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The exhausting, never-ending job of debunking antisemitic conspiracy theories
(JTA) — A few days after the comedian Dave Chappelle appeared to justify the never-ending appeal of Jewish conspiracy theories, this sentence appeared in the New York Times: “Bankman-Fried is already drawing comparisons to Bernie Madoff.”
I’ll explain: Sam Bankman-Fried is the 30-year-old founder of FTX, the crypto-currency exchange that vaporized overnight, leaving more than 1 million creditors on the hook. Bernie Madoff, is, of course, Bernie Madoff, the financier who defrauded thousands of investors through a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme and died in prison.
It’s a fair comparison, as a former regulator tells CNN: “Bankman-Fried, like Madoff, proved adept at using his pedigree and connections to seduce sophisticated investors and regulators into missing ‘red flags,’ hiding in plain sight.”
Nevertheless, seeing these Jewish figures lumped together, I braced myself for the inevitable: Nasty tweets about Jews and money. Slander from white supremacists. Plausibly deniable chin-scratching from more “mainstream” commentators.
What comes next is a familiar script: Jewish defense groups issue statements saying conspiracy theories traffic in centuries-old antisemitic tropes and pose a danger to the Jews. Jewish news outlets like ours post “explainers” describing how these myths take hold.
It’s exhausting, having to deny the obvious: that a group of people who don’t even agree on what kind of starch to eat on Passover regularly scheme to bilk innocents, manipulate markets or control the world. And it often seems the very attempt to explain these lies and their popularity ends up feeding the beast.
Chappelle’s now notorious monologue on “Saturday Night Live” is a case in point. At first pass, it is a characteristically mischievous attempt to both mock the rapper Kanye West for his antisemitism, and to push boundaries to explain why a troubled Black entertainer might feel aggrieved in an industry with a historic over-representation of Jews. Jon Stewart certainly heard it that way, telling Stephen Colbert, “Look at it from a Black perspective. It’s a culture that feels that its wealth has been extracted by different groups. That’s the feeling in that community, and if you don’t understand where it’s coming from, then you can’t deal with it.”
That is a useful message, but consider the messenger. Chappelle appears to disapprove of West’s conspiracy-mongering, but never once discusses the harm it might cause to the actual targets of the conspiracies. Instead, he focuses on the threat such ideas pose to the careers and reputations of entertainers like him and West. The “delusion that Jews run show business,” said Chappelle, is “not a crazy thing to think,” but “it’s a crazy thing to say out loud.” He ends the routine by ominously invoking the “they” who might end his career.
That’s what critics meant when they said Chappelle “normalized” antisemitism: He described where it’s coming from, explained why his peers might feel that way, and only criticized it to the degree that it could lead the purveyors to be cancelled. It’s like saying, “You don’t have to vaccinate your kids. Just don’t tell anybody.”
This week I worked with a colleague on an article about how the “Jews control Hollywood” myth took hold, and at each step of the way I wondered if we were stoking the fire we were trying to put out. No, Jews don’t control Hollywood, we reported, but “nearly every major movie studio was founded in the early 20th century” by a Jew. Those moguls rarely used the movies as a platform to defend Jewish interests, but per Steven Spielberg, “Being Jewish in Hollywood is like wanting to be in the popular circle.”
A documentary shown Thursday night at the DOC NYC festival here in New York teeters on the edge of the same trap. “The Conspiracy,” directed by the Russian-American filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin and narrated by Mayim Bialik, uses 3-D animation to explain how conspiracists ranging from a 19th-century French priest to American industrialist Henry Ford placed three Jews — German financier Max Warburg, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and falsely accused French soldier Alfred Dreyfus — at the center of a vast, contradictory and preposterous scheme to take over the world. It connects age-old Christian animosity to the Jews to centuries of antisemitic paranoia and fear-mongering that led to unspeakable violence at Kishinev, Auschwitz and Pittsburgh. “This myth has plagued the world for centuries,” Pozdorovkin explains.
Or at least that’s the message you and I might have gotten. But I can also see someone stumbling on this film and being seduced by the rage and cynicism of the conspiracy-mongers — who, I should note, are quoted at length. Part of the problem is the film’s aesthetic: a consistently dark palette and a “camera” that lingers on ugly examples of antisemitic propaganda. Even though these images are seen on a creepy “conspiracy wall” and connected with that red thread familiar from cop shows and horror films, I can well imagine an uninformed viewer asking why members of this tiny minority seem to be at the center of so many major events of the 19th and 20th centuries.
I was reminded of a joke by the Jewish comedian Modi, ridiculing the ritual of inviting celebrities accused of antisemitism to visit a Holocaust museum. “Which is the stupidest idea, ever,” he says. “You’re taking someone who hates Jews into a Holocaust museum. They come out of there [saying] ‘Wow! Oh my God, that was amazing! I want a T-shirt!’”
