PART 2: ONE JEW’S REACTION TO 2023
2023 was a horrible year for me as a Jew. We were attacked in the worst way since 1972. This was made even more poignant because we’d travelled to Israel earlier in the year which gave me a strong connection of Israel and what Israel stands for. Let’s start with the trip.
Before my trip to Israel I didn’t know much about it even though I’d spent many years studying Israel in Hebrew School. This lack of understanding reminded me of a conversation I had with Ari when he was in first grade.
It’s like when Ari, as a first grader, asked me, “Can you tell me about Andrew Cuomo?”
And I said, “Well… he’s the governor of New York… he’s a Democrat… and his dad Mario was also governor. People liked his dad a lot.”
Ari then shot back, “Tell me more. Like if you had to write a first-grade book report about Andrew Cuomo, what would you say?”
“Oh,” I said, “I don’t know enough about Andrew Cuomo to do that.”
So I realized I need to learn more about Israel. I started reading books to get up to speed. My favorite was Noa Tishby’s Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth. Tishby, with similar liberal sensibilities to me, wrote a book that helped me understand and connect to the country as I travelled through it. When I came back, it let have a far more nuanced view of the country than I’d had before.
What is Israel?
Israel was founded as a secular Jewish state. It’s about Jews as an ethnic group rather than a religion. It’s less about “Jews who pray on Saturday” Jewish, and more about “Jews who were rounded up by the Nazis” Jewish. Israel was created in 1948, just after Hitler killed 6 million of us just because we were Jews. During the Holocaust as Hitler was murdering us, there was no place for us to go.
You’d think that someone would have taken us in. Why didn’t we just go to pre-Israel British Palestine with the other Jews? Because the British placed strict limits on immigration. Why didn’t the US or some other country take us in? Because no one wanted us.
The most famous incident of abandonment was the SS St. Louis. In 1939, the St. Louis left Hamburg Germany carrying 937 Jewish refugees. The ship was headed to Cuba but denied entry. Then it stopped at in the US and Canada but found no better luck there. Finally, it was sent back to Europe where many of them were killed by the Nazis.
After the war, as Britain was divesting of its colonies, British Palestine was split into two, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. The Jews finally had a chance at a homeland. Few believed that the Jewish state, surrounded by countries who attacked it on creation, would survive. But we made the most of our plot of land and thrived.
Building and Innovating
What did the Jews do with our land? We worked incredibly hard and transformed this land into something beautiful. We created the only democracy in the Middle East. When Germany sent reparations for the atrocities of WWII, Israel spent the money building a national water system to transform the desert into lush greenery. In short, Israel is a place of innovation and working together to make things better.
On our trip we visited the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation which highlighted how Israel is using innovation to drive peace. As one example, during the Syrian Civil War in the 2010s, the Israeli military created a designated unit called Shchenoot Tova, translated as “good neighboring.” This allowed Israeli doctors to treat over two hundred thousand Syrians, a fifth of them children. As Galilee Hospital’s Dr. Eyal Sela said, “If I treat one man, 50, 1,500, and they go back to Syria, their families will be grateful. At some stage the child or grandchild will ask about their scar, and they’ll explain that the Zionist enemy treated them and saved their lives.”
Condoleezza Rice said it well when she said “Think about Israel and the Gulf states and what is developing there. Think about the fact that you could actually be at a place where the Arabs end the state of war against Israel — really end it. And why? Not because they’ve learned to love the Jewish democratic State of Israel, but because the smarter of them have realized that in order to modernize their own economies and not be completely dependent on oil, that they’re going to have to deal with the 800-pound gorilla on technology in the region, and that’s Israel.”
I learned that the only way to long lasting peace is to build something more than what’s there currently. We can’t fight over an existing piece of pie and expect to get peace.
BDS, Anti-Semitism and Double Standards
I had assumed that everyone was on the same page in terms of what we’re looking for in the Middle East—that we were all looking to work together to make the world a better place. It should be a better place for Jews as well as Arabs and everyone else. To me, that’s what being a liberal Jew is all about.
