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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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How a Persian Jewish immigrant became the rodeo king of California
David Halimi grew up Jewish in Tehran, watching Bonanza. He now produces rodeos in Northern California and owns a bar modeled on Cheers.
At 73, Halimi is known around Chico as the man behind a Western wear store stocked with thousands of cowboy boots, a rodeo circuit that draws bull riders from across the region, and a U-shaped bar where locals joke about who might be the town’s version of Norm. Less obvious — but no less central — is that he is also a longtime synagogue president, a Hillel board leader, and a professor who teaches business analytics at the local university.
Asked how an Iranian Jew learned the rhythms of the American West, Halimi doesn’t mystify it. “I’m a quick learner,” he said.
Halimi still follows events in Iran closely. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “It’s my heritage.” He has no illusions about the imbalance of power. “People protesting with their bare hands are no match to machine guns and professional assassins.” Still, he allows himself hope. “I wish and I pray that the people will prevail.”
For Halimi, the distance between Iran and Chico is not just geographic. It is the distance between a life shaped by instability — he grew up in Iran in the aftermath of a coup — and one he has spent decades deliberately building.
On a recent afternoon inside the 6,000-square-foot Diamond W Western Wear, Halimi wore what he sells — black alligator boots, jeans, a button-down, blazer and a hat — and moved easily past towers of boots, glass cases of belt buckles, pausing as an employee steamed a cowboy hat back into shape. His wife, Fran, emerged from the back. Customers drifted in.
Over the years, his footprint downtown has expanded to include two restaurants and a soon-to-open coffee shop, all within walking distance of his store.
Halimi didn’t arrive in America looking for a job. He arrived looking for an opportunity. When he moved to the United States at 16, in 1969, he worked full time while going to school, bussing tables at a restaurant and saving aggressively. By 18, he had pooled his earnings with his older brother to make his first real estate investment. “I was never looking for a job,” he said. “I always wanted to do my own thing.”
That instinct carried him through college, where he studied mathematics and economics, and later into commodities trading — “the stock market on steroids,” as he put it — before settling in Chico in 1979. It had the virtues he was looking for: a small-town feel, a university’s energy, and room to build.
Mending fences, building community
For all the boots, buckles and bull riders, Halimi’s most consequential work happens closer to home. He has served on the board of Congregation Beth Israel of Chico for decades, including numerous stints as president, and has been a steady presence through the cycles that define small Jewish communities.
Rabbi Lisa Rappaport, who leads the congregation, said that constancy matters. In a community with limited resources, leadership often means stepping in wherever the need arises.
That was especially true after the synagogue was targeted with antisemitic graffiti in late 2022. What followed, Rappaport recalled, was an outpouring of support. Donations funded a new security system. A local metalworker volunteered to create a new sign. Another family, moved by the response, offered to pay for a fence.
Halimi volunteered to design and help build it. Vertical bars, he insisted, would make the synagogue feel like a jail. Instead, he created diagonal metal panels inspired by math’s golden ratio, incorporating stainless-steel symbols of the Twelve Tribes — a boundary meant to protect without closing the place off.
Rappaport credits both Halimi and his wife, a former religious school director and longtime sisterhood leader, with helping sustain the shul. “They’re in it till the end,” she said. In a small community, she added, that kind of commitment is existential. “If you have a couple of people who have that frame of mind,” she said, “it keeps the community alive. It’s people like that that keep it pulsing.”
Halimi, now a grandfather, carries that same lesson into his classroom at Chico State, where he has been teaching since 2009. Each semester he leads two courses: business analytics and the evolution of management theory. He doesn’t think of it as a job so much as a responsibility. “I like seeing the light bulb go on,” he said. Former students, now entrepreneurs themselves, sometimes track him down to say thank you. The payoff, he said, is “psychic income.”
Halimi teaches what he learned: “Even when the odds are against you,” he said, “you can still succeed.”
His rodeo business began, improbably enough, as a marketing complaint. Halimi had been sponsoring country concerts and rodeos to promote the store, but he was unimpressed with the results. Other sponsors, he noticed, felt the same way. So he launched his own production company. First, they hosted country music concerts. Soon, they built a rodeo: the National Bullriding Championship Tour, which just marked its 30th year.
