“It feels like a betrayal to be interviewed by foreign media,” an IDF combat veteran says. He’s out of uniform, brow furrowed, plucking nervously at his goatee. His name is Yuval Ben-Ari, and he is here — on camera, using his real name — telling us what he saw in Gaza.

Ben-Ari, who served in an infantry unit, is one of nearly a dozen soldiers who appear in Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, a new documentary from indie production company Zandland which streamed in the U.K. and can be viewed on YouTube. Four of the speakers appear on camera, identified by their real names; the rest are disguised and use aliases. Taken together, their testimonies are a scathing indictment of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the “world’s most moral army.”

If their stories are true — and nearly everything the soldiers say has already been corroborated by other media reports — they are describing war crimes as the rule in Gaza, not the exception. Unarmed civilians are shot or bombed as a matter of course. Homes are torched without cause. Humanitarian aid sites are shelled out of sheer resentment. The people telling us this — young men and women who served hundreds of days in the territory over the past two years — are still reckoning with their role in the destruction.

Breaking Ranks is not the first documentary to be made about the war in Gaza, and it will not be the last. But it may be the only one to focus on the targeting of innocent Palestinians while also humanizing Israeli soldiers. The soldiers outline their belief in the IDF and the importance of the mission in Gaza. The film contextualizes the war, showing footage of the atrocities of Oct. 7 and noting that Hamas leaders, too, have been charged with war crimes in international courts. Palestinian casualty figures are provided, the film notes, by the “Hamas-run Gaza health ministry”; the tunnel network, it explains, is used for smuggling and warfare. It does not avoid discussing the 251 Israeli hostages.

Those elements ultimately strengthen the film’s argument about how the war was conducted. They do not, however, soften the accounts that follow. The picture that emerges is one of lawlessness and cruelty, coupled with a tolerance for collateral damage and a lack of accountability that runs counter to the IDF’s “Purity of Arms” statute. Yet that portrait also shows the rank-and-file — not all, but some — resisting the practices of their superiors.

A tank commander (“Daniel,” an alias) recounts a time his commander informed troops he planned to destroy a humanitarian aid building. The unit warned him the building was off-limits, but the commander shelled it anyway. Then — according to the soldier — the commander made up an excuse to justify the attack: “I had an anti-tank weapon pointed at me.”

A member of a different unit tells a similar story: When a man hanging laundry on the roof of a building is deemed a “spotter,” a commander shells the structure, killing and injuring many people inside. “This kind of thing happened every week,” says the soldier telling us this story. “And that’s just my unit.”

A platoon sergeant, using the alias “Yaakov,” tells how a pair of Palestinian teenage boys came to be his unit’s human shields, sent down into Gaza’s tunnels as scouts. The unit’s objections eventually won out — they cited international law — but Yaakov insists the IDF has a policy sanctioning the practice called “Mosquito Protocol.” (The Associated Press published an investigative report on the practice earlier this year; the IDF denies that it uses human shields.)

“I carried out these things,” says Yaakov. “I hope I can find a way to live without feeling shame with every step I take.”

One soldier says his unit once reported killing 112 people over the course of a deployment. Only one of the 112, he said, was even suspected of holding a weapon.

Not all of the soldiers recalling their enlistment in Breaking Ranks regret their participation. We meet Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, who claims to have invented the tactic of razing entire Gaza neighborhoods, block by block, with a bulldozer. Another, given the alias “Lt. Col. F.,” says he would have happily pushed every Palestinian in Gaza into the ocean, given them snorkels and “let them swim to Egypt.”

Their hawkishness puts the defiance and disillusionment of soldiers like Yaakov in stark relief. And it raises questions as to why the IDF — which says it has launched dozens of Military Police investigations into alleged misconduct by soldiers — has not found more wrongdoing.

Ben-Ari, who admits that after Oct. 7 he was “consumed by rage and a desire to fight and avenge,” has since become a peace activist; he was injured last week in the West Bank, attacked by Israeli settlers, while accompanying Palestinians during the annual olive harvest.

He vows to never return to Gaza. But Ben-Ari will not quit the IDF entirely, either. Toward the end of the film, he says he would answer a call to protect Israel’s other borders because that is what he is trained to do, and because he still believes it’s necessary.

“This separation works for me,” he says. “I totally understand if people would say I’m a hypocrite, but this is my decision.”

The post A new documentary humanizes Israeli soldiers. It also alleges war crimes. appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Every day, it can seem, brings a fresh headline about how AI chatbots are spreading hateful ideas. But researchers tasked with understanding antisemitism and how it can be stopped say they have found evidence that AI chatbots can actually fight hate.

Researchers affiliated with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Antisemitism Research trained a large-language model, or LLM, on countering antisemitic conspiracy theories, then invited people who subscribed to at least one of those theories to interact with it.

The result, according to a study released on Wednesday: The users soon believed in the antisemitic theories less, while at the same time feeling more favorable about Jews as a group. And the effects were still strong a month later, even without further engagement with the LLM.

The researchers are hailing the finding as a breakthrough in the quest for identifying actionable strategies in the fight against Jew-hatred.