But then I learned that everyone wasn’t on this page. Even before Israel’s creation there has been a concerted campaign to destroy it. The Arab League created a pre-Israel boycott of Jewish products in 1945. This movement changed forms over the years but reemerged as BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions) in 2005. I’d seen the BDS movement on campus for years but I didn’t dig too deeply into it. I’d assumed that they were a liberal group that wanted peace in the Middle East. On its website, its official statement is this:
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I want Israel to create a long-lasting peace with the Palestinian people. I want to push the Israeli government towards that. But they’re not. Their goal is the destruction of Israel using the same tactics as their forerunners.
The BDS group is an example of antisemitic group that doesn’t seem that way on the surface. The word antisemitism is thrown around a lot which makes it hard to pin down, but the US Department of State has a good definition. According to this definition, antisemitism is about the 3D’s: Delegitimize, Demonize, Double Standard. BDS does all three:
- Delegitimize. BDS does not accept Israel’s right to exist. It considers Israel an Arab land that should be returned.
- Demonize. BDS describes Israel and the Jews as “genocidal” and “murderous.” They are comparing Israel, a liberal democracy, of being more murderous and genocidal than Hamas, it’s terrorist neighbor.
- Double Standard. The biggest double standard is how refugees are treated. Palestinian refugees are different from every other refugee in the world. BDS and others believe that the Palestinians should be able to take their homes back from the Israelis, forgetting that the majority of Israelis were evicted from their homes in neighboring Arab countries like Egypt and Iraq.
When I came back from Israel, I wanted to make a point to tell all of my liberal friends that BDS was not what they thought it was. I heard a little bit about Hamas in passing—they were a terrorist organization that gained control of Gaza and would attack Israel every few years, but didn’t seem to be much of a threat. That’s where my head was on October 6th.
October 7th
Then came October 7th. This was the worst attack on Israel in at least 50 years. This was not a military action. As Tom Friedman said, “Hamas did not send operatives to the Israeli-occupied West Bank (and it has plenty there) to attack Jewish settlements. It focused its onslaught on Israeli villages and kibbutz farms that were not part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.”
As the Israeli writer Ari Shavit told Fridman, “These were the homes of the people of pre-1967 Israel, democratic Israel, liberal Israel — living in peaceful kibbutzim or going to a life-loving disco party… [For Hamas,] Israel’s mere existence is a provocation.” Like in 1948, 1967, and 1972, this is about Israel’s right to exist. The Hamas charter, along with a number of other Arab organizations, don’t believe that Israel has the right to exist and it is their goal to destroy it.
This wasn’t a military operation but a hunt for Jews. This felt less like the Yom Kippur War of 1972 than the Russian Pogroms where Jews were just indiscriminately killed. The way to get rid of the Jews is to destroy their country and kill them.
How I Felt Abandoned by Liberals
For my whole life, I’ve skewed liberal. I’m moderate but tend to think that government can do good things for us, and we should all come together and help each other out. Jews have a long history of helping out other discriminated minorities including helping to start the NAACP. In 1914, Professor Emeritus Joel Spingarn of Columbia University became chairman and recruited eminent Jews Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen Wise to the board.
However, right after we were attacked, before Israel even went to rescue the hostages that were taken from their houses, we started to see messages saying that these attacks were justified. Somehow the world was divided into groups that are victims and those that aren’t victims. This segmentation became more important than basic humanity. As Helen Lewis writes about in The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test:
The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
The problem here is that the progressives do not see Jews as “victims.” That’s because we’ve opted out of this competition for victimhood. We can be given the most horrible situation and create something beautiful out of it. But now, because we were no longer victims, we were unworthy of basic human sympathy.
After the attacks, when I was hoping for sympathy, I felt antisemitism that I’d never felt before. Even in New York, a swastika was scrawled on the side of a kosher deli. A Jewish woman was punched in the face because “she was a Jew.” Even one of my colleagues was yelled at on the subway for wearing his yarmulke. In an environment where we were supposed to “bring our authentic selves to work” I never felt more afraid to show off my Judaism.