He had expected resistance from the industry. Instead, he found acceptance, and eventually respect. “It’s very unusual,” he acknowledged, “for an Iranian Jew to be a successful rodeo producer.”
The post How a Persian Jewish immigrant became the rodeo king of California appeared first on The Forward.
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Argentina’s chief Sephardic rabbi reaffirms century-old ban on local conversions, sparking backlash
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s Sephardic chief rabbi reaffirmed a 100-year-old ruling that conversion may not be performed in Argentina and is considered valid only if carried out in Israel.
Representatives of non-Orthodox movements reacted angrily, asking why the ruling was issued now and saying it would essentially subject Argentinian converts to the tight hold that Israel’s Orthodox rabbis have on conversion.“Orthodoxy is attempting to present itself as the sole legitimate source of Judaism and halachic [Jewish legal] authority,” Rabbi Ariel Stofenmacher, the rector of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano, the Masorti/Conservative movement’s seminary in Buenos Aires, told JTA. “We are concerned that members of the Jewish community in Latin America, where about 80 percent or more are not Orthodox, may read that statement by an important rabbi and feel confused.”
The document, issued on Jan. 13 and signed by Chief Rabbi Yosef Chehebar, reaffirms a takanah, or rabbinical ban, first established in Argentina in 1927. The authors of that ban, Rabbi Shaul Sitehon Dabah of the Syrian-Aleppo tradition and the Ashkenazi Rabbi Aharon Goldman, emerged in response to a proliferation of lax or irregular conversions, particularly in rural areas among Jewish immigrants.
The statement signed by Cheheber describes the ban as “general and binding.” It emphasizes that the decree was enacted permanently, “with no temporal limitation or expiration whatsoever,” and frames it as a safeguard for “the purity of lineage and the sanctity of our families.”
In the years since the original ban, however, non-Orthodox rabbis say the conversion process has been standardized, and that the level of preparation in Argentina is considered very high. The Masorti seminary, which has conducted conversions since its founding in 1994, argues that the reasons for the restriction “are no longer applicable.”
Critics of Cheheber’s document say there have been no recent incidents or developments that would have prompted such a reminder.
“We reject recent statements that invoke a cherem from the 1920s to invalidate conversions carried out outside the State of Israel and by non-Orthodox rabbis, as well as the use of language that appeals to notions of ‘lineage,’ ‘purity’ or ‘contamination,” the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano and its affiliated Rabbinical Seminary said in a statement Jan. 15. “Such claims are halachically unsustainable and ethically unacceptable, particularly when they introduce categories alien to Judaism and morally offensive.”
Rabbi Isaac Sacca, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Buenos Aires, posted Chehebar’s ruling on social media and defended it in an interview with JTA.
“The regulation represents a self-imposed limitation by Argentina’s Orthodox rabbis on their own authority, undertaken in order to ensure security and peace of mind that a practice as delicate and sacred as conversion is carried out with due seriousness, and that neither the convert, nor families, nor the community are misled,” he said.
Conversion has been a flashpoint between the diaspora and Israel, where the Orthodox rabbinate for decades held a near monopoly on Jewish lifecycle events, including conversion. Non-Orthodox conversions were recognized in Israel under a landmark ruling handed down by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2021, but non-Orthodox groups continue to object to government regulations that complicate the recognition of these conversions.
Conversion has been particularly fraught in Latin America, including the controversies that led to the 1927 takanah and, more recently, the mass conversion in Brazil, Colombia and other countries of people who identify as Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forcibly converted during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
Within Orthodox circles in Argentina, preparatory stages for conversion may take place in the country, but the bet din, or rabbinical court, that validates them operates in Israel. According to sources who asked to remain anonymous, the target of the latest ruling was not the non-Orthodox movements but Orthodox rabbis who had been offering more flexible alternatives to prospective converts, such as completing an Orthodox conversion in neighboring Uruguay and then returning to Argentina to seek its recognition in Buenos Aires.
Chehebar’s recent statement specifies that the takanah “applies both to any person residing in Argentina, as well as to anyone coming from another country with the intention of establishing residence in national territory, even in cases in which the giyur [convert] has already been carried out in their country of origin or another country, outside of Eretz Israel.”
