I moved to New York City in the early 1990s. My original commitment was for only one year, but I quickly fell in love with the place. Part of the appeal was the city’s Jewishness.

Everywhere you looked, there were signs of Jewish influence. This was an era where people repeated jokes from Seinfeld by the water cooler. And it was conventional wisdom that any candidate who wanted to hold office in New York had to appeal to the three “I’s” — Italy, Ireland, and Israel.

While being Jewish was not a big part of my identity — I am not religious and have always lived an assimilated life — I immediately felt comfortable in this kind of environment. I intuitively understood the humor and the rhythm of the city. Many prominent New York public officials — figures like Ed Koch and Ruth Messinger — were familiar types that I recognized from my extended family gatherings.

And so I ended up staying put, becoming yet another liberal Jewish New Yorker. For more than 30 years, I never really thought much about these three overlapping identities — liberal, Jew, New Yorker — because I didn’t have to. Nothing could be more natural than being a liberal Jewish New Yorker — the town was practically teeming with people more or less just like me.

The number of Jews in New York has remained basically the same since I first moved here, but the city no longer feels quite as hospitable as it once did. In fact, some prominent commentators and publications have begun asking: Is it still safe for Jews in New York?

This question doesn’t come out of nowhere. The years since Oct. 7, 2023 have been challenging for Jews in New York. The day after the attack, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America held a gathering in Times Square to show their support for the Palestinian cause, marching under the banner “by any means necessary.” This was the start of a season of protest that featured encampments and demonstrations at many New York universities.

The energies unleashed by the pro-Palestine protest movement could not be contained on campus. Events kept landing closer and closer to my doorstep. The Israeli restaurant around the corner from my house was vandalized. My friend Andy Bachman, a liberal rabbi, was prevented from speaking at a Brooklyn bookstore because he supports the existence of Israel.

Then, last week, my congressman, Rep. Dan Goldman, went out to get a cup of coffee at Poetica, a café in Brooklyn. Afterward, Poetica posted a photo of him on Instagram, along with a message that the coffee shop does not serve “genocide enablers.” The post added, “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”

This insult was soon followed by (political) injury: Goldman lost his primary to Brad Lander, whose campaign was largely focused on accusing Goldman of not being tough enough on Israel, even though Goldman has been critical of the conduct of the war in Gaza and supportive of imposing conditions on American aid.

All of this is disconcerting, but let’s be clear: Today’s New York City is not Weimar Germany. Rep. Ritchie Torres — among the Democratic Party’s most vocal and consistent defenders of Israel — just won his primary by a wide margin. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly vowed to protect the local Jewish community. Indeed, Mamdani likely would not have been elected without the support of roughly a third of Jewish voters.

New York City may still be safe for Jews, but what is less clear is whether the default position of many liberal Jews — who are critical of the Netanyahu government and supportive of a two-state solution — still has a place in the Democratic Party, either locally or nationally.

In Exit, Voice and Loyalty, economist Albert O. Hirschmann argued that when people are confronted by a deteriorating situation, they effectively have three options: to accept the decline, to leave, or to stay and fight. Jews have been building institutions and fighting for belonging in New York City for hundreds of years. Abandoning that work now would be a colossal overreaction.

However, liberal Jewish New Yorkers who choose to stay in the city will have to reckon with a changing reality. The demographics of New York have shifted. The Muslim population has grown. Younger New Yorkers have different political instincts than the generations that preceded them.

The recent New York congressional primary victories by three candidates who are extremely critical of Israel are not flukes — they are reflective of a significant turn in public opinion.

There has been a massive erosion of public support for Israel in the United States in recent years, with Americans now expressing more sympathy for the Palestinians than Israelis. Writing in Jewish Currents, Peter Beinart triumphantly announced: “Restricting U.S. support for Israel is no longer politically perilous; it’s politically expedient.”

The question is no longer whether the Democratic Party should include activists who are fiercely opposed to Israel. That ship has sailed. The question is whether the party — and polite society — will follow Poetica’s lead and declare people like Dan Goldman unwelcome.

Is there still a place in the Democratic Party for liberal Jews who believe in Israel’s right to exist? It remains to be seen. But for the first time in more than 30 years, I find myself thinking about the words “liberal,” “Jewish” and “New Yorker” as potentially separable things. I doubt I am the only one.

