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These rabbis are making an Orthodox case against A.I. Will anyone listen?
Seated inside a ballroom on the campus of an all-girls religious school, the heavy hitters of Haredi Orthodox Judaism stared grimly into the future.
Rabbi Elya Ber Wachtfogel, head of the prestigious Yeshiva of South Fallsburg, had summoned more than a dozen of his colleagues to this Lakewood wedding venue on urgent business. Artificial intelligence posed a dire threat to their way of life. Over the next few hours, these men — the elders of four Hasidic dynasties and more than a dozen yeshivas — would begin to chart a course against it.
Their plan of attack: A communal fast, during which rabbinic authorities will reiterate the dangers of the technology and discourage its use. Then, technical steps — an effort to ban A.I. texting, or to promote phones that automatically blocked such services.
“These coordinated steps will establish a clear and unified communal standard that such use of open A.I. is unacceptable within the homes, yeshivas, and schools of our kehillos,” or communities, read an article on the gathering, known as an asifa, in the community news site Lakewood Alerts.
The Jan. 4 meeting elicited some ridicule online, from within the Haredi world and beyond it. One Instagram post teasing the gedolim, or rabbinic leaders, joked that the asifa had led to the first “A.I.-generated fast.” Riffing on Haredi attire, a commenter on one article about the gathering warned of a “worldwide shortage of black hats.” It is unclear whether any A.I. ban will stick — or, truly, whether a fast day will actually happen.
Yet the asifa has already produced something of broader significance: A religious case against A.I. — perhaps the first made by any group of Jewish denominational leaders. And though they were teased for being out of touch, the Lakewood rabbis had raised concerns with surprising parallels in the critiques of secular A.I. skeptics, said Ayala Fader, the author of Hidden Heretics, a book about the impact of technology on Haredi communities.
“They might come up with different sources for explaining it,” Fader said, “but they are actually articulating some of the objections to A.I. that you can read about in the Chronicle of Higher Education.”
A changing threat
The asifa recalled a gathering in 2012 at a much larger cathedral. Some 40,000 Haredi men packed the home of the New York Mets that day to listen to gedolim rail against the internet. The concerns shared at Citi Field fueled a cottage industry of “kosher” technology — devices that either filtered the internet or lacked a browser altogether.
“Information about religion, about faith, about sexuality, they see as being a corrupting force on the brain which you can’t undo,” explained Frieda Vizel, an expert on Hasidic life who gives tours of New York’s Hasidic neighborhoods. Today, old-school flip phones are ubiquitous in Haredi enclaves, and homes without television are the norm.
The urgency of Wachtfogel’s call was partly due to the evolution of the old threat: A.I.-based texting services mean even kosher phones can open the floodgates of uncensored information.
But the gedolim’s worries about A.I. were more focused on the technology itself — how it was communicating, and the human implications of its power. (Wachtfogel did not respond to an inquiry.)
Their primary concern was social. Get too used to a chatbot telling you what you want to hear, one Haredi rabbi in attendance explained, and you won’t be able to navigate friction in the real world. There’s a budding term for this phenomenon, emotional intelligence atrophy, which threatens the age-old Jewish ideal of shalom bayit, or domestic harmony.
And while using A.I. in various Torah study contexts has become commonplace among non-Haredi rabbinical students and in the rabbinate, the gedolim considered it almost blasphemous. For exposition on the Torah to have divine character, they said, it has to come from a Jew.
“We have a neshama,” or soul, said one Haredi leader, who was granted anonymity to protect his relationships in the community, which he said would be threatened by appearing in a non-Haredi outlet. “We have a spark from Hashem inside of us. And when two Jews are learning together, talking together, or being kind to each other, those two sparks are in connection. Replacing that with a machine, it’s sterile.”
The 11th-century commentator Rashi famously wrote that the essence of living a Torah-based life was toiling in its study. Haredi and Hasidic communities are rooted in this concept of ameilut, or toil: Men learn in yeshiva deep into adulthood, and career development is seen as secondary to a lifelong pursuit of Torah knowledge. To the gedolim, the very purpose of artificial intelligence seemed to be skirting ameilut.
