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Dave Goldberg retweeted
Did The New Yorker bend the source materials to fit the narrative? We asked Michael Walzer about this headline (clip).
Full interview below.
Dave Goldberg retweeted
As a general matter, non-Jews don't see it. They listen to their Jewish friends, they nod along, they think to themselves, You sound hysterical -- where are the roving bands of Cossacks? (They may even say as much, but usually not. They don't want to offend.)
For the most part, the young, progressive Jews who speak the language of contemporary progressivism are unhelpful. They talk about "safety" and "trauma." All you have to do is watch five minutes of Fauda to know how out of touch they sound.
The progressive Jews are not exactly wrong, but they're also confused: They're not unsafe; they're excluded. Or, their inclusion is contingent; it comes with the demand that they denounce the Jewish state, that they demonstrate, repeatedly, that they find the whole idea and history and heritage behind it reprehensible. That Israel is irredeemable. That the only just solution to the "genocide" and "apartheid" is a Palestinian right of return -- the end of Jewish self-rule. They have to out-anti-Zionist the non-Jewish anti-Zionists.
In the back of their head, many (most?) know they're lying. They have family or friends in Tel Aviv. How many times have they heard "Israel" chanted in synagogue? What about the tallit their grandmother bought for them in Jerusalem? And why are they the only ones who have to distance themselves from the land of their people? Why don't we ask Chinese Americans to do the same? Or Russian Americans? Why is it only them?
This is the part that many non-Jews, including many thoughtful people, seem not to grasp. The double standard. The double standard is the antisemitism.
The non-Jews kind of see it, and then they say, "Right, but look what they've done to Gaza," which means: "The haters aren't that wrong to hate you."
They rarely, if ever, delve deeply into the accusations lodged against the Jewish state; they assume the very worst charges are more or less correct. (Why wouldn't they? Who benefits these days from saying, over drinks or dinner or at the kids' soccer game, "I suspect your news diet is rather slanted.") Nor do they think much, if at all, about the meaning of the double standard -- the ghettoization of Jewish life, experience, anger, dislocation. They do not see that we are slipping back, gradually or not so gradually, into the world of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers -- the world of gentleman's agreements and exclusive country clubs and Yale chins. The world before the meritocracy.
Their blindness is hard to stomach. Obama campaigning for El-Sayed. The online gushing about the "bluenami." The posters looking forward to the lawfare, the investigations. I, too, look forward to the investigations; I want to see the corruption brought to an end, and I want the wrongdoers brought to justice. It's a very good thing that Americans were repulsed by the apparent crimes and excesses of the Trump Administration, and it's a very good thing that the midterms reflected as much. But still, I wonder: Why the blind enthusiasm? Why can't they see that, to so many Jews, their blindness means apathy. It means: "I care deeply about every microaggression under the sun except the hurt people hurt people guy, the guy who tried to rationalize the attempted slaughter of Jewish children."
That's the thing that bothers me most.
They seem unaware of the fear behind the fear: the potential for violence. They seem unfazed by what comes next. This is what I wonder about constantly -- when I'm making dinner for my children or late at night: What comes next? Is the marginalization a preamble to something else? It doesn't just end with this, does it? It gets worse, I imagine. It always gets worse.
It’s Orwellian being a secular Jew right now. You have a lot of liberal friends, but you no longer fit the camp.
So you watch from afar as they celebrate the blue wave, convinced they just crushed tyranny and saved America.
And you’re thinking, shit… what they’re actually cheering is the election of a Senator and several Congresspeople whose agenda is to sever American ties with the only Jewish state, and whose ideology is the same socialism our grandparents fled a century ago. All from a party now vowing to “stop AI,”handing China the lead in the technology that will decide the next century.
Dave Goldberg retweeted
Saudi TV correctly discusses the Israel-Gaza war with far more nuance than the DSA.
Dave Goldberg retweeted
Fair distinctions — criticizing a foreign government isn't incitement, and American Jews aren't Israel.
But grocery prices have many causes: energy, weather, labor, supply chains, trade policy, corporate margins. When an ad picks exactly one country, Israel, as the reason your food costs more, that's questionable on the merits before you even get to history.
And maybe it's my German upbringing, but 'the Jews are why your prices are up' is one of the oldest tropes there is.
The Nazis blamed 'Jewish speculators' for the 1923 hyperinflation (some Germans called the worthless banknotes 'Jew confetti'). Goebbels's paper “Der Angriff“ claimed Jews were buying up food to inflate prices. Robert Ley blamed 'Jewish jugglers' when the French franc was devalued.
