworthy incessant negotiation attempts have been.
When an Iranian who had lost friends in the Ukrainian PS752 plane shot down and covered up by Zarif’s government asked the panel how they sleep at night knowing they support figures like Zarif, the panelists laughed and joked about using melatonin. The Iranian student’s emotional testimony was deemed uncivil by panel moderator Travis Zadeh, Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies, but the mockery that followed was treated as acceptable.
This is the problem with Iran discourse at Yale, and beyond Yale. Treating academic credentials as a pass to ignore views that don’t fit the pre-established political ideology of “experts” is not merely due to ignorance and disconnect from reality. It is a deliberate decision to launder these fundamental misunderstandings as facts in classrooms where future political leaders sit.
Iranian voices are already silenced through repression, Internet shutdowns, and executions. What little space that remains for Iran discussion is then hijacked by academics who avoid any resolution by framing everything about the region as “too complicated,” treat the region as a monolith, and present the regime’s terrorists as authentic Iranian voices.
Foreigners are told that any intervention is wrong, because Iranians must decide their own future. But when Iranians speak, they are silenced here and silenced in Iran by the very same policies that these foreign experts and discussion panels present as the best solution for Iran.
To make any progress towards peace, that choice must be reconsidered.
The Yale Daily News initially signaled interest in publishing this piece, but declined to move forward after heavy editorial pushback by at least one staff member.
Hadi Mahdeyan is an Iranian international student at Yale University, and a fellow at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA). Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CAMERA.
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Group of Writers, Artists Urges Others to Boycott New York City’s Historic 92NY for Its Support of Israel
The 92nd Street Y (now known as 92Y) on New York’s Upper East Side. Photo: Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons.
A group of anti-Israel artists and writers has launched an initiative urging creatives to boycott the New York institution 92NY, formally known as the 92nd Street Y, because the historic nonprofit community center has hosted cultural and political figures who support Israel.
The collective, called 92NO, wrote on its website that the 92NY “stage and venue is tainted by [its] actions throughout the genocide.”
In a statement explaining the group’s formation, members said their frustration with the 92NY started in October 2023, when it canceled a scheduled talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet ُThanh Nguyen that was organized by 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center. The event was called off after the author signed an open letter that criticized Israel and called for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and an arms embargo on the Jewish state.
The same open letter accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” and the “occupation of Palestine.” It condemned “the deliberate killing of civilians,” without denouncing by name the Hamas terrorist organization, which led a deadly assault in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which started the conflict in Gaza. The letter was published shortly after the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
The cancellation of Nguyen’s event resulted in several writers withdrawing their own scheduled appearances from the 92NY and resignations from staff members. The 92NY venue paused events as part of its literary series “given recent staff resignations.” Seth Pensky, CEO of the 92NY, defended the decision at the time in an interview with New York Magazine and refuted accusations of “censorship.”
Nguyen has previously expressed support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, and in 2024, he joined over 1,000 prominent authors in vowing to boycott Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers.
In its statement, 92NO noted that after the Nguyen event was canceled, 92NY organized “a series of public events boosting cultural and political support for Israel” that featured figures such as former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, journalist Bari Weiss, former US special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, actress Debra Messing, and “various Israeli military, cultural, and academic figures.” The protest group accused 92NY of expressing a “clear bias and support for Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.”
“Throughout 2025 and into 2026, 92NY has continued to platform aggressively pro-Israel public figures,” the coalition stated, before listing featured speakers including journalist Bret Stephens, US Rep. Ritchie Torres, novelist Dara Horn, Israeli activist Hen Mazzig – whom the group labeled as an “Israeli propagandist” — Israeli journalists Ronen Bergman and Nadav Eyal, Bernard-Henri Lévy, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, former White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp.
The group specifically accused Sullivan of having “outright complicity in the Gaza genocide,” and claimed he is “one of the chief architects and cheerleaders for Israel’s assault on Gaza.” 92NY also called Karp a “tech world Zionist Bond villain” and criticized Horn for “repeated genocide and apartheid denial.” They claimed Torres is “funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza” because he supports the US providing military aid to the longtime ally and took issue with his “obsessive pro-Israel posting on social media.”
“Nearly three dozen scheduled artists have withdrawn from events at 92NY,” 92NO said in conclusion. “Local activists gather regularly in front of the building to picket against the pro-war, pro-genocide speakers platformed on the 92NY stage. In April 2026, 92NO officially launched, calling on artists to refuse to allow their names and works to be used to launder the reputation of 92NY.”
92NY did not immediately respond to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment about 92NO.
On the 92NY.org Policy Page, the center has a section titled “Regarding Israel.”
“We reaffirm that, as we curate our programming going forward, we will continue to welcome a broad range of viewpoints to our platform, including welcoming people who are critical of Israel, as long as they have not and do not actively call for the destruction of the State of Israel or question its legitimacy,” the policy states. The institution also notes on its website that it will “work to avoid giving platform to hate speech of any kind, including misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, racism, Islamophobia, and, of course, antisemitism.”