AI and the Shape of the Jew

The most dangerous antisemitism is not always the one that announces itself. Sometimes it arrives as plausibility. A recent study on generative AI and antisemitic stereotypes should therefore be read not merely as another warning about technological bias, but as something more disturbing: evidence that antisemitism can survive even when antisemitic language is removed. The machine does not need to repeat the old words. It can inherit the old shape.

According to a Times of Israel report on research by Gal Gutman and Michael Gilead, published in American Psychologist, the study did not simply ask AI systems whether they liked or disliked Jews. That would have tested a slogan rather than a structure. Instead, it examined how generative AI represents “the Jew” when prompted to produce biographical material associated with Jewish and non-Jewish names. The Jewish markers were then removed, and the resulting figures were evaluated for traits such as competence, warmth, status, dominance, privilege, and likability.

The result is disturbing precisely because it is not crude. The Jewish-coded figures were not simply represented as inferior. They were represented as more competent, intelligent, organized, successful, high-status, and future-oriented, but also as colder, less likable, more dominant, more privileged, and more morally ambiguous. This is not merely bias. It is a cultural grammar: a durable way of making Jewishness plausible as competence that has already begun to turn into suspicion.

Modern antisemitism rarely needs to say, “The Jew is evil.” That sentence is now too exposed, too primitive, too historically contaminated. The more resilient form is subtler and therefore more durable. The Jew is too competent, too strategic, too successful, too influential, too unreadable, too close to power, too comfortable inside systems others barely understand. In this form, antisemitism does not appear as hatred. It appears as interpretation. It can even appear as praise.

That is the ancient trick. The Jew is not always depicted as weak, backward, or primitive. Often the opposite happens. The Jew is imagined as hyper-intelligent, managerial, calculating, invisible, over-adapted, too mobile, too literate, too networked, too prepared. The stereotype first flatters, then condemns. It grants competence, then converts competence into suspicion. The knife enters through the compliment.

This is why the language of “AI bias” is too small for what we are seeing. Bias suggests an error, a distortion, a measurable deviation from neutrality. But the problem here is not only that the model gets something wrong about Jews. The deeper problem is that it inherits a cultural rule about how Jews become narratively plausible. Antisemitism does not merely attach negative traits to Jews. It organizes the threshold at which Jewish competence becomes Jewish suspicion. It defines the passage from ability to threat.

A Jew may be intelligent, but then intelligence becomes calculation. A Jew may be successful, but........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)