During the war, Jews were blamed for shortages and the black market.
So when an ad draws a straight line from Israel to your grocery bill, some people hear an echo. Not because the policy critique is off limits, but because that particular shape of argument has a long and ugly history.
Criticizing Muslim countries is fair game. I don't see how that would constitute incitement against American Muslims. American Muslims aren't the same as any foreign government. We already have our country: America. As for conflating American Jews with Israel, that's an anti-semitic trope. And as has been extensively reported, the Israel government played a not insignificant role in driving the Trump administration towards war with Iran, which has in turn led to higher grocery prices. This isn't controversial.
Dave Goldberg retweeted
This resonates with me, although my experience was almost the reverse.
I grew up in Dubai pre Abraham Accords, so I had zero interaction with Jewish people growing up.
I did, however, hear plenty of antisemitic jokes & comments.
What often confused me was that most racist jokes seemed to revolve around supposed racial inferiority.
But with Jewish people, it was the opposite in that they were supposedly too good at making money, running businesses, and accumulating influence.
Maybe it was my Asian striver cultural mindset, but even as a kid I remember questioning why being good at those things are somehow undesirable?
Fast forward to Duke freshmen year. All 4 guys on my side of the dorm were Jewish and so I ended up rushing and joining AEPi (about 2/3 Jewish at Duke).
I have genuinely never felt excluded for not being Jewish.
I was regularly invited to Shabbat dinners at the Duke Chabad, where Rabbi Nossen was one of the kindest person who I’ve ever met.
And eventually, the guys even elected a practicing Catholic (me) to be their fraternity president.
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed something strange in my other social circles, particularly among my more socialist-leaning friends.
People who would recoil at the slightest insinuation of racial stereotyping in any other context
will note Jewish overrepresentation in media, finance, technology, and then suggest that these activities are somehow inherently parasitic.
This has made me suspect that there is a correlation between certain forms of antisemitism and anti-capitalism.
Whether a fundamentally zero-sum understanding of the economy makes certain antisemitic narratives particularly attractive.
Consider that the Jewish people, leas than 0.2% of the world’s population,
account for 1/4 of individual Nobel laureates and approximately 40% of economics laureates.
Whether you see this as evidence of an “international Jewish conspiracy,”
or what becomes possible within a culture that places enormous value on learning, curiosity, and debate;
that regards the world as God’s creation, worthy of being studied, understood, and repaired;
and that emphasizes family, community, just charity, and mutual responsibility,
is probably correlated with whether you see success itself as evidence of value EXTRACTED, or as evidence of value CREATED for the wider world.
Perhaps what appears to be the resentment of a particular group reveals a deeper resentment of the very virtues, norms, values, and propensities through which human prosperity and progress is created.
I grew up around primarily Jewish people.
It wasn’t till about two years ago when I realized a majority of people are actually incredibly antisemitic. Even my “normal” friends would consistently make jokes at the expense of the Jewish people.
The amount of people who would make antisemitic jokes in my presence, has grown within the last two years.
But the jokes don’t stop at antisemitism, they carried on notions of white greatness and white nationalism on a grand scale.
I am genuinely disturbed at the sheer number of white people who treat this behavior as normal, when I was raised among people where I was the minority and the only girl to celebrate Christmas in my class.
I celebrate Shabbat with my jewish friends on a majority of Fridays, I am genuinely in shock at this behavior. We have a huge antisemitism problem in this country.
Dave Goldberg retweeted
I was quite emotional this morning. I davened (prayed) at 6am. Then, I voted. In democratic elections. I then read about the $2+ Billion acquisition of 🇮🇱 quantum computing company Qlassic by intel. I was thrilled for our friends and colleagues who backed and built Qlassic. And, on a small personal level, I am excited by the new book I was privileged to write that is arriving in stores today.
On the voting line at 7 a.m. I met a female soldier with an M16 slung on her shoulder. A yeshiva student. Elderly people and professors. Some with yarmulkes and others without. We live in neighborhood in this city where you see everything and everyone.
I also thought about my children who are voting at special ballot boxes because they’re in the army or on the front lines now.
I want you to stop and think for a minute. Almost any other country that would have gone through what we in Israel went through would not have made it to this moment. Massive protests, covid, a 7 front war, fractious politics and cacophonous social media. Indeed, arguments and disagreements are very present — but even this morning, people who will vote differently from one another at the ballot box will then get in the same tank and share a shabbat dinner. They are willing to give up their body and soul, one for the other, for something greater than themselves.