“What’s remarkable about these findings is that factual debunking works even for conspiracy theories with deep historical roots and strong connections to identity and prejudice,” David Rand, a Cornell University professor who was the study’s senior author, said in a statement. 

“Our artificial intelligence debunker bot typically doesn’t rely on emotional appeals, empathy-building exercises, or anti-bias tactics to correct false beliefs,” Rand continued, referring to practices frequently employed by advocates seeking to fight antisemitism, including at the ADL. “It mostly provides accurate information and evidence-based counterarguments, demonstrating that facts still matter in changing minds.”

Matt Williams, who has headed the Center for Antisemitism Research since its founding three years ago, says the study builds on a growing body of research that views contemporary antisemitism as primarily a misinformation problem, rather than a civil rights problem.

“We need to think about antisemitism less like feelings about Jews, and more like feelings about Bigfoot,” he said in an interview. “And what I mean by that is, it’s not ‘Jews’ that are the problem. It is ‘the Jew’ as a function of conspiracy theory that is the problem. And the relationship between ‘Jews’ and ‘the Jew’ in that context is far more tenuous than we might want to think.”

Calling conspiracy theories “malfunctions in the ways that we make truth out of the world,” Williams said the study showed something remarkable. “People can correct those malfunctions,” he said. “They really can, which is super exciting and really impactful.”

The study emerges from the ADL’s relatively new effort to come-up with evidence-based ways to reduce antisemitism, working with dozens of researchers across a slew of institutions to design and carry out experiments aimed at turning a robust advocacy space into less of a guessing game.

The new experiment, conducted earlier this year, involved more than 1,200 people who said on a previous ADL survey that they believed at least one of six prominent antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as that Jews control the media or the “Great Replacement” theory about Jewish involvement in immigration. 

The people then were randomly assigned three different scenarios: A third chatted with an LLM programmed by the researchers to debunk such theories, built within Microsoft’s Claude AI model; another third chatted with Claude about an unrelated topic; and the final third were simply told that their belief represented a “dangerous” conspiracy theory. Then they were all tested again about their beliefs.

Members of the group that chatted with what the researchers are calling DebunkBot were far more likely than members of the other groups to have their beliefs weakened, the researchers found.

DebunkBot was hardly a panacea for antisemitism: The study found that those who believed in more antisemitic conspiracy theories experienced less change. And Williams notes that the study found only that belief in antisemitic conspiracies was reduced, not rooted out entirely.

But he said any strategy that can cut against what researchers believe has been a widespread explosion of belief in conspiracy theories is a good thing.

The proportion of Americans subscribing to conspiracy theories over the last decade has reached as much as 45%, more than twice the rate that had held steady for 70 to 80 years, Williams said.

“To me, the increase in that level of saturation is far more concerning than any particular conspiracy theory moving through different generations,” he said. “I don’t think that we’re going to ever create a world in which we go under 15% — but going from 45 back to 30 or 25 seems more doable.”

The new study comes as AI models vault into widespread use among Americans, raising concerns about their implications for Jews. When Elon Musk launched a model of his own earlier this year called Grok, it immediately drew criticism for amplifying antisemitism — kicking off a pattern that has played out repeatedly. Soon, the company apologized and said it would train its model to avoid the same behavior in the future. Criticism of Grok is still widespread, but it no longer praises Hitler — though even this week it reportedly told one user that the Nazi gas chambers were not designed for mass killing, prompting an investigation by French authorities.

Chatbot training is seen as essential for delivering high-quality AI results. DebunkBot can be found online on its own website now, but Williams said efforts were underway within the ADL to convince the companies operating major AI platforms to incorporate its expertise. 

“There’s far more receptivity than not, by any stretch of the imagination,” he said, while noting that the work was early and he could not share many details.

Whatever happens with that effort, Williams said, the new research demonstrates that combatting what’s sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred is possible.

“AI and LLMs — those are tools, right? And we can use tools for good and for evil,” Williams said. “But the fact that we can subject conspiracy theories to rational conversation and arguments and actually lead to favorable outcomes is itself, I think, relatively innovative, surprising and extraordinarily useful.”

The post AI has a reputation for amplifying hate. A new study finds it can weaken antisemitism, too. appeared first on The Forward.

There’s a simple reason Halle Goldblatt likes to tour breweries on vacation: People who keep kosher can sample the product. Unlike wine, which requires certification to be deemed kosher, beer has historically received the benefit of the doubt.

“Most people, when they travel, go to wineries,” Goldblatt, a self-described beer aficionado, said in a phone interview. “I can’t do that, but I can always go to a brewery and have a beer.”

But multiple kosher certifiers now say the assumption that beer is kosher has gone flat.

The heads of OU Kosher, Star-K and OK Kosher — three of the five major certification agencies — announced this month that all beer will soon require certification to be considered kosher, attributing the change to the increased use of flavoring and other additives in craft beers.

A list of problematic ingredients rabbinic inspectors recently discovered in breweries included oyster broth, clam juice, wine and milk, according to OK Kosher.

“These ingredients are regularly included in craft beers,” OK Kosher wrote in its letter. “As such, the major kashrus agencies have concluded that the time has come to change our old policy of accepting beer as free of kashrus concerns.”

