I began this blog in the weeks after October 7 to think in public about Jewish life, our safety, memory, identity, and politics. I posted unevenly, sometimes wide, sometimes narrowly, but the center of gravity has been consistent.

The world is entering an era in which artificial intelligence will not merely sit on top of society like another app. It will become part of the infrastructure of reality, how information is ranked, how narratives spread, how reputations are made and broken, how threats organize, and how communities defend themselves. Going forward, this blog will be laser-focused on AI and the Jewish future.

And that brings me to the question I’ve been wrestling with for the last eighteen months, the one that sounds like a punchline until you sit with it long enough to feel the seriousness beneath the grin. It’s the title of my book and the organizing question of this project: Is AI Good for the Jews?

Why Jews Ask the Hard Question First

 Jews have a cultural habit of asking the most anxious question in the room and asking it early. Is this good for the Jews? becomes a kind of folk risk-assessment framework, a Shabbat dinner version of scenario planning.

This habit isn’t paranoia so much as historical pattern recognition. When you’ve lived through centuries where rumors harden into laws, where scapegoating becomes policy, and safety can evaporate between one decade and the next, you develop instincts that resemble comedy on the surface and survival underneath.

Jews are also a civilization trained in interpretation and debate, the people of the book. AI, meanwhile,  is helping transform us into the people of the cloud, uploading memory and identity onto platforms that store everything and forget nothing. AI, in this view, isn’t simply another tool, but the next medium through which meaning itself gets sorted, summarized, and redistributed.

And whenever a society changes the medium through which meaning moves, Jews tend to notice the risk before everyone else does because we’ve often been the first targets of its darker side.

Every Tech Revolution Came With a Jewish Price Tag

Major revolutions in communication and transportation expand opportunity for everyone. History shows they also create new mechanisms for mass coordination against Jews and other minorities.

The printing press democratized knowledge and made Jewish texts easier to reproduce, but it also made mass distribution of antisemitic tracts easier, accelerating viral blood-libel style propaganda centuries before the........

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