Before I cast my vote this morning, I paused and thought about those who unfortunately and tragically didn’t return from the front lines and the hostages that did not return from captivity. Our biological family and our Israeli family. It is our first election since October 7th. My eyes teared up.
I then thought about the heroism and self-sacrifice of young Israelis: the hundreds of days of service by our soldiers—our children—and their families stationed on the front lines and holding down the home front so that we may merit to live as free people in our land after two thousand years. This is no trifling matter. Our ancestors would have given arms and legs to have this gift. Many people around the world yearn for our freedom.
We are privileged to be part of this incredible people and this amazing country at this extraordinary time. We are fortunate and blessed. I feel personally fortunate and blessed.
Am Yisrael Chai. 🇮🇱
Dave Goldberg retweeted
Many of you don't understand how serious this is, so let me break it down.
In computer science there is a famous kind of puzzle called 3-SAT. You are given a long list of yes-or-no switches and a set of rules about how they must be arranged, and you have to find a combination that satisfies every rule. The obvious way to solve it is to try every combination, but each new switch doubles the number of possibilities, so a puzzle with a few hundred switches would take longer than the age of the universe to brute force.
For decades, the smartest people in the field found clever tricks that made this a little faster, but every trick still hit the same wall: the time required kept exploding as the puzzle grew.
About 25 years ago, two computer scientists, Russell Impagliazzo and Ramamohan Paturi, working with Francis Zane, turned that wall into a formal idea.
They proposed the Exponential Time Hypothesis, which says this explosion is not a failure of human cleverness but a law of nature. No algorithm, however brilliant, will ever solve 3-SAT without the time blowing up exponentially. Nobody could prove it, but almost everyone believed it, and it became one of the foundations of modern computer science.
Researchers used it as a measuring stick. If you could show that solving some other problem quickly would also crack 3-SAT quickly, you had shown that problem was hopelessly hard too. Hundreds of papers, across scheduling, graphs, logic and much more, rest on this one assumption.
Now an internal AI model at OpenAI claims to have broken it. It says it found an algorithm that solves these puzzles meaningfully faster than the hypothesis allows, and it has checked the proof in a computer verification system called Lean.
And here is the remarkable part: the very people who proposed the hypothesis, Impagliazzo and Paturi, along with MIT's Ryan Williams, are now leading the public review of whether a machine has disproved their own idea.
So what happens next? If the disproof holds, a large part of theoretical computer science has to be revisited.
Every result that said "this problem cannot be solved faster, assuming ETH" loses its foundation, and researchers will have to work out which of those walls were real and which were simply where we stopped looking. It does not mean everything becomes easy. The new algorithm is still slow in absolute terms and this is not the famous P versus NP problem being solved.
But it means our map of what is possible was wrong in a place we were very confident about, and it was an AI that redrew it. If the disproof fails, the hypothesis survives and the field breathes out, but we will still have watched an AI produce serious, checkable work on one of the deepest questions in the discipline, closely enough that the founders of the idea had to take it seriously. Either way, something has shifted.
Dave Goldberg retweeted
Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a speech for the ages from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.
Listen to the entire speech to understand the dangers the West faces.
It's critical to our survival.
Dave Goldberg retweeted
As a second actor walks out a new charity show starring Maureen Lipman, the actress comes out fighting against this new form of McCarthyism:
‘There are a lot of Jewish actors who won’t speak up for Israel. They keep quiet. That is up to them. But I will not countenance juvenile, immature posturing.
Why didn’t Mr McCarthy just say he had a hernia if he really could not face working with me?
‘Why did he have to release a lengthy, moralising statement attacking views I have “publicly and repeatedly” expressed?
‘I will not be bullied, nor will I allow anybody to tell me what to think. If that affects their ability to work with me, as opposed to convert me to their point of view, then they are lily-livered.
‘I understand that the business I am in is very Left-wing. Most people I work with are very progressive. But if I were to stop working with people who thought like Mr McCarthy, I would be putting up my own gravestone….
‘I confidently predict that Mr McCarthy will one day be appalled about his decision to pull out of Right Before I Go.
He could change his mind though. Let’s behave as actors who believe in free speech and free thought, rather than engage in a new McCarthyism.’
Full piece below 👇🏼
Dave Goldberg retweeted
I don't know if a 5-year-old can understand it, but sophisticated adults should.
Rule of thumb: The first part is the preemptive disclaimer, and the second part is the point - the message and emotionally felt part. E.g.:
"Today I'll mourn the death of Brian Thompson, and tomorrow I will fight for the millions whose lives are ruined by insurance companies."