The poet and essayist Clint Smith, whose cover story in next month’s Atlantic explores the meanings of Holocaust museums in Germany, makes a similar point. After visiting the museum in Wannsee documenting the infamous meeting in which the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, he wonders: “Might someone come to a museum like this and be inspired by what they saw?”
The makers of “The Conspiracy” (oy, that title) obviously intend the very opposite. In an interview with the Forward, Pozdorovkin agrees with the interviewer’s suggestion that those “who most need to see this film might be the least likely to be convinced by it.”
“My hope is that this film has a trickle-down effect,” he explains.
The fault lies not with those who seek to expose antisemitism but with a society that relies on the victims to explain why they shouldn’t be victimized. As many have pointed out, antisemitism isn’t a Jewish problem; it’s a problem for the individuals and societies who pin their unhappiness and neuroses on a convenient scapegoat. Ultra-nationalism and intolerance are the soil in which conspiracies take root.
But as long as scapegoating remains popular and deadly, the victims have to keep explaining and explaining the obvious — that, for instance, the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried and Bernie Madoff are Jewish is no more significant than the fact that Henry Ford and Elon Musk, two people who founded car companies, are gentiles.
The question is, who is listening?
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The post The exhausting, never-ending job of debunking antisemitic conspiracy theories appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New U2 album includes Israeli poem and a song about slain Palestinian activist
(JTA) — U2 frontman Bono delivered sharp criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and lavish praise on Jewish tradition in an interview released Wednesday alongside the band’s new EP, titled “Days of Ash.”
The album — the first from U2 since 2017 — includes a song memorializing Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen, who was killed by an Israeli settler in the West Bank in July as well as a recitation of the anti-war poem “Wildpeace” by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
“As with Islamophobia, antisemitism must be countered every time we witness it. The rape, murder and abduction of Israelis on Oct. 7 was evil,” Bono said. “But self-defense is not defense for the sweeping brutality of Netanyahu’s response, measured but the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians.”
Bono’s criticism of Netanyahu alongside the EP’s release comes months after the Irish artist broke his silence on the war in Gaza in August, writing at the time on social media that “the government of Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu today deserves a categorical and unequivocal condemnation.”
In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, Bono had struck a different tone, standing out among other artists for paying tribute to the hundreds of “beautiful kids” murdered at the Nova music festival during a performance.
The new politically charged EP comprises six songs that address a series of high-profile deaths in recent years, including the killing of Sarina Esmailzadeh by Iranian security forces in 2022 and the fatal shooting of Renee Good by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent last month.
The Amichai recitation comes immediately before the song memorializing the death of Hathaleen, titled “One Life at a Time.”
In a wide-ranging interview about the band’s latest EP that accompanied its release, Bono lamented that Judaism was “being slandered by far-right fundamentalists from within its own community.”
He added, “While I’m someone who is a student of, and certainly reveres, the teachings in many of the great faiths, I come from the Judeo-Christian tradition and so I feel on safe ground when I suggest: There has never been a moment where we needed the moral force of Judaism more than right now, and yet, it has rarely in modern times been under such siege.”
Bono noted that another song on the EP, titled “The Tears of Things,” takes inspiration from a book of the same title by Richard Rohr, which Bono said made the case that “the greatest of the Jewish prophets found a way to push through their rage and anger at the injustices of the day … until they ended up in tears.”
Critiquing Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, Bono then cited the words of prominent Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who has described the war in Gaza as a “spiritual catastrophe for Judaism itself.”
“As if all Jews are to blame for the actions of Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir. … It’s insane, but the waters get even muddier when anyone criticizing the lunacy of the far right in Israel is accused of antisemitism themselves,” continued Bono.
The post New U2 album includes Israeli poem and a song about slain Palestinian activist appeared first on The Forward.
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HaKarot HaTov: Artificial Intelligence Can Never Replace Human Love and Wonder
Illustrative: Fourth grade students from Kibbutz Parod with certificates they received from the Israel Antiquities Authority for finding and turning in an ancient oil lamp. Photo: IAA.
One of the things that primary teachers regularly encounter is children calling them “mom” or “dad.” This is usually followed by serious embarrassment on behalf of the child, and possibly nervous laughter from their classmates.
Most teachers will just smooth incidents like this over, but the good ones will perhaps reflect on its underlying meaning — how in a very real sense for the child, they can temporarily become the child’s mother or father. It’s an expression of the incredibly important role teachers play in the lives of children, acting as the adult presence that bridges across from their family existence to their encounters with the larger world. This is what, unconsciously, children are tapping into when they mix up “mom” and “miss.”