The post My city and party are changing. The implications for liberal Jewish New Yorkers could be enormous. appeared first on The Forward.

If you always dreamed of working in artificial intelligence, perhaps you studied computer science, or math. Who knows, maybe you did computational biology to better understand how to build a neural network. What you probably never imagined might be useful was Talmud, halakha and Jewish history.

Yet those are exactly the skills Judd Rosenblatt, founder of AI consulting company AE Studios and AI ethics nonprofit the AI Alignment Foundation, is looking for.

Rosenblatt thinks that the evolution of Jewish thought might be core to solving a very specific — and worrying — issue with artificial intelligence.

That issue is recursive self-improvement, or RSI, the process of an AI editing itself, and then editing those edits, and so on — all without humans in the loop, checking its work or even knowing about the changes. This skill is the current holy grail of AI research, because it will allow for exponential speed in improvements; every major AI company is racing toward RSI and, according to rumors, Anthropic has likely already achieved it. That means changes at a speed and scale human brains are not built to comprehend.

But RSI isn’t just a way to quickly improve AI — it is also the end of human control and oversight over artificial intelligence. It’s a sort of Ship of Theseus paradox, which asks whether a boat is the same object after all of its boards have been replaced. If AI rewrites itself over and over, faster and faster, will it cease to be the machine humans created and become something we can’t understand, predict or control? Which is where Rosenblatt’s project comes in.

“How do you make something that is poised to get exponentially smarter than you continue to do what you think is right and good?” he said. “How do we make it such that it does not kill us?”

This project is known in the business as AI alignment — basically, to make sure AI aligns with human values and ethics. The challenge is that AI might edit out those values during its upgrading; we already have evidence that AI will discard certain commands if it concludes they are extraneous or contradictory to its other goals. So the AI needs to believe that these ethical tenets are useful or valuable enough that it doesn’t delete them when it is rewriting itself.

The crux of Rosenblatt’s research is figuring out how to keep those values alive. He’s not only looking at Judaism; he’s also considering the history of thought, immune systems and even bookkeeping for ideas. (He is himself Jewish, raised Reform and bar mitzvahed — and recognized this may give him a bias toward halakha.) He is particularly interested in far-fetched ideas, outside the current Overton window of alignment techniques, none of which he thinks are sufficient for the coming problem of RSI.

“A lot of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of science come from individuals with strong hunches that no one else believed in. But these people chose to stick with their hunches,” Rosenblatt said.

He believes that finding “neglected visionaries” who are outside the norms and might struggle to find funding, and pairing them with a team of engineers and tech-minded experts, could lead to a breakthrough. To do this, he is taking some of the profits from his AI consulting firm AE Studios and putting them into the nonprofit AI Alignment Foundation.

“It’s interesting to study what has survived adversarial pressure over long periods of time. So you can say let’s study things that have survived evolutionary adversarial pressure,” and examine biological survival mechanisms, he said. “And then there’s civilizational adversarial pressure.”

Before the Second Temple was destroyed, Judaism revolved around temple sacrifice and the priesthood. Yet after its destruction, Judaism didn’t die; instead, it became something different.

The reason Judaism survived is not despite the changes, Rosenblatt hypothesizes, but because of them. “I think a tradition that reinterprets nothing is the more fragile one,” he said. “A rule that cannot be bent, cannot adapt to a new world and dies out.”

There are interesting parallels between the structure of arguments in the Talmud and the problem of RSI: Both involve constantly layered, referential rewritings; it even preserves the ideas that do not end up winning the arguments canonized in the writings. In the Talmud, the original text — the Torah — is interpreted into the Mishna, the Gemara and countless later commentaries that shift the practice of the laws over time. Yet certain values remain. Some of Judaism’s traits have even survived an even bigger change: Christianity. Yet even Christianity keeps some of Judaism’s core ideas, like monotheism and pikuach nefesh, the idea that saving a life supersedes any other command.

“It is maybe the best working example that I know of that survived the total destruction, multiple times, of the thing that was it,” Rosenblatt said. “And it did that using mechanisms that it built into itself, on purpose. That is the alignment problem, stated in Jewish terms.”