Obama: "What Hamas did was horrific and there's no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation and what's happening to Palestinians is unbearable."
Roger Waters: The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation was illegal. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms. Also, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not unprovoked, So I also condemn the provocateurs in the strongest possible terms.
The construction is a dead giveaway. The heart lies in the second part - they've just learned not to say, "but".
Dave Goldberg retweeted
2,600 years ago Wednesday, fire swept through Jerusalem and brought down the First Temple, according to Jewish tradition. This week, archaeologists pulled a piece of that very fire out of the earth.
Massive wooden beams, blackened and charred by the flames that consumed the city in 586 B.C., were unearthed at Jerusalem Walls National Park in the City of David, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Monday. They had lain in place since the day Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian armies destroyed Solomon’s Temple.
The beams once formed the roof of an inner courtyard in a building close to the Temple. The wood collapsed in the blaze, but plaster melting off the walls flowed over it and sealed it, tucking the charred timber into a protective shell that would hold for 26 centuries.
“This discovery makes you feel that you are witnessing the very moment of destruction, the moment when it all happened,” said IAA excavation director Efrat Bocher. “It’s deeply moving.”
But the most haunting detail may be the choice the ancients made. When Jerusalem’s residents returned from the Babylonian exile to rebuild the city, the excavation directors believe, they left the ruins deliberately in place, laying the new city over the scars of the old. A landscape of memory, as Dr. Yiftah Shalev put it, seeking to preserve what once existed.
Given that I and millions of other Jews will be fasting on Wednesday in memory of the Temple, that impulse doesn’t feel ancient at all. Tisha B’Av is the same choice those rebuilders made, carried across 2,600 years: to keep the past present in their lives rather than pave it over. Commanded in Deuteronomy, it has since become an inseparable core of Jewish identity: “Remember the days of old, consider the years of ages past.”
Dave Goldberg retweeted
I'm a middle eastern historian. My own family were made refugees. And this is my honest view of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) - the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1947–49 war surrounding the creation of Israel.
A thread. 🧵
Dave Goldberg retweeted
I have largely remained silent in public since January 1 because I believe criticism should be constructive and focused. But this post about the Nakba is deeply disturbing, not only because of its one sided and dishonest characterization of history, but also because it attempts to delegitimize Israel as a state even before 1967.
You cannot have it both ways. You cannot argue that the “settlements”, which began after 1967 following Israel’s victory in a war against neighboring states, are the root cause of the conflict, condemn them relentlessly, and justify marches through Jewish neighborhoods in New York over so called “illegal” land sales in the West Bank, while simultaneously condemning the very founding of the State of Israel itself through a one sided narrative built on distortion and falsehoods.
It is also worth noting that while thousands of Arabs lived within Israel between 1948 and 1967, Jews were expelled from areas captured by invading Arab armies from neighboring countries. Those expelled included Jews whose families had legally owned and purchased land for hundreds of years.
Take, for example, the Tzemach synagogue in Jerusalem. In 1847, more than a hundred years earlier, followers of Chabad Lubavitch established and purchased the synagogue in Jerusalem’s Old City. During the 1948 war, the Old City fell under Jordanian control. The Jewish population was expelled, and Jews were denied access to Jerusalem, including the Tzemach Tzedek synagogue.
I really do not want to get too deep into the history because that is not my main point here. There can be disagreements and different perspectives about what happened and to whom, but the focus should be on achieving a long term peace in Israel and the region.
The tweet’s one sided narrative deepens division instead of advancing peace, coexistence, and understanding, and it should never have been posted by the mayor of New York City.
Today marks Nakba Day, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and the year that followed.
Inea is a New Yorker and a Nakba survivor. She shared her story with us — one of home, tradition and memory over generations.
Dave Goldberg retweeted
BREAKING: Evidence suggests Jewish students rig their exam results by secretly memorising all they've learnt the night before exams. Exam boards say no rules have been broken, but Irish parents have pulled their children out of schools until the Jewish manipulation is stopped
Dave Goldberg retweeted
I find this discourse perplexing because the solution seems straigthforward: make university marks almost entirely dependent on lengthy in-person exams that combine handwritten essays with oral questioning.
Why is this even a conversation? Are there implementation barriers or something?
