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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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Watch: The cattle farmer building a synagogue in a cornfield
For the past year and a half, we’ve followed Nik Jakobs, a third-generation cattle farmer in Sterling, Illinois, who is building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield. Alongside it, he is also building a museum of tolerance.
Our coverage began when Nik traveled 600 miles to rescue the ark, bimah and stained glass from a closing congregation in Pennsylvania. After we published our first story about the unlikely journey, additional synagogues began donating their own sacred objects, each from a community that could no longer keep them.
Nik, 41, is the grandson of Holocaust survivors, and the museum is his way of teaching the tolerance that saved his family. His grandmother, Edith, was 11 in 1942 when a Lutheran farmer named Willem Drenth offered the family’s home as a hiding place. She was one of 13 Jews who lived in that single room for two years and eight months, with no electricity and no running water. About a hundred villagers knew about the Jews in hiding. No one said a word.
While in hiding, Edith kept busy by learning to knit. She embroidered a cloth, which survived and will now cover the Torah in Nik’s new synagogue.
This spring, Nik and his family traveled to the Netherlands, where the village staged a play about the family in hiding and the Drenths. They watched actors portray their ancestors, and the Christians who kept their family alive.
Edith died this month at 95. Her voice, trained to a whisper in hiding, never regained its full volume. Her story did.
That story is now drawing others in. The Anne Frank House donates one sapling a year, grown from the chestnut tree Anne saw from her attic hiding place. It has chosen the Illinois synagogue and museum to plant its next one. After visiting Anne’s house with his four daughters, Nik put it this way: “Anne’s story ends. My grandmother’s didn’t.”
Nik and his family broke ground on the sanctuary this spring, on land beside a Lutheran church — the same faith as the farmer who saved his family.
If all goes as planned, the doors open in late 2027. They hope the first service will be the bat mitzvah of Nik’s oldest daughter, Taylor. The pews will hold the congregants of the closing synagogues whose ark, Torah and windows helped build the room, there to see their old homes live again.
Catch up on all of our stories about Nik Jakobs.
The post Watch: The cattle farmer building a synagogue in a cornfield appeared first on The Forward.
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In this Florida district, politicians battle over who most loves Israel
(JTA) — BOCA RATON, Fla. — Rep. Jared Moskowitz said that he is “proud to be known as the most pro-Israel Jewish Democrat in Congress” during a synagogue event in one of the country’s most Jewish congressional districts on Tuesday evening.
The comment came during a one-hour candidates’ forum featuring Moskowitz and his Republican challenger, Scott Singer — both Jewish and both wearing kippahs — that largely centered on Israel and got testy at moments.
Moskowitz said he is “proud to have AIPAC’s endorsement” at a moment when the popularity of Israel and the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC has plummeted among Democratic voters amid Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the war with Iran.
But the crowd at the Reform synagogue Congregation B’nai Israel in Boca Raton was, like Florida’s 25th Congressional District itself, split across party lines, and staunchly pro-Israel.
“This isn’t New York, this isn’t Boston — this is South Florida,” attendee Edward Kone told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Moskowitz had soundly defeated democratic socialist challenger Oliver Larkin, a sharp Israel critic, in August. As Democrats look to take control of the House of Representatives, Florida’s recently redrawn 25th Congressional District — which would have favored Trump by 9 percentage points in 2024 but backed Joe Biden in 2020 under its new boundaries — is being closely watched ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Despite some tense moments between Moskowitz and Singer, who was Boca Raton’s mayor until earlier this year, the two politicians have been largely aligned on the issue of Israel.
Both have condemned accusations that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. They each oppose any effort to condition or cut off U.S. military aid to Israel. Both supported Israel’s strikes on Iranian facilities in 2025, though Moskowitz has since called for the U.S. to end its war with Iran.
Moskowitz referenced his and Singer’s shared pro-Israel viewpoints on Tuesday during the forum moderated by South Florida Sun Sentinel journalist Anthony Man.
