Uncategorized
Which side are you on: Jewish American or American Jew?
(JTA) — Earlier this month the New York Times convened what it called a “focus group of Jewish Americans.” I was struck briefly by that phrase — Jewish Americans — in part because the Times, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, tends to prefer “American Jews.”
It’s seemingly a distinction without a difference, although I know others might disagree. There is an argument that “American Jew” smacks of disloyalty, describing a Jew who happens to be American. “Jewish American,” according to this thinking, flips the script: an American who happens to be Jewish.
If pressed, I’d say I prefer “American Jew.” The noun “Jew” sounds, to my ear anyway, more direct and more assertive than the tentative adjective “Jewish.” It’s also consistent with the way JTA essentializes “Jew” in its coverage, as in British Jew, French Jew, LGBT Jew or Jew of color.
I wouldn’t have given further thought to the subject if not for a webinar last week given by Arnold Eisen, the chancellor emeritus at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In “Jewish-American, American-Jew: The Complexities and Joys of Living a Hyphenated Identity,” Eisen discussed how a debate over language is really about how Jews navigate between competing identities.
“What does the ‘American’ signify to us?” he asked. “What does the ‘Jewish’ signify and what is the nature of the relationship between the two? Is it a synthesis? Is it a tension, or a contradiction, or is it a blurring of the boundaries such that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins?”
Questions like these, it turns out, have been asked since Jews and other immigrants first began flooding Ellis Island. Teddy Roosevelt complained in 1915 that “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.” Woodrow Wilson liked to say that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.” The two presidents were frankly freaked out about what we now call multiculturalism, convinced that America couldn’t survive a wave of immigrants with dual loyalties.
The two presidents lost the argument, and for much of the 20th century “hyphenated American” was shorthand for successful acculturation. While immigration hardliners continue to question the loyalty of minorities who claim more than one identity, and Donald Trump played with the politics of loyalty in remarks about Mexicans, Muslims and Jews, ethnic pride is as American as, well, St. Patrick’s Day. “I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said in announcing her run for the Republican presidential nomination this month.
For Jews, however, the hyphen became what philosophy professor Berel Lang called “a weighty symbol of the divided life of Diaspora Jewry.” Jewishness isn’t a distant country with quaint customs, but a religion and a portable identity that lives uneasily alongside your nationality. In a 2005 essay, Lang argued that on either side of the hyphen were “vying traditions or allegiances,” with the Jew constantly confronted with a choice between the American side, or assimilation, and the Jewish side, or remaining distinct.
Eisen calls this the “question of Jewish difference.” Eisen grew up in an observant Jewish family in Philadelphia, and understood from an early age that his family was different from their Vietnamese-, Italian-, Ukrainian- and African-American neighbors. On the other hand, they were all the same — that is, American — because they were all hyphenated. “Being parallel to all these other differences, gave me my place in the city and in the country,” he said.
In college he studied the Jewish heavy hitters who were less sanguine about the integration of American and Jewish identities. Eisen calls Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the renegade theologian at JTS, “the thinker who really made this question uppermost for American Jews.” Kaplan wrote in 1934 that Jewishness could only survive as a “subordinate civilization” in the United States, and that the “Jew in America will be first and foremost an American, and only secondarily a Jew.”
Kaplan’s prescription was a maximum effort on the part of Jews to “save the otherness of Jewish life” – not just through synagogue, but through a Jewish “civilization” expressed in social relationships, leisure activities and a traditional moral and ethical code.
Of course, Kaplan also understood that there was another way to protect Jewish distinctiveness: move to Israel.
A poster issued by the National Industrial Conservation Movement in 1917 warns that the American war effort might be harmed by a “hyphen of disloyalty,” suggesting immigrants with ties to their homelands were working to aid the enemy. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
The political scientist Charles Liebman, in “The Ambivalent American Jew” (1973), argued that Jews in the United States were torn between surviving as a distinct ethnic group and integrating into the larger society.
According to Eisen, Liebman believed that “Jews who make ‘Jewish’ the adjective and ‘American’ the noun tend to fall on the integration side of the hyphen. And Jews who make ‘Jew’ the noun and ‘American’ the adjective tend to fall on the survival side of the hyphen.”
Eisen, a professor of Jewish thought at JTS, noted that the challenge of the hyphen was felt by rabbis on opposite ends of the theological spectrum. He cited Eugene Borowitz, the influential Reform rabbi, who suggested in 1973 that Jews in the United States “are actually more Jewish on the inside than they pretend to be on the outside. In other words, we’re so worried about what Liebman called integration into America that we hide our distinctiveness.” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading Modern Orthodox thinker of his generation, despaired that the United States presented its Jews with an unresolvable conflict between the person of faith and the person of secular culture.