Asked whether any specific incident had triggered the statement, Sacca replied: “We are not aware of any particular event. It is simply a reminder that the Sephardic Chief Rabbinate of Syrian-Aleppo tradition has conveyed to our rabbinate for public dissemination.”
The ruling “does not constitute a rejection of the convert, nor does it devalue those who sincerely seek to join Judaism,” he added. “On the contrary, it functions as a halakhic safeguard designed to preserve a core commandment linked to Jewish identity, in a context marked by social pressures and institutional weaknesses. It also seeks to prevent hasty decisions that could affect the spiritual and personal lives of those seeking conversion, as well as those of their descendants.”
The Masorti movement insisted that its own rabbis conduct the conversion process in a manner that is “serious, demanding, and deeply Jewish,” based on rigorous study, commitment to Jewish life and responsible rabbinical guidance. “Those who join the Jewish people through this path,” the statement affirms, “are received as full Jews, with dignity and complete belonging, in accordance with rabbinic tradition.”
Said Stofenmacher: “We reaffirm that we conduct legitimate conversions in accordance with the halacha, as we have done for decades, with thousands of individuals who have joined the Jewish people in our region, and we will continue to do so in all the communities where our rabbis serve.”
The post Argentina’s chief Sephardic rabbi reaffirms century-old ban on local conversions, sparking backlash appeared first on The Forward.
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French Jewish Community Marks 20 Years Since Ilan Halimi’s Brutal Murder
A crowd gathers at the Jardin Ilan Halimi in Paris on Feb. 14, 2021, to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Halimi’s kidnapping and murder. Photo: Reuters/Xose Bouzas/Hans Lucas
France’s Jewish community on Tuesday commemorated the 20th anniversary of the death of Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish man who was brutally tortured to death, as his memory continues to be defaced amid a rising tide of antisemitism threatening Jews and Israelis across the country.
“Twenty years on, Ilan Halimi’s memory still needs to be protected and honored, yet it continues to come under attack, as recent vandalism at his memorial site shows,” the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews — wrote in a post on X.
“Antisemitism remains a persistent threat in France today,” the statement read.
Le 20 janvier 2006 marque l’enlèvement et le début de la séquestration d’Ilan Halimi, 23 ans, parce qu’il était Juif.
20 ans plus tard, alors que la mémoire d’Ilan Halimi doit être protégée et honorée, elle continue d’être atteinte, comme l’ont montré les récents actes de… pic.twitter.com/Htu9ntMHhq
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) January 20, 2026
Last week, another olive tree planted to honor Halimi’s memory was vandalized and cut down, as French authorities continue efforts to replant trees in remembrance of the young Jewish man who was murdered in 2006.
“We will bring those responsible to justice,” French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez wrote in a post on X. “Our collective outrage is matched only by our unwavering determination to combat antisemitic and anti-religious acts that continue to tarnish the memory of an innocent man.”
This latest antisemitic act came after a plaque honoring Halimi was vandalized in Cagnes-sur-Mer, a town in southeastern France, prompting local authorities to open an investigation for “destruction and antisemitic damage.”
According to local reports, a 29-year-old man with no prior criminal record has been arrested. While he admitted to the acts, he denied any antisemitic motive and is now awaiting trial.
Last year, a tree planted in memory of Halimi was also vandalized and cut down in Épinay-sur-Seine, a suburb north of Paris.
Two Tunisian twin brothers were arrested and convicted for cutting down the tree, but were acquitted of the antisemitism charges brought against them.
Both of them were sentenced to eight months in prison, but one of them received a suspended sentence, meaning he will not serve time unless he commits another offense or violates certain conditions.
According to local media, one of the brothers has reportedly been deported from France.
Halimi was abducted, held captive, and tortured in January 2006 by a gang of about 20 people in a low-income housing estate in the Paris suburb of Bagneux.
Three weeks later, Halimi was found in Essonne, south of Paris, naked, gagged, and handcuffed, with clear signs of torture and burns. The 23-year-old died on the way to the hospital.
In 2011, French authorities planted the first olive tree in Halimi’s memory. However, the young Jewish boy’s memory has faced attacks before, with two other trees planted in his honor vandalized in 2019 in Essonne, where he was found dying near a railway track.