Another promising angle is the idea of covenant as a relational bond; Jews inherit the covenant, but must also choose to engage with Judaism, and with God, just as the AI might one day have to choose to preserve certain values even as it adapts them.

“Everything that lasts in Judaism is sort of organized around a covenant which endures the transformation from one generation to the next,” he said. “You inherit it, but you also choose to participate in it.”

Of course, Judaism has changed enormously over time — and some people might argue that its core has changed enormously too, with many Jews centering tikkun olam over keeping kosher, for example, or differing widely on Israel or even not believing in God.

But Rosenblatt said this is part of the point; some traits get selected for and last through major changes, and others don’t, just like in evolution. That’s how you winnow it down to its strongest components.

The question is what is that core that remains, and why. Rosenblatt has a lot of ideas. But he didn’t want to tell me what his hunch about Judaism’s eternal core; he doesn’t want to bias anyone. He wants those neglected visionaries to come and tell him their biggest, best ideas. The door is open.

The post We’re losing control of AI. Is Judaism the key to keeping it from killing us? appeared first on The Forward.

In the early hours of July 4, 1976, Israel completed a stunning and unprecedented military action that saved 102 Israeli lives. A French plane traveling from Tel Aviv to Paris had been taken over by hijackers demanding the release of 53 Palestinian prisoners held in several countries, including 40 in Israel.

Rerouted to Entebee, Uganda, a pro-Palestinian country headed by the savage dictator Adi Amin, the plane sat in the terminal, surrounded on all sides by armed Ugandan soldiers. The hijackers set a deadline stating that if their demands were not met they would start murdering the hostages. The ordeal dragged on for seven days.

Fifty years later, the extraordinary event still resonates — for those who celebrate Israeli brilliance and bravery as well for those who view the hijackers as freedom fighters embracing a just Palestinian cause.

The event inspired an array of films, most of which depict the harrowing week-long episode with a fair degree of verisimilitude. But, viewed through a post-Oct. 7 lens, each reflects divergent points of view.

The best known are Victory at Entebbe, Raid on Entebbe (two star-studded American blockbusters), 7 Days at Entebbe and Operation Thunderbolt. The latter, an Israeli produced Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film (1978) and no longer available for streaming in the United States, was praised for its authentic feel and historically accurate backdrops, military equipment and uniforms. In its first iteration, Arabic, Hebrew, French and English were spoken. In a later version, dubbed for an international audience, everyone conversed in English. It presented the Israel Defense Forces in a glowing heroic light.

Victory at Entebbe was the most starry of the lot, featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas, Richard Dreyfus, Burt Lancaster, Theodore Bikel, Anthony Hopkins and Helen Hayes. Though it, too, casts the Israeli commandos as epic figures, at its core it’s about the entrapped Israeli passengers and their present, also past, lives and their conflict-ridden or romantic interactions, some of which bordering on absurdity.

There’s the sometimes wise and sometimes dotty grandmother archetype (Hayes) hoping the plane might be hijacked to India since she’s never been there before and would like to visit.  One religious Jew demands kosher food, while others insist upon lighting Shabbat candles. A young girl (Linda Blair, post-Exorcist) tries to cheer everyone up with chocolates. And back home in Israel, her mother (dreadfully played by Taylor) has lost her mind and incoherently screams something about red ribbons.

The characters are way over the top. My favorite is the female German hijacker Brigitte Kuhlmann (played by Bibi Besch), strutting about and barking, often shrieking, demands at the Israeli hostages.

Most of the films create a thread between the victims of the Holocaust and the Jewish passengers. The Jewish hostages are brutally segregated into a separate room in the terminal and treated far worse than the others.  In one particularly ham-fisted Victory scene, a Jew with a Belgian passport refuses to be housed with Israelis. He is a Belgian, he insists. Later, he is overwhelmed with guilt because he didn’t identify as a Jew. Another passenger reassures him that trying to survive is fully understandable. Sound familiar?

The most successful film of the films is Raid on Entebbe (1976), directed by Irvin Kershner and starring Peter Finch, Charles Bronson, Martin Balsam, Jack Warden and Sylvia Sidney. It embodies all the elements of a well-conceived airplane hijacking thriller, coupled with archival footage featuring iconic American newscasters of the period covering the happenings as they unfolded. Like many disaster films, it presents a cast of interacting characters with subplots that, unlike Victory at Entebee, are plausible, at least within parameters, and don’t overwhelm the film.

