Will AI put me out of a job?

by Brian on November 16, 2024

in Covid-19,Health,In the News,Only in Israel,Reviews,Technology

I started using artificial intelligence in my writing work almost by accident.

I was writing a case study for a client about a Wolt-competitive delivery service based in Umm al-Fahm called HAAT. Some of the interviews we conducted were in Arabic. We had a HAAT employee help ask the questions, but when we got the video back from the interviews, we didn’t feel comfortable asking the translator to pour over hours of tape and write down everything she heard.

So, I ran the audio through a Mac-based app called Whisper Transcription. Whisper transcribed it into both Arabic and English text. It even included the timecode so we could easily add subtitles to the video.

Whisper Transcription uses artificial intelligence to work its magic. I have extracted salient points from dozens of podcasts this way. Compared to how I used to do it – painstakingly playing the audio while typing, stopping and scrolling whenever the audio got ahead of me – this has saved me innumerable hours of annoying grunt work. 

The next step in my AI evolution was not a work-related issue but a personal one. 

When Covid-19 hit, I moved my therapy sessions from in-person to Zoom. I’ll then take notes either afterward or during the session itself. 

Then I discovered Read.ai. A more fully-featured AI transcription tool than Whisper, Read.ai has a plug-in for Zoom that automatically launches and captures any audio. When you’re finished, Read.ai sends you a link to its transcription online.

Read.ai does more than transcribe: It also summarizes the conversation, presents a list of action items, and even grades you on how personable and attentive it felt you were during the session. I now take my hands off the keyboard during therapy and highlight the text later. 

Whisper and Read pale in comparison to the incredible utility that comes with Google’s new NotebookLM tool.

Utilizing Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro AI, NotebookLM (the LM is short for “large language model”) is astounding. Aimed at helping writers make sense of their research, you simply upload your documents, and, like Read.ai, the AI will summarize them for you.

That’s just the start, though.

NotebookLM suggests query topics, or you can type in your own. I gave NotebookLM a PDF of my book, Totaled. “What were the key factors that led to the failure of Better Place, according to the author?” it asked. “Evaluate the management style of Shai Agassi as to the success or failure of Better Place.” 

Which got me concerned: Will our content-creating jobs someday be threatened by AI? 

I didn’t think so – until I discovered a NotebookLM feature that blew me away. The app can generate a 10-minute podcast based on your material. Two chirpy NPR-style narrators banter back and forth, talking over each other, disagreeing, then coming together, as they discuss the merits of your work. 

The result is unnervingly realistic. The narrators don’t sound like they are computer-generated (other than a few grammatical gaffes here and there). They can, at times, be quite smart, unlocking insights I didn’t even realize I’d written. 

For example, I’ve been noodling for a few years now on ideas for a novel but have been having trouble figuring out the main plot points. I plugged my notes into NotebookLM. The podcast hosts honed in on what the main thrust of the book should be (spoiler alert: It wasn’t necessarily what I was thinking) while surfacing some illogical contradictions.

I’ve used AI in various other ways.

  • For a book I’ve been working on with a client, we wanted to include a series of graphics that would have a consistent look and feel. Dall-e, an AI image-generation program, did a yeoman’s job.
  • I’m a huge fan of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. So, I asked an app called Songer to write me a song in the band’s early 1970s style. The song sounded more like Rush or Black Sabbath than Genesis. Still, it’s only a matter of time before musicians join the list of artists disintermediated by AI.
  • When I was working on the audiobook version of Totaled, I considered using an AI tool such as Revoicer or Podcastle to turn my text into narration. They did pretty well, especially with a British-accented voiceover, but when I uploaded some samples of my own voice to “clone,” the result came out choppy and distorted. Plus, the AI had trouble enunciating Hebrew words and names. I stuck with the old-fashioned way and recorded it myself.

Beyond my personal experience, Israeli high-tech is fast becoming an AI leader. Among the companies worth tracking:

  • Immuneai is mapping the entire human immune system to explain why people react differently to viruses, cancer, autoimmune and degenerative diseases.
  • IdentifAI has developed a noninvasive prenatal blood test that can detect problems with the fetus with a low level of false positives.
  • RespirAI has created an algorithm that uses sensor data from smartwatches to predict when respiratory deterioration is imminent.
  • Clarity.ai is tackling what CEO Michael Matias calls “the invasion of deceit” – specifically, deepfakes that have confused audiences as to whether Taylor Swift did that or whether Donald Trump said that (he probably did).
  • Visionary.ai has partnered with Qualcomm to bring better pictures and videos in low light to an Android smartphone near you.