When I read the texts Eisen shared, I see 20th-century Jewish men who doubted Jews who could be fully at home in America and at home with themselves as Jews (let alone as Jews who weren’t straight or white — which would demand a few more hyphens). They couldn’t imagine a rich Jewishness that didn’t exist as a counterculture, the way Cynthia Ozick wondered what it would be like to “think as a Jew” in a non-Jewish language like English.
They couldn’t picture the hyphen as a plus sign, which pulled the words “Jewish” and “American” together.
Recent trends support the skeptics. Look at Judaism’s Conservative movement, whose rabbis are trained at JTS, and which has long tried to reconcile Jewish literacy and observance with the American mainstream. It’s shrinking, losing market share and followers both to Reform – where the American side of the hyphen is ascendant — and to Orthodoxy, where Jewish otherness is booming in places like Brooklyn and Lakewood, New Jersey. And the Jewish “nones” — those opting out of religion, synagogue and active engagement in Jewish institutions and affairs — are among the fastest-growing segments of American Jewish life.
Eisen appears more optimistic about a hyphenated Jewish identity, although he insists that it takes work to cultivate the Jewish side. “I don’t think there’s anything at stake necessarily on which side of the hyphen you put the Jewish on,” he said. “But if you don’t go out of your way to put added weight on the Jewish in the natural course of events, as Kaplan said correctly 100 years ago, the American will win.”
—
The post Which side are you on: Jewish American or American Jew? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
AI has a reputation for amplifying hate. A new study finds it can weaken antisemitism, too.
(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.
Uncategorized
Beer is no longer automatically kosher, rabbis say. Will observant Jews skip the Dos Equis?
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.
Uncategorized
Imam-led walkout over Jewish participant at CUNY interfaith event draws wide condemnation
(JTA) — Jewish groups and government officials are condemning an incident at a recent interfaith event held on the campus of the City College of New York, at which a Muslim leader reportedly led a student walkout against the Hillel director after saying he refused to be “sitting next to a Zionist.”
The incident took place last week and was first reported Wednesday by the Times of Israel, which obtained a recording of the event hosted by the college’s Office of Student Inclusion Initiatives.
The imam let loose a series of remarks about Shariah law and “the filthy rich” before stating, “I came here to this event not knowing that I would be sitting next to a Zionist and this is something I’m not going to accept. My people are being killed right now in Gaza.”
He then added, “If you’re a Muslim, out of strength and dignity, I ask you to exit this room immediately.” Roughly 100 Muslim students followed him out the door, according to the report, and the chaplain hosting the event expressed disbelief.
“This is not dialogue — it is harassment,” the Anti-Defamation League’s New York chapter wrote on the social network X. The chapter’s director Scott Richman called the incident “a truly disgusting display of raw antisemitism not only by the imam but by the huge crowd of people there for an interfaith event who followed him out the door because a Jew was present.”
“We unequivocally condemn this gross display of antisemitism at City College of New York,” the Nexus Project, a progressive-leaning antisemitism watchdog group, wrote on social media.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul blasted the walkout as “antisemitism, plain and simple,” adding, “No one should be singled out, targeted, or shamed because they are Jewish.” She urged the City University of New York, the public university system that includes the campus, “to act swiftly to ensure accountability and protect every student’s safety.”
Hochul’s Republican opponent in next year’s governor race, Rep. Elise Stefanik, called CUNY “a hotbed of antisemitism.”
The federal Department of Justice, which has used its authority to pressure universities to quash antisemitism, also has an eye on the situation. “This is deeply concerning,” tweeted Associate Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. “@CivilRights has questions and will look into this!”
The Hillel at City College, in an email to members, wrote, “Our concern is with one individual’s extremist rhetoric—not with Islam, not with Muslim students, and not with interfaith engagement itself.” It added that it was confident that City College would “respond appropriately” to the incident.
CUNY said it was aware of the incident and was investigating.
Jewish Insider later identified the Muslim speaker, who had identified himself only as “Abdullah” on the recording, as Abdullah Mady, a recent psychology graduate of the school who stayed on to pursue a master’s degree in medical translation. In a biography published online by his department, accompanied by a photograph in which he is wearing a keffiyeh, Mady says he aims to become a doctor.
Ilya Bratman, who runs the Hillel that serves City College as well as several other local public and private schools, told the Times of Israel that he was in attendance but that there were not many other Jewish students present because the Hillel had been hosting a talk with a Holocaust survivor in another room in the same building.
One Jewish student who was in attendance told the moderator after the walkout, “You’re in shock? We’re not, we’re used to it.”
The post Imam-led walkout over Jewish participant at CUNY interfaith event draws wide condemnation appeared first on The Forward.