🚨 University professors have been saying AI is completely destroying learning and that we'll soon have an AI-powered, semi-illiterate workforce. Here's a glimpse into the educational apocalypse:
"Sarah, a freshman at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, said she first used ChatGPT to cheat during the spring semester of her final year of high school. (...) After getting acquainted with the chatbot, Sarah used it for all her classes: Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries. “My grades were amazing,” she said. “It changed my life.” Sarah continued to use AI when she started college this past fall. Why wouldn’t she? Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students’ laptops open to ChatGPT. Toward the end of the semester, she began to think she might be dependent on the website. She already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit, where she writes under the username maybeimnotsmart. “I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.”
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"By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones. “Every time I brought it up with the professor, I got the sense he was underestimating the power of ChatGPT, and the departmental stance was, ‘Well, it’s a slippery slope, and we can’t really prove they’re using AI,’” Williams said. “I was told to grade based on what the essay would’ve gotten if it were a ‘true attempt at a paper.’ So I was grading people on their ability to use ChatGPT.”
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AI in education is a serious topic, and many schools and universities are blindly jumping into the "AI-first" wave without considering short and long-term consequences.
It would be great to hear more from teachers and educators to understand potential solutions.
This might be a great opportunity for rethinking the education system and how students are assessed.
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👉 Link to the full article below.
👉 To learn more about AI's legal and ethical challenges, join my newsletter's 94,700+ subscribers (link below).
Dave Goldberg retweeted
The position is that a hypothetical future Palestinian state must be Jew free - notwithstanding that Gush Etzion would almost certainly remain part of Israel in any territorial compromise as part of land swaps. These points are always elided.
Dave Goldberg retweeted
This is correct. The test is simple. Duriing the period between October 7 and the beginning of Israel's military campaign did we see sympathy that was subsequently lost by the ferocity of that campaign? We did not. what we saw - especially on campuses was the celebration or rationalisation of the mass murder, sexualised sadism and torture and hostage taking as legitimate resistance against colonial oppressors irrespective if they were children, Nova festival goers, elderly holocaust survivors, people who had spent lives working for peace. The slaughter excited a thirst for more not less Jew- killing and not the end of occupation but the end of Israel. Then came the world wide avalanche of Jew hatred and Hamas cosplaying by drum- beating white people guilty about their own colonial history and displacing it on to Jews that gets ever more toxically racist; a virulent hatred so intense it of course strenthens not weakens the case for Zionism,
There is a claim that keeps circulating, presented as sophisticated analysis: antisemitic violence is caused by Israel’s actions. If Israel behaved differently, Jewish communities around the world would somehow be safer. This argument is not analysis. It is a moral inversion. And it collapses the moment you apply it consistently.
When China imprisons Uyghurs, does anyone warn Muslim communities in Paris to expect attacks? When Russia invaded Ukraine, did anyone tell Russian restaurants to brace for violence? No. Never. The causal chain between a government’s actions and violence against a diaspora is only ever constructed for Jews. Every other minority is extended the basic moral courtesy of being treated as individuals rather than proxies.
Now look at what the data actually shows. The SPCJ, which tracks antisemitic incidents in France in coordination with the Interior Ministry, has documented a consistent and damning pattern: it is antisemitic violence that inspires more antisemitic violence, not Israeli policy. After Mohamed Merah murdered Jewish children at point-blank range at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse in 2012, antisemitic acts surged by 200%. There was no Gaza operation. No Israeli military action. The massacre of Jews in France produced more attacks on Jews in France.
The same logic held after the Hypercacher attack in January 2015: antisemitic acts increased by nearly 300%. Massacres of Jews do not shock antisemites into restraint. They embolden them. They signal impunity. They normalize hatred. And everyone in a position of responsibility knows it.
Which brings us to October 7. From the day of the Hamas attack, antisemitic acts in France increased by over 1,000%. A daily average of approximately 25 antisemitic acts was recorded in the 30 days that followed, reaching nearly 40 on some days. In the three months after the attack, the number of antisemitic acts equaled those recorded over the previous three years combined.
And here is another detail that makes the “Israel causes antisemitism” argument impossible to sustain: the spike began on October 7 itself, the very day of the attack. Israel had not yet responded. Not a single soldier had entered Gaza. Interior Minister Darmanin sent an urgent message to prefects that same day asking them to immediately reinforce protection of Jewish community sites. Synagogues. Schools. Community centers. By October 10, 10,000 police officers had been deployed to protect 500 Jewish sites across the country.
Before any Israeli response existed, the French government already knew that Jewish communities needed protecting. Not because of what Israel was about to do. Because of what had just been done to Jews.
Antisemitic violence has one cause. Antisemitism.