“This is exactly why nothing gets done in Washington. This is exactly why nothing is functioning: Because literally two people who agree on 99% of this stuff want to take this 1% and try to ram it down people’s throats,” Moskowitz said.
Singer, however, made a point of emphasizing where the two candidates differ on Israel. He criticized Moskowitz for voting for the March 2026 war powers resolution in response to the Trump administration ordering strikes on Iran without congressional authorization. While Moskowitz has called for the administration to end the war, Singer argued that the threat of Iran must be thoroughly dealt with. “We have to ensure victory here,” he said.
For siblings Edward and Susan Kone, both Jewish Republican voters who attended the forum, Moskowitz’s record on Israel does not stack up against Singer’s positions. They, too, criticized Moskowitz for voting to end the Iran war, and for his 2023 vote to keep Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
“I’m America first, but Israel is extremely important to me. And on Israel, Jared Moskowitz just doesn’t add up,” Edward Kone said. Omar is among a number of pro-Palestinian Democrats whom Republicans say are leading the party’s left-wing flank in turning it against Israel..
Singer himself blasted Moskowitz for his vote against removing Omar, and tied Moskowitz to the left flank of the Democratic Party.
“The strategy is adjective, verb, Ilhan Omar, I got it. Let’s move onto the next topic,” Moskowitz responded, drawing some groans from the audience.
Others in the room had voted for Moskowitz in previous elections, and said they were likely to do so again, at least in part because of his Israel stance.
“He has a good track record with Israel, and as an American Jew I appreciate that,” said Peter Davidson, an independent who is a member of Congregation B’nai Israel.
Moskowitz pointed to his endorsement from AIPAC and Singer’s lack of an endorsement from Rep. Randy Fine, a fellow Jewish Republican from Florida, as evidence that he is seen as satisfyingly pro-Israel across parts of the political spectrum. He also pointed to a post on X by Jeff Miller, an RJC board member, who wrote that he has “zero interest in tearing down one of the few Democrats left willing to stand unapologetically with America and Israel.”
“They’re staying out,” Moskowitz said. “They’re specifically saying, ‘We’re not going to oppose Jared Moskowitz because of his record fighting antisemitism and fighting for the State of Israel.’”
Singer has the endorsement of the RJC as well as Trump. He admitted during the forum that he had reached out to Fine for an endorsement and was rejected.
Earlier this year, Singer downplayed anti-Israel trends on the right as “a few fringe commentators” who are out of step with Trump. Moskowitz challenged him to name three of those figures: Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback.
Singer named all three and said “I gladly, shamelessly condemn” them, but countered that Democrats are voting in anti-Israel voices while Republicans cast theirs aside.
Man also asked Singer about President Donald Trump’s use of the term “Shylock” on Monday, a term that references a character from the play “The Merchant of Venice” which is rooted in an antisemitic trope.
“I think that’s an ill-advised term,” Singer said, before pivoting to praise of Trump and urging the audience to focus on what the president has done for Israel rather than his choice of words..
“‘Merchant of Venice’ happens to be my favorite Shakespeare play. That term has multiple meanings. But let’s look at the real record beyond an offhand comment: No president has been better for the State of Israel than President Trump,” Singer said, drawing applause.
As for the upcoming Israeli elections — which Trump recently weighed in on — Singer told reporters after the event that he was too busy with his own race to make endorsements and does not have a preferred candidate.
“To be candid, I have some awareness of it, but I’m not following it intently,” he said.
Singer’s attacks on Tuesday often focused on Moskowitz’s Democratic Party, which he says will drown out the congressman’s pro-Israel views as it takes its cues from its left-wing flank. He pointed to Moskowitz’s quote from last month, when he said that pro-Israel voices are being “ostracized” in the party.