A Peaceful Path Forward
I want peace. Hamas does not want peace. In fact, Hamas wants a permanent state of war. They attacked on October 7th because there was likely to be a peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia that likely would have restarted the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
This is a very complicated situation. As Tom Friedman says in the New York Times, there are three different wars going on simultaneously:
- A war between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians exacerbated by a terrorist group
- A war within Israeli and Palestinian societies over the future
- A war between Iran and its proxies and America and its allies
Let’s start with the first one. Yossi Klein Halevi has a good article What this war is about on his blog. He points out that this is an existential threat for Israel. There are many words that are thrown around in this war like genocide. While Israel’s bombing campaign has led to horrible suffering, Israel’s goal is not the destruction of Gaza and all of its people. Hamas’s stated goals, on the other hand, is the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.
While it might not seem this way, Israel is responding proportionally to the attack. According to international law, a proportional response needs to take into account the nature of the threat and civilian lives. The problem is that it’s being attacked by a genocidal enemy hiding behind civilians. This means that many Palestinians are unfortunately killed when Hamas uses them as human shields.
It’s clear to everyone that “Someone should do something about this. We can’t have a terrorist origination leading 2 million people in Gaza.” Just in case you still had doubts about Hamas’s leadership before the war and how regular citizens felt, take a look at Whispered in Gaza, a series of animated interviews with Palestinians. As Dennis Ross, a former U.S. envoy to the Middle East, writes that all the Arab leaders he knows (except Iran) believe that Hamas has to be destroyed. They say this in private because the war is an ugly one, they don’t want to get Palestinian blood on their hands or be seen as supporting Israel.
But though it’s imperative for Israel to destroy Hamas, there needs to be a path forward to create a Palestinian government that can rule Gaza with the goal of helping the people of Gaza rather than the goal of destroying Israel. This will be a challenge for Israel and the international community. Tom Friedman sums it up well in the Times:
There’s a single formula that can maximize the chances that the forces of decency can prevail in all three. It is the formula that I think President Biden is pushing, even if he can’t spell it all out publicly now — and we should all push it with him: You should want Hamas defeated, as many Gazan civilians as possible spared, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his extremist allies booted, all the hostages returned, Iran deterred and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank reinvigorated in partnership with moderate Arab states.
PART 2B: WHAT YOU CAN DO. AN EXPERIMENT ON CARING
I’ve written these letters for about 10 years but this one was by far the hardest. I needed to write about Israel because that was the defining moment of my year and I wanted all of you to understand how I was feeling. But many of my Jewish friends told me, “If you send something like this out, you’ll be making a political statement. People will send you hate mail.” I told them this wouldn’t happen.
When I’ve been telling people this story verbally over the past couple of weeks, I found the opposite to be true. A surprising number of people said, “How can I help?” They also said, “I’m not sure what to say. I don’t want to overstep my bounds.”
So the best thing you can do is reply to this email with a quick note of caring. It doesn’t have to be more than a few words, but it’s good to know that there’s more caring in the world than the hatred spread by the media.
Now for something more fun!
PART 3: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS ABOUT TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE
Early adopters of this language will influence the unimaginable machines of the future, and, soon enough, this vocabulary will not be optional. The question is: Will you opt in now, or later? — John Maeda, Talking in Code
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI says, “The future is about to change. We could have gone off and just built this in our building here for five more years and we would have had something jaw-dropping.” But instead, he’s decided to bring out iterative versions of the software to let people get ready for it. It’s like Steve Jobs showing you a preview of the iPhone. So let’s take this opportunity and play with it!
What Makes This New Breed of AI Different?
Artificial Intelligence has been getting very good at specific tasks. Most people are surprised to learn that Google’s spell check and translation engines are not powered by human linguists but by data and statistics (click on the links for the details). The goal of these systems is to automate “boring” work. But now these tools are being used to do things that we thought only humans could do. Computers can now make decisions on hiring, write essays, and even tell jokes.