“If at the push of a button, I can get a hold of a d’var torah for my Shabbos meal from A.I., to us, that’s a problem,” the Haredi leader told the Forward. “No, no — I want you to open the book and read it and come up with a question and come up with an answer. That’s part of what’s holy about learning Torah. It’s not just end result. It’s the process.”
The Haredi method
For thousands of years, the Jewish tradition has reserved six days a year for communal fasts, which unify its participants in solemn purpose. This year, if the yeshiva leaders follow through on their commitment, communities in Borough Park, Lakewood, Monsey and Williamsburg will observe a seventh. (No date has been publicly announced.)
On that day, gedolim will inveigh against A.I. the same way they once had about the internet. In addition to no eating or drinking, a special fast day Torah portion will be read.
Ultimately, however, a total ban on artificial intelligence is no more possible or likely in the Hasidic world than a total ban on the internet. Fader noted that in 2012, a total ban was the original goal. “But they quickly realized that couldn’t be,” she said, which is how internet filtering became the compromise. “There’s more flexibility to the system than you might expect.”
Fourteen years after Citi Field, the internet is the economic lifeblood of Haredi communities; as it turns out, e-commerce is basically the ideal business for Haredi Jews, affording men anonymity and women the ability to work from home. And Haredi leaders I spoke to acknowledged that A.I. will ultimately become an unavoidable part of online business. Vizel, the tour guide, told me she had recently come across an ad for an A.I. seminar in a Hasidic newspaper.
Eli Steinberg, a Lakewood-based Haredi pundit, surmised that it was precisely this sense of inevitability that led to the meeting’s outcome. The gedolim, just as they were in 2012 and just like the rest of society today, were playing catch up.
“There’s a challenge here, and there’s no clear answer of how one deals with it,” Steinberg said. While he had not attended the asifa, his sense was that the gedolim had concluded, “‘This unanswerable challenge will have to be dealt with the way we deal with most unanswerable challenges, which is prayer and fasting.’”
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A Chabad Jew was stabbed in NYC. He returned the next day to continue wrapping tefillin.
(JTA) — Less than 24 hours after he was stabbed in midtown Manhattan, Yosef, a Chabad-Lubavitch man from Crown Heights, was back on the same street where he’d been assaulted, popping into Diamond District businesses as usual to help employees wrap tefillin.
Yosef, 26, who did not share his last name to maintain his privacy, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he was back on 47th Street on Thursday afternoon, the day after the stabbing, without missing a beat in his Monday-through-Thursday rounds even as police investigate the incident as a possible hate crime.
A number of the people he visited pieced together that the widely circulated footage of a man being stabbed the previous night was of him.
“They were in shock. They were obviously scared for me,” said Yosef, who has been wrapping tefillin and distributing Shabbat candles to Jewish Diamond District employees for about three years. He started that routine when his father, a Chabad Jew who works in the jewelry business, realized he needed his son’s help to handle the demand for those acts. Yosef told Chabad.org that he was “still shaken” by the attack a day later.
Still, he told JTA, “We can’t allow some hate to stop us.”
Yosef said he felt it was important to communicate that message because “we need more mitzvahs in the world, we need more light in the world.”
Yosef was taken to Bellevue Hospital on Wednesday evening around 6 p.m., where medical staff assessed that he had no internal bleeding and would not need stitches. No arrests have been made, but the assailant has been described as a woman in her 40s.
The attack has renewed concerns about security that have faced Chabad adherents and institutions, which often host public events and maintain a visible street presence. But the threat didn’t diminish their presence in midtown Manhattan on Friday.
Multiple Chabad men stood under a bright yellow tent on the sidewalk wrapping tefillin for a steady stream of workers in the heavily Jewish Diamond District.
