{"id":102905,"date":"2026-07-11T23:09:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T23:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/102905\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T23:09:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T23:09:09","slug":"jewish-success-in-ai-is-fueling-an-old-debate-about-antisemitism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/102905\/","title":{"rendered":"Jewish success in AI is fueling an old debate about antisemitism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many have wondered about Jewish over-representation in just about every intellectual pursuit. Simply googling the words \u201cJewish genius\u201d yields over 30,000 results.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always thought that disproportionate Jewish achievement is due to a cultural and religious emphasis on education, debate, and literacy, as well as to the pressures of widespread discrimination, not genius.<\/p>\n

But I do admit that the term genius occasionally crosses my mind, as when I was reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao about OpenAI<\/a>, one of the leaders in the current race to develop artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

It is impossible to read the book and not notice the significant roles played by Jews: Sam Altman<\/a>, the CEO; Ilya Sutzkever; and the Bengio brothers, Samy and Yoshua. While Altman is an American Jew who was born and raised in the US, Sutzkever was born in the Soviet Union and educated in Israel and Canada. The Bengio brothers are Canadian computer scientists who were born in France to Moroccan-Jewish parents.<\/p>\n

\"OpenAIOpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024 (credit: REUTERS\/DADO RUVIC\/ILLUSTRATION\/FILE PHOTO)<\/p>\n

The name Sutzkever drew my attention. My immigrant parents spoke Yiddish and participated in the rich Yiddish cultural life of Montreal as I was growing up. From them, I understood that Abraham Sutzkever was one of the foremost Yiddish poets of the 20th century. I wondered if there was a family connection to Ilya, and it turns out that there may be a distant kinship (Abraham died in 2010), but there is no direct connection.<\/p>\n

Hao’s book evokes other prominent Jewish poets\u00a0<\/p>\n

The book also reminded me of another prominent Yiddish poet whose work my parents knew, Kadia Molodovsky, and one poem in particular. Molodovsky\u2019s life as a Yiddish writer began in Warsaw, Poland, and continued in New York after she immigrated to the US before World War II. The poem, \u201cEl Khanun\u201d (God of Mercy), written in 1944, is a heart-wrenching expression of her anguish over the trauma experienced by the Jewish people during World War II.<\/p>\n

The poem asks God to choose another people, saying that the Jews have no more blood to sacrifice. They have run out of prayers. They \u201chave paid for every letter of the Ten Commandments with the lives of the aged, the young and the innocent.\u201d<\/p>\n

It asks God to give the prophecies and the Ten Days of Repentance<\/a> to another people, and give the Jewish people simple, ordinary lives and humble tasks as shepherds or blacksmiths.<\/p>\n

The poem\u2019s final line has stirred the most interest. In a poignant plea, Molodovsky, like many of her Yiddish-writing contemporaries, a secular Jew, asks God for one more favor. The key Yiddish words she uses are “shkhine,” or Godly spirit, and “geoynes,” genius, and the line has been translated (see Ben Kline, The Quality of Mercy) as \u201cTake back what is godly from our genius.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sowell: ‘As long as you succeed, you’re going to be hated’<\/p>\n

When the well-known American economist and social commentator Thomas Sowell was asked what Jews themselves can do to minimize the hostility they face, he responded with a one-word answer: fail. \u201cBecause as long as you succeed you\u2019re going to be hated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sowell\u2019s advice is \u201ceasier said than done,\u201d and the Jewish contributions to the development of AI that were noted above indicate that his advice has not been followed. Nor has Molodovsky\u2019s plea to the almighty borne fruit.<\/p>\n

Today, close to one-half of the world\u2019s Jews live in Israel. If you ask Google AI about Israel, a tiny country with a population barely over 10 million, you find that it is a major AI powerhouse, ranking alongside the US, China, and the UK.<\/p>\n

Israel boasts more than 2,300 AI start-up companies<\/a>, about 25% of the total start-ups in the country. The emphasis is on applied AI. In terms of AI adoption, Israel ranks number one in the world, with as many as 95% of technology workers using AI in their day-to-day work.<\/p>\n

Recently, former prime minister Naftali Bennett was cited as saying that Israel must treat AI as one of the central tools of national survival.<\/p>\n

Failure is not an option.<\/p>\n

The writer, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor of the University of Waterloo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Many have wondered about Jewish over-representation in just about every intellectual pursuit. Simply googling the words \u201cJewish genius\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102906,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,132,1590,53391,32891,157,137],"class_list":["post-102905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-google","tag-israel","tag-israel-start-up-nation","tag-jews","tag-openai","tag-start-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}