Teachers are really important to kids — and the emotional investment that teachers make in children, and that children make in teachers, is enormous. Sometimes teachers can even provide the love and care that a child’s parents cannot. Teachers matter. Or at least they did.
What it seems the future holds, as AI models improve exponentially, is children each having their own AI-powered tutor responding in real time to their learning needs. AI’s ability to gauge the progress, challenges, and requirements of each child are likely far beyond anything a human teacher could ever hope to achieve. I don’t doubt that this is coming soon, and that many parents, and many governments, will be thinking of the undeniable benefits that these AI tutors will bring.
They don’t need a salary, they don’t need time off, and they can be there at any time of day. On top of that, millions of children are already using AI chat bots for emotional support. AI tutors will soon combine academic and emotional and pastoral support in one package. Unlike human teachers, they will never get tired, or angry, or disappointed, or get distracted from their charges’ needs.
We might wonder why any of this might be a problem. In a near future where robots will care for the elderly, do our shopping, and undertake surgery, and other AI bots will be our lawyers and accountants, as they already are our software engineers, why does it matter if children are taught by AI tutors?
Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps children and parents won’t be able to tell the difference, or even care if they can. Having human teachers won’t be important. Maybe we will just need a few humans to check if the AI tutors are on track to ensure that the kids of the future (or the kids of next year) learn enough to read and write, and to count well enough so that they don’t spend their universal basic income all at once.
I had a friend who was a great teacher who taught in Jewish schools in London. He died a decade ago, far too young. He was dyslexic and he told me how he used to share this with his pupils and get them to help him with his spelling on the board. A small thing perhaps, but I just think how much this communicated to those young people — about dealing with adversity, compassion, and empathy. I also remember how, when I was walking with him, we might bump into some of his old pupils. Always, they were so pleased to see him.
He was still “sir,” someone important in their lives, who had helped them navigate the path from their families, out to the world as independent adults. There was also, I would venture, something there that no robot teacher or AI tutor could ever truly have. That thing was love. The love that teachers bring to their work, that drives their professionalism and their commitment and care for the next generation.
Children know that teachers are not parents — that they only come into their lives for a short time and then leave. Yet they also know that just like their parents, teachers can love and care about them — really care about what happens to them. Children also learn how adults apart from their parents can, like my friend, not be perfect, and not know everything, but still set an example through their own behavior, and push them to achieve or keep going, even when it is challenging. They can feel how this connection with adults, with other human beings, molds and creates their adult selves.
Another thing that my friend’s pupils had was gratitude. As Dostoevsky wrote, gratitude is a fundamentally human quality, because someone has to give it, and someone has to receive it. But Judaism recognized this decades before the Russian literary geniuses of the 19th century.
The Jewish concept of HaKarot HaTov or “Recognizing the Good” means gratitude, but it also implies something transcendent — the wonder of just taking the time to stop and reflect on what we have. HaKarot HaTov teaches us that it’s through gratitude to other people that we come closer to G-d. Large language models and algorithms don’t have aims, or desires, or feelings. They can’t love. AI tutors quite literally are incapable of caring whether the children they work with live or die. They can’t receive gratitude from their students, or give it, not really, because there is no “them.” Perhaps we should think more than twice before we sign up to an education system where children have no one to say thank you to.
Joseph Mintz is Professor of Inclusive Education at UCL. Follow him @jmintzuclacuk. His views are his own and do not reflect those of his employers.
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The Palestinian Authority Just Paid ‘Pay-for-Slay’ Salaries to 8,000 Terrorists
The opening of a hall that the Palestinian Authority named for a terrorist who killed 125 people. Photo: Palestinian Media Watch.
The mask is off: The Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that 8,000 terrorist prisoner pensioners would receive their monthly Pay-for-Slay “pension” salary this week — and confirmations of receipt of the deposits are already being observed over social media.
A Palestinian social media post confirming Pay-for-Slay payments have gone out.
The minimum amount for such salaries is 4,000 shekels for terrorists who spent five years in prison. Going by that minimum, the PA just paid these terrorists — which constitute only one third of all Pay-for-Slay recipients — at least 32 million shekels — over US $10 million.
However, in actuality, this most conservative estimate is far lower than the amount that was likely paid out, as some of the more infamous terrorists released in recent hostage deals have spent 30 or more years in prison. Terrorists with such status receive at least 12,000 shekels each month.
A chart detailing Palestinian payments to terrorists.
One year after PA President Mahmoud Abbas promised the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and the EU that he was ending Pay-for-Slay, there is no escaping the fact that this was just another deception and a lie.
The PA remains an unreformed sponsor of terror.
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.