How did this happen? Computer scientists have been looking at Artificial Intelligence and saying, “What if we could try to model the brain and human thinking?” They did it by building a basic model of the brain called a neural network that has “neurons” and “connections” that resemble the brain at a high level. These models were successful at many AI tasks, but they didn’t do anything resembling “thinking.” Then the team at OpenAI tried something new. What if we used these neural networks to try to predict the next word, training it on the entire internet? By predicting the next word in text, they could gradually write sentences, paragraphs, and essays.
What was shocking in this process was that by doing this, they didn’t just predict the next word but they seemed to have figured out how language (and the brain) works. As Stephen Wolfram wrote in his summary of the technology, “I think we have to view this as a potentially surprising scientific discovery: that somehow in a neural net like ChatGPT, it’s possible to capture the essence of what human brains manage to do in generating language.”
How To Use An LLM: Pretend It’s Your Intern
I wrote this for you but also published it on Mind the Product on December 20th.
Congratulations! You’re about to get a new intern! She may be named Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI, ChatGPT, or Google Bard. Whatever her name, she’s a large language model that can make you more efficient and creative.
Rather than thinking of this new assistant as just another tool, I’ve found it useful to think of her as a virtual intern. She’s a Large Language Model (LLM) built from neural networks that simulate the human brain. This makes her very different from other virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa. Rather than just providing you with the answers to questions, she can collaborate with you and help you develop your ideas.
But she’s different from your typical intern. She’s been trained on the entire internet. She’s read everything from Shakespeare to Seinfeld to quantum mechanics, and she’s lightning fast at pulling all this stuff together. And while she’s surprisingly creative, she has a habit of making stuff up. Overall, she’s very diligent but a bit quirky which makes her difficult to manage. To help you manage her more effectively, I’ve put together these five tips:
1. Set clear objectives
She’s a great researcher and she’s very educated, but she needs to be pointed in the right direction. You should do this for any employee, but your virtual intern takes it to another level. Tell her to do something, and she will execute the hell out of it without a fuss—whether or not it makes sense. She has no clue what to prioritize. If you tell her to “Explain quantum mechanics as if you were a dog,” she will come back with “Quantum mechanics is when you can be in two places at once, like when you chase your own tail and catch it.” It’s important to remember that, despite her name, she’s not actually “intelligent” like a person. People often get confused by the words “Artificial Intelligence,” and think that a computer program can “just figure it out for them” for them without any guidance. She’s more like a GPS that can help you get where you’re going more effectively.
2. Take responsibility for her work
I don’t mean that you should plagiarize her work. But once she gives you an answer, you need to make sure it’s the right solution to your problem. This can be tricky because she writes in a very compelling fashion with lots of confidence, even when she’s wrong. Remember, she’s trained on the entire internet. But before you share her ideas with others, make sure you think them through and check that they apply to your situation. Today, many institutions rely on AI to make decisions for them. They rely on AI systems today to make lending decisions, hiring decisions, and parole decisions. Just like with a human intern, you own that decision and can’t pass off responsibility to someone else. “Don’t blame me, the AI said so” is not an acceptable answer.
3. Check her work carefully
She works really hard and bullshits really well. She does both of these things literally a billion times better than a human. Instead of saying “I don’t know,” she may create long expositions that are made up of whole cloth. These may even include references to fictitious websites, articles, or even legal cases that are completely made up. Recently, one of her fellow virtual interns worked for Roberto Mata when he sued the airline Avianca. His ChatGPT intern cited a half dozen imaginary cases. Some people call it AI hallucinations, but the interns prefer to call it creative writing.
4. Learn to Communicate better with her
Like any new super smart intern, she thinks she knows everything and doesn’t know when to ask for help. Therefore it’s useful to guide her with prompts and examples of how to do things. As an example, virtual interns are notoriously bad at math. This is because she likes to jump to conclusions based on what she’s seen before. When I asked her, “What’s (7 * 4) – (16 * 2)?” she told me the answer was -12, which is wrong. The right answer is -4. But it is the right answer to “What’s (5 * 4) – (16 * 2)?” but in math, close isn’t good enough. Remember, she doesn’t think the same way a person does. But when I change the prompt slightly to “What’s (7 * 4) – (16 * 2)? Go step by step,” she provides a flawless answer and shows all the intermediate steps. There’s a whole new field called prompt engineering to help communicate with her.