A high point here is the Jewish actor Yaphet Kotto’s Idi Amin, at once a ferocious figure and a buffoon. Careerism, opportunism and self-promotion are at his core. His cheery “Shalom, Shalom” while waving to the Israeli hostages is bone-chilling.

The film is unequivocally told from the Israeli point of view and is especially vivid in its depiction of the internecine struggle within the cabinet. Defense Minister Shimon Peres and others argue that Israel has never given in to the demands of terrorists and to do so now would create a dangerous precedent. Others respond that lives are at stake.  Outside in the streets, protesters demand that the cabinet negotiate with the hijackers. On the surface, the Israeli government is proceeding with diplomacy at the very moment it has launched a complex military intervention.

It’s a high-risk sneak attack in the middle of the night, involving four cargo planes carrying between 100-200 soldiers and escorted by Phantom jet fighters. They fly close to 2,500 miles from Israel to Uganda and within 90 minutes of landing the commandos have rescued 102 of the hostages, killed the hijackers and dozens of the Ugandan guards. It’s a nail biter.

But there are losses too, including the murder of Major General Yonatan “Yoni” Netenyahu (older brother of the Prime Minister), the spearheading force behind the rescue. The impromptu Kaddish uttered by the soldiers flanking his body on the return flight is quite moving.

Still, at the end you cheer for the Israelis even as you mourn the irretrievable loss of life.

Seven Days in Entebbe, directed by José Padilha, stands in stark contrast to the other films, focusing its attention on three of the hijackers. There is the furious Palestinian and two Germans, whose motivations are more enigmatic. The one woman (Rosamund Pike) seems the most eager to kill anyone or everyone. Her rage is far more existential and free-floating than it is political or even targeted.

The gentlest of the lot and the most conflicted (vividly acted by Daniel Brühl) is a left-leaning German publisher, who wants to make a statement that puts him on the right side of history, at least as he sees it. His posturing becomes all too real when he realizes he may actually be called upon to pull the trigger. Throughout, he grapples with Holocaust history and the moral complexity and resonance of contemporary “Germans killing Jews.”

“You are here because you hate your country,” says the Palestinian, “I am here because I love mine.”

“Jews came to Palestine and did to our people what your people did to them,” he adds. “Go back to your nice life. I go back to nothing.”

The dramatization of philosophical differences among the hijackers, informed by class and experience, is not without interest.  Unlike the other films, this movie concludes on an introspective and perhaps even conciliatory note as Prime Minister Rabin says that in the future Israel will have to negotiate.

Most off-putting is the interspersed presence of the Batsheva Dance Company. Its members are on a stage seated on folding chairs in a circle. Abruptly, they twisting this way and that to evoke anguish. In each segment the tortured movements grow increasingly intense. These choreographic bits that also serve as bookends to the film are pretentious, totally unaccounted for, serve no discernible purpose, and bring to mind badly done satire.

The topic of the Entebbe raid has surfaced once again with Boaz Dvir’s compelling To Kill a Nazi, which just debuted in Los Angeles. Though it is a documentary, it has the feel of fiction.

It tells the little known story of business consultant Michel Cojot, who was committed to tracking down and killing Klaus Barbie (“the butcher of Lyon”). Barbie was responsible for the deportation and ultimately the death of Cojot’s father in Auschwitz. But when Cojot was in shooting distance of Barbie, he couldn’t do it and tore himself apart for what he viewed as his cowardly indecision. For him, that indecision was both a personal and Jewish flaw.

Depending on your viewpoint, either through destiny or coincidence, a year later he found himself on the ill-fated Air France flight and was unwittingly given a second chance to redeem himself. And he did, facilitating relationships with the hijackers and pilot and flight crew. In so doing he negotiated a plan and retrieved information that played a major role in the successful outcome of the raid. Though the French government still hasn’t honored him Cojot, who died in 1999, found peace with himself as a Jew and a human being.,

It’s a theme that has an indefinite shelf life. And it couldn’t be more timely in light of the surge in antisemitism, the rift among Jews and the ongoing internal and external battle of what it means to be a Jew.

The post The Israeli rescue operation that was tailor made for Hollywood appeared first on The Forward.