“It’s great that he says these things, but he’s also voted to empower Ilhan Omar twice,” Singer said. “He’s tried to go along to get along with the Squad, and it’s not working.”
But for some in the crowd, that attack didn’t quite land.
Davidson, an independent, said he is “not a great fan” of the Democratic Party. But for him, Moskowitz is an exception.
“He’s more of an independent thinker,” Davidson said. “Crosses a lot of party lines.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In this Florida district, politicians battle over who most loves Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Brad Lander detained by Israeli police in the West Bank while helping Palestinians harvest; dozens of rabbis and activists arrested
Dozens of Israeli and international activists, including U.S. congressional candidate Brad Lander, were detained by Israeli authorities in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday morning while accompanying Palestinian farmers harvesting olives. After Landers was released, the Israeli activists were later placed under arrest, and the foreign citizens were reported to be awaiting interrogation.
The delegation was hours into their work when they were told they were unlawfully inside a closed military zone, according to Anton Goodman, acting CEO of Rabbis for Human Rights. Authorities detained the group even after he agreed they would leave immediately, he said.
Goodman told the Forward that 42 Israeli members of his delegation and another 28 foreign citizens were being held at the police station in nearby Beitar Illit.
“Those of us with Israeli citizenship are being detained outside of the police station,” Goodman said by phone while he was detained. “The foreign passport holders have been separated from us, and I have been told by a senior security officer that they will be interrogated by Army personnel.”
Shorty after speaking to Goodman, Tamar Glezerman, an activist from New York who holds Israeli citizenship, informed the Forward that the detainment had been converted to arrests “because you cannot detain people for more than three hours.” Glezerman also said the foreign citizens had been taken to a military base for interrogation.
According to Goodman, the delegation was helping Palestinians who have faced severe restrictions on access to their land since Oct. 7, 2023, when authorities informed the group that the area had been declared a closed military zone.
“There is no possible way we could have known that this morning,” Goodman said. “And even so, I told them we would respect the decision and leave immediately.
“But that was not good enough for them,” he continued. “I was informed that the entire group was being detained for ‘identification purposes.’”
At the time of the interview, Goodman said, only Lander had been released. The others remained detained, including a Palestinian woman whose family owned the olive grove where the harvest took place. Lander, a progressive Democrat running for Congress this year, has been vocal in his criticism of both settler violence and Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, also confirmed that she and dozens of other Americans, along with Canadian and British citizens, had been detained, their passports confiscated. They were being taken by bus to the same police station, she said at the time.
“There is a Jewish principle of accompaniment of those in danger,” Jacobs told the Forward. “We were living that out, in contrast to the settlers who justify stealing olives and carrying out violent acts contrary to Jewish law.”
Despite the uncertainty over what would happen to her delegation, Jacobs said they remained in good spirits.
“We are currently on the bus saying divrei Torah and singing niggunim and religious songs,” she said, referring to Torah teachings and wordless melodies.
“It is a sad comment on the current state of Jewish affairs that they are arresting rabbis picking olives, and not the settlers who steal them, poison trees, and violently attack human beings,” Jacobs added.
The detentions follow an especially brutal week in an already escalating wave of settler violence in the West Bank. On Friday, settlers severely beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine while she covered the olive harvest in Abu Falah, leaving her with fractured vertebrae and a broken rib. The following day, settlers attacked a delegation of European diplomats and other visitors near Taybeh. Palestinian residents have also faced repeated assaults, with dozens reported injured, several seriously.
Goodman called the mass detention “insane,” criticizing both its scale and the deployment of security forces against volunteers.
“This is the largest mass detainment we have ever seen,” he said. “But it’s not just that. All across the West Bank we have seen a complete deterioration of the rule of law as settler terrorists rampage through Palestinian villages with little consequence or deterrent. Now you have a completely peaceful delegation who are only here to help with the olive harvest and 100 security personnel are dispatched to detain them?
“What a complete and utter waste of public resources.”
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