5. Brainstorm lots of ideas
Use her as a brainstorming partner, not a ghostwriter. She’s great at generating ideas, so use her explore different angles, perspectives, and examples. But remember, while she comes up with a lot of good ideas, she also comes up with a lot of bad ones. When asking for her to write something, don’t be proscriptive and rely on just one answer. Ask her for a few different options. Ask her questions like, “Give me 10 ideas of how AI can be used to help me at work.” You’ll get some good ones, like “Automate repetitive and tedious tasks such as data entry, scheduling, invoicing, etc.” but also some bad ones like, “You can use AI to impersonate your coworkers and spy on them.” I’m just kidding. For that one I asked her for 10 “bad” ways to use AI and picked the worst one.
Just try it
Congratulations! Now you’re ready to work with your new intern. Don’t be scared. The best way to master this new world is to experiment. She’s not real person so she won’t mind if you send her on crazy missions or try out new things. It’s a great way to test your ideas and see what she can do. You can play with ChatGPT Plus or Bing’s AI Chat for free. It’s fun to see what she can do. For example, I’ve found that she can have the cast of Seinfeld explain difficult concepts. Here’s how she explains LLMs through a Seinfeld script.
Remember to think of her as a partner rather than someone to fetch your coffee. She can help come up with new and innovative solutions that you’ve never thought of. Leverage her correctly and she will surprise you, inspire you, and challenge you.
Explore, Create, and Have fun!
If you’re interested in learning more, check out the following:
- My website has quite a bit on AI.
- Impromptu (especially the first 50 pages) by Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of OpenAI, who co-authored the book with ChatGPT.
- How to Speak Machine by John Maeda, written in 2019, this book goes very deep into how humans and machines work together.
- What is ChatGPT and How does it Work and Will AIs Take All Our Jobs and End Human History—or Not? Well, It’s Complicated… are two good articles that go deep into the technology.
PART 4: A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS
This was a hard year but an important one. I wanted to leave you with something fun for you to do:
- Samsung Frame TV. This is our favorite purchase for our new house because of one big trick. When it’s not in use, it disappears and becomes a piece of art. This makes it perfect for a Manhattan apartment where we need everything to do more than one job.
- AirPods Pro. The New York City subway is a sonic health hazard. Train noise approaches 110 decibels. With these noise cancelling headphones, the subway becomes a softer, more relaxing, and healthier place. Also, at home, instead of telling someone to turn down the TV, I can just turn on my noise cancelling.
- Bullet Journal. I love my Bullet Journal. I wrote about this extensively in last year’s letter. This analog journal and planner help me to structure my life, relax, and get the important things done. I got started with some quick YouTube videos and learned a lot more from the book/audiobook. This year I went a level deeper and bought a Bullet Journal Premium membership and class.
- Comedy. Two great specials for the year were nominated for an Emmy. Trevor Noah’s I Wish You Would hits on many of the humorous cross-cultural themes of his autobiography. John Mulaney’s Baby J, is a crazy story of Mulany’s trip to recovery and back.
- Pranking Zoom Meetings. Apple included a fun Easter Egg in iOS 17. By making certain shapes with your hands, you can make fireworks, hearts, or lasers appear. However, Apple turned this on default for all video communications. This has led to some embarrassing situations at work including an only therapy session gone awry.
BYE FOR NOW
As I sign off from this email, I wanted to leave you with one of my cards. I wrote about the story behind these cards, but the message stands by itself. Thanks for being my friend. You’re Awesome. Let’s Talk.
Rob
P.S. If you’d like to read more of my writing check out schlaff.com. If you want to get more articles by email you can subscribe here. If you want to unsubscribe from this annual letter you can do it here.