The agencies provided a list of more than 900 beers that are currently hechshered, or certified kosher, which is typically denoted with an agency’s symbol on the packaging. (Ⓤ is OU Kosher’s mark.) The rest — which includes popular imports like Dos Equis and regional favorites like Sierra Nevada — will no longer be acceptable to serve at OU-certified establishments as of Jan. 1, 2026, OU Kosher said.

The decision undercut a credo that was long a saving grace for kosher travelers, casual drinkers and hopheads. One Facebook thread responding to the news received more than 100 comments, with a few seeing the change as a way for the certifiers to drum up business. But the majority of the commenters — Goldblatt among them — appeared to begrudgingly understand the decision. And a few wondered why it had not come sooner.

“At first, I was like, ‘Oh, no, this is gonna make my life a lot harder,’” Goldblatt said. “But I think it makes sense for the OU. People rely on them to get honest information about the things that they are consuming,” she added, “so I think it’s good for the kosher consumer.”

New brews, you lose

The acceptability of beer even without rabbinic oversight was rooted in an assumption that it only contained four basic ingredients: grain, water, hops and yeast. Those ingredients are each considered inherently kosher, so using them in combination did not pose any challenges.

National regulations helped preserve the four-ingredient standard. Germany’s Reinheitsgebot, a beer purity law dating back several centuries, ensured that breweries there did not use artificial additives, and in the United States, a law mandates that any added flavoring must be noted on the packaging.

“The good, old-fashioned beer everybody would drink was simple,” Rabbi Moshe Elefant, OU Kosher’s chief operating officer, said in a video interview. Now, he said, manufacturers “want to enhance the beer — to give them an edge. So they can add all sorts of flavors.”

A major catalyst for the flavor trend is the rise of craft breweries, small and independent manufacturers. They’ve flooded the market with sours, stouts, barrel-aged beers and bocks, and now account for up to a quarter of U.S. beer sales.

The use of additives to make exotic flavors put even the “plain” beer into question, Elefant explained, because breweries often use the same vats for different recipes. And while those breweries surely clean their equipment between uses, cleaning is not the same as kashering. Some cleaning processes are primarily chemical while rendering something kosher requires heat.

Elefant, who is also OU Kosher’s executive rabbinic coordinator, said the organization’s formal policy change was nearly two years in the making, but even before then, “we’ve been grappling with this issue for a while.”

Elefant listed two other beverages that fall into a gray area, but do not currently require certification: Whiskey, which like beer uses basic ingredients, is sometimes aged in barrels that previously held wine; and orange juice, which sometimes shares equipment with grape juice.

Orange juice was spared a certification mandate, Elefant said, because the processes used to clean the equipment between uses were considered sufficient. And while he personally believes whiskey merits a similar reversal to beer, he admitted it was not currently the position of his employer.

“We walk a delicate tightrope,” he said. “On one hand, we want people who keep kosher to be able to have as much kosher food as possible, we’re not looking to be onerous. But on the other hand, we are responsible that when we tell somebody that they could eat something, that we really are convinced that it’s kosher without question.”

And he dismissed comments that the beer policy was financially motivated, saying that certification can cost as little as a few thousand dollars a year. (The price depends on travel costs for supervisors, number of facilities and other variables.)

The law of the spirit, or the spirit of the law?

Another responsibility for Orthodox decisionmakers, whether a synagogue rabbi or an umbrella organization like the OU, is to make rules that people can follow.

Quoting the Talmud, Elefant said, “Just like there’s a mitzvah to say something that people will listen to, there’s a mitzvah not to say it if people aren’t going to listen.”

Working in tandem with other certifying agencies was crucial, then, to bolster the authority of what could be a controversial decree. Elefant joked that when they first met to discuss it, each agency said they had wanted to do it but were waiting for the others to make the first move.

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how well the rule will stick. Confusion has persisted, with some saying the agencies’ list of kosher beers is inconvenient and leaves out brands that have longstanding regional hechshers, like Shiner Bock.

Goldblatt, the aficionado, has been to dozens of breweries and tasted some 200 different beers, according to her profile on the drink-rating app Untappd. But she had been drinking with vigilance long before the OU’s announcement.

When she visits a new brewery, she tends to pepper her tour guide with questions about the brewing process. What ingredients do they use? Do they use only those ingredients? Do they use the same equipment for everything?

Absent rabbinic oversight, she developed her own code: If it contained artificial flavoring, she would steer clear of it and — per the old rules — choose an unflavored option. Natural flavoring would be okay, if she could learn enough about it. On a recent trip to Wisconsin, she picked out a fruity craft beer, having determined the brewery used whole fruit and not grapes.

Though she recognized the value of the OU’s policy — saying it would eventually bring needed clarity to a cloudy landscape — she thought she might stick to her own, at least for now.

“I guess if I looked and the brewery made something like oyster stouts, I may abstain from that brewery altogether,” she said. “But if it’s a brewery that just does regular beer and it’s an unflavored beer, then I would probably still drink that.”

The post Beer is no longer automatically kosher, rabbis say. Will observant Jews skip the Dos Equis? appeared first on The Forward.