“The Rebbe says that the way to defeat darkness is only through the addition of light,” said Shmuel Cohen, who was handing out small photographs of the movement’s late leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Cohen told JTA that he had not heard about the attack that took place just down the block two days earlier, though his partner under the sidewalk tent had. Cohen said that the best way to respond is through “the observance of Torah and mitzvot without being ashamed of our Judaism but presenting it to everyone.”
Also on Friday, Chabad officials met with New York Police Department representatives for their annual meeting about security ahead of Chabad’s international conference in Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood where the movement is headquartered. The conference begins on Nov. 5.
Chabad has been targeted in multiple high-profile attacks in the past year, including the deadly Bondi Beach shooting in Australia in December. The following month, a man rammed a car into the doors of the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn, raising further questions over how the movement should balance its commitment to making its events accessible with security.
Meanwhile, Jews have been targeted in more than half of hate crimes committed in New York City in 2026, despite making up about 12% of the city’s population.
“Security is our top priority. Our goal is to provide an environment where every participant feels safe and can fully experience the purpose and spirit of the gathering,” said Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky, a top organizer of the upcoming conference.
In the wake of the attack, Yosef said he is not concerned about going out in public as a visibly Jewish person and doesn’t plan to change how he approaches the world.
“I was wearing the same clothes on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday,” he said. “I didn’t change my routine.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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They met on a Birthright trip then married. Now this American Israeli couple’s internet fame has turned to infamy.
Ethan and Hila Klein first met at Yad Vashem — Israel’s Holocaust museum — in 2007, a meet-cute they recounted, giggling, years later for their millions of YouTube followers.
“I think I went up to her and said something like, ‘They had it coming, don’t you think?’” said Ethan, known for his edgy humor and infamous internet trends, including Vape Nation and Papa Bless. “No I didn’t say that. I wonder if you would have laughed though.”
They were on a Birthright trip, Ethan an American and Hila an Israeli soldier on leave to join the group. Soon after the trip ended, Ethan moved to Israel to be with Hila, and the two began making videos under the name H3H3 Productions (the H for Hila and the 3 standing in as an E for Ethan). They married, moved to America, and started a popular podcast.
A Jewish love story, until Thursday, when Hila, now mother to their three children, accused Ethan publicly of having a months-long affair.
“The betrayal I feel is immeasurable,” Hila said in an Instagram post. “My only family on this side of the world. How do I even begin to make sense of this?”
Ethan reposted her statement.
Their podcast is run by a handful of crew members who often chime in and participate in various skits and bits. The crew also shared a statement saying they stand with Hila and refuse to work with Ethan, though they added they don’t know what this will mean for the future of the show.
A couple roiled by Oct. 7
The left-leaning, secular couple’s videos and podcasts focused primarily on pop culture, internet drama and general politics, not Jewish or Israeli issues.
Both Ethan and Hila would make statements sometimes when tensions in Israel flared, and they would occasionally speak out against IDF actions that upset them.
In 2021, Ethan started a podcast with political commenter Hasan Piker, a controversial left-wing influencer, called Leftovers, a nod to their leftist politics.
Then came Oct. 7.
Ethan, an American Israeli dual citizen like Hila, was horrified by the attacks but quick to call the IDF genocidal in the aftermath. In their first episode together after Oct. 7, Ethan and Piker said the show would continue through their disagreements. The episode was tense, and it was their last.
As Piker’s rhetoric on Israel intensified and became at times antisemitic, the two began a nasty internet feud, culminating in a nearly five-hour livestreamed debate.
Piker posted about the news of the affair on X, sharing a video of Ethan and expressing disgust for men who cheat.
“Now this is a high caliber man [with] good morals,” Piker said sarcastically. He also posted “Judge me by my enemies” after sharing Hila’s statement.
Hila, who owns a makeup and clothing company, increasingly came under scrutiny by Piker and others after Oct. 7 for her service in the IDF. Artists refused to work with her. One model she hired publicly disavowed her after finding out she was Israeli.
