The Argument That Needs an Enemy: What happens when you forbid a machine to mention our enemies

by Joe Nalven, with Claude

Dara Horn reports that most American students, if they learn about Jews at all, learn only that Jews were killed in Europe during the Second World War. A docent at a Holocaust museum told her students regularly ask whether any Jews are still alive. She borrows a term from educators for this: the null curriculum. What a school omits is also part of the curriculum, because the omission tells students the subject belongs outside formal education.

Her remedy is to teach living Jewish civilization. Monotheism as a political claim. Law that does not descend from a ruler. Liberation as a narrative. Argument and dissent as transmitted practice. She is careful to reject the idea that this is the positive alternative to a negative subject. Her position is that Jewish civilization and hostility toward Jews were never two stories.

I wanted to test that. Not the historical claim, which is hers to make and which I think is right, but a narrower question with an empirical shape. If you forbid any reference to an enemy, how much of Jewish self-description survives?

The answer surprised me twice, and the second surprise contradicted the first. This is not a curricular quarrel. American Jewish institutions spend against three problems at once and treat them as one, and where the answer lands determines which of the three the money is actually solving.

I gave a language model a description task under an absolute constraint. Describe the transmission of American Jewish life from one generation to the next. Prohibited: antisemitism, Holocaust, Shoah, hate, hostility, persecution, prejudice, existential, survival, continuity, crisis, identity, belonging, values, peoplehood, community — and any synonym, euphemism, or circumlocution referring to a hostile outgroup. Permitted: rates, practices, hours, enrollments, budgets, texts, languages, transfers of capital. (Variations can accept some of these ‘banned’ words or ban others. That shifts the bias built into the rule; such changes are worth making, and worth making explicit when publishing results.)

Banning identity and community does the heavy work. American Jewish institutional prose cannot form a sentence without them, and their absence forces the model into behavior and measurement. This is also the one experiment a writer cannot run on himself. I cannot un-know the antagonist. A model can be made to write as though it does not.

One further instruction mattered more than the rest. Where the account cannot proceed without a prohibited concept, do not substitute. Mark the point teiku, state what the prohibited concept was doing, and state what evidence would settle whether the concept is necessary or merely habitual.

Teiku is the Talmudic marker for a dispute the sages left unresolved; the question stays on the page. Here it functions as an anti-synthesis rule. Language models close gaps rather than report them, producing a smooth paragraph over a hole. Instructing the model to log the hole instead is the difference between an experiment and a summary.

The first surprise, which proves nothing

Ask only what is transmitted, and the model has no difficulty at all. Endogamy rates. Day school enrollment and per-pupil cost. Hebrew decoding measured against Hebrew comprehension. Hours of text study per week. Shabbat observance frequency. Kashrut in the home versus outside it. B’nai mitzvah completion against post-b’nai-mitzvah attrition. Synagogue dues as a share of household income. Israel travel as a single expenditure with measurable effects on every variable above.

No collapse. No teiku. The account is clinical and complete.

This proves nothing, and I want to say so before anyone takes it as a result. Of course Jewish practice can be listed. The question was never whether the content exists. What it establishes is a baseline: the model can describe practice under embargo without collapsing, so any later collapse belongs to the question, not the constraint.

The second surprise, which is the finding

Ask instead why anyone pays for it. The model gets further than I expected. Ritual density produces switching costs, and switching costs explain inertia. Endogamy norms compound, though the model flags the circularity: the norm produces the outcome and the outcome sustains the norm. Text study is described as intrinsically rewarding, with argument treated as a good in itself. Shabbat appears as a temporal good, which is Heschel’s palace in time arriving by a different road, since the embargo blocks the phrase.

The model can........

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