The couple was harassed, sometimes online, sometimes in-person, as they attempted to take what they viewed as a nuanced stance in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. The united front seemed to fortify their relationship, as Ethan, ever outspoken, routinely came to his wife’s defense.
Their show lost thousands of subscribers, but loyal fans stuck with them — fans who now say they are gutted and confused by the news of the affair. Many in disbelief noted that Ethan had Hila’s face tattooed on his arm less than two years ago as a surprise for her.
“The greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother,” says the quote surrounding the tattoo.
The Forward attempted to contact the Kleins through their work emails and did not immediately hear back.
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These Jewish college students have some ‘nonnegotiables’ for El-Sayed
At the University of Michigan, first-year student Robert Kashan, 18, and sophomore Jacob Reich, 19, sat behind a large blue sign. “Some things are nonnegotiable,” it declared in all caps.
The sign laid out their requirements for any candidate seeking their support: a commitment to Jewish safety, “including for Zionist Jews,” and supporting Jewish statehood in Israel, among other positions.
“Zionism is a legitimate part of the Democratic coalition, and a lot of us are feeling less represented by the Democratic Party,” Kashan told the Forward.
The students are part of a broader “Nonnegotiable” movement in Michigan, a coalition of Jewish Democrats who are spelling out their dealbreakers for candidates ahead of the Senate election between Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Republican nominee Mike Rogers.
The movement has attracted national attention, with hundreds of rabbis across 34 states signing on to the “Nonnegotiable” demands. Meanwhile, about 20 students at the University of Michigan have publicly signed, while hundreds more offered support anonymously, according to Reich.
The “Nonnegotiable” supporters aren’t saying whom they’ll vote for if their concerns aren’t addressed — or whether they’ll vote at all. But they are pushing back against the assumption that Jewish voters will, as the saying goes, “vote blue no matter who,” urging El-Sayed to engage with their demands if he hopes to earn their support.
That’s in contrast with two other Jewish political camps, including a group called Michigan Jews for Democracy that endorsed El-Sayed. Their petition, which has garnered almost 1,000 signatures, notes that some signatories hold reservations about El-Sayed but are voting for him nonetheless as a check on President Trump.
“We understand that a vote is not a valentine; it’s a strategic chess move,” the petition reads.
A competing petition, dubbed “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” has drawn hundreds of signatures from Michigan Jews who plan to vote for Rogers. That petition similarly emphasizes that Rogers voters may still have reservations about the candidate: “Our vote for Mike Rogers does not require that we agree with him on every issue or that we support President Trump,” it reads.
“Nonnegotiable,” meanwhile, rejects the idea that Jewish voters would have to choose between Zionist and Democratic values. Some have criticized the nonnegotiable movement for ignoring the reality of the electoral choice at hand. Others have called it “a veiled attempt to excuse the actions of Jewish Democrats who want to feel validated about voting for Mike Rogers.”
But Kashan and Reich, who met at Hillel and plan to major in political science, said the “Nonnegotiable” movement was the only way they could see themselves engaging in the election, as they felt increasingly pulled between their identities as Democrats and as Jews.
Some Michigan Jews have expressed alarm at El-Sayed’s questioning of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state and his decision to campaign alongside controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric. Rogers, who Trump has endorsed, earlier this week called El-Sayed “anti-Jew.”
In a letter to Michigan Jews, El-Sayed has vowed to “stand up against antisemitism and take the threat of violence against our Jewish community incredibly seriously.” He has also hired a Jewish liaison in the final weeks leading up to the election.
This will be the first election when Kashan, who just turned 18, is eligible to vote, and Reich’s first national election after voting in a local primary in his hometown of Palo Alto, California. For both, voting Democratic in their first major election had once seemed like a given.
“I’m a Jewish Democrat, and I want Democrats to take the Senate,” Reich said. “I want to vote for a Democrat in my own state.”
They’re still holding out hope that will happen — and that, with less than two weeks until the Nov. 3 election, El-Sayed will sign on to their petition.
And if he doesn’t? Neither student is ready to say.
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