Do I believe these newfangled AI tools will send the creative class to work at a local McDonald’s? No. That doesn’t mean the day won’t come when computers surpass human cognition. Elon Musk is betting his latest company, Neuralink, on just that. Ray Kurzweil predicts in his 2024 book The Singularity is Nearer that AI will reach human intelligence by 2029 and merge with humans by 2045.

To see what’s coming next, go to http://bit.ly/4fFKSSB where I asked NotebookLM to generate an AI podcast version of this column. 

I first wrote about my AI adventures in The Jerusalem Post.

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Is Jewish universalism the source of antisemitism?

by Brian on November 2, 2024

in Jewish Holidays and Culture,The Old Country,War in Gaza,War with Hezbollah

Sometimes an idea can upend decades of thinking. That’s what Dara Horn’s recent essay (“October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Antisemitism”) in The Atlantic did for me. 

Horn, the author of People Love Dead Jews, offers up a definition of antisemitism for the post-Oct. 7 world. The source of Jew hatred, Horn writes, is not that the Jews killed Jesus or refused to accept Muhammed’s teaching. Rather, it stems from the very core of the Jewish experience in the Diaspora – and for many years a key tenet of my own beliefs.

Judaism, I felt growing up, should focus on the universal, not the particular. We should stand up for the oppressed and downtrodden whomever they are. Fixating internally on the problems of one’s own people ignores the world’s most pressing issues. 

Moreover, the concept of tikkun olam – of making the world a better place – well, isn’t that what Judaism ought to be about, rather than arguing over the minutiae of ancient laws on how to slaughter a goat?

Yet, by embracing universalism over particularism, many Jews have assimilated our unique values into the narratives of our enemies.

Horn lays out how this happened. 

She starts by pointing out how Holocaust education in North America, which increasingly posits that all genocides are equivalent, has become a “massive appropriation of the Jewish experience that obscured, behind a screen of happy universalism, an intellectual tradition that has been used to justify the demonization of Jews for millennia.”

This appropriation, Horn explains, is “entirely consistent with what non-Jewish societies have routinely done with the Jewish experience: Claim that that experience [applies] to ‘everyone,’ and then use it to demonstrate how wrong Jews are for rejecting the ‘universalism’ of their own experience — for refusing to be just like everyone else.”

Here are several salient examples from history.

  • Christianity appropriated the Old Testament, stated that Christians were the “new Israel,” then excoriated Jews for failing to accept the Church’s universal salvation while promoting “supersessionism,” the claim that Christianity had replaced the Jews as the legitimate heirs to the identity of Israel. 
  • Islam did this too, insisting the Quran “was the true universal message and the Torah, which shares many of the Quran’s stories and precedes it by many centuries, was somehow ‘corrupted,’” Horn writes. 
  • Rational-minded Germans at the turn of the last century didn’t feel comfortable playing the supersessionist card. So, instead, they decided they were the ones experiencing subjugation. By whom? The Jews, of course.
  • When the former USSR announced the official memorial for the 100,000 people massacred at Babyn Yar, the text read that the Nazis had murdered “citizens of Kyiv.” That is, “the Soviets declared themselves – not the Jews who went unmentioned – to be Nazism’s chief victims,” Horn explains. 

The modern Jewish impetus to focus on universal values, while minimizing the particulars of being Jewish, has backfired spectacularly. That was the case even before Hamas’s invasion of Israel and mega-atrocity on October 7. Afterward, the masks came off (or went on, depending on who’s protesting) and the disastrous repercussions of our obsession became manifest.

We are being canceled everywhere, from the political – where Jewish college students are not allowed to pass on their way to class – to the literary – where having a Jewish-sounding name is enough to brand one a “Zionist” and therefore not acceptable to participate in an authors’ roundtable.

And yet when Jews complain, Horn writes, we are told that it is we who “are perniciously shutting down ‘free speech.’” 

Is it time to reignite the particular and jettison those touchy-feely universal concerns? Bret Stephens, writing in The New York Times, hints that this will be his approach.

“To have been born a Jew is the single most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” he opines. “It is therefore worth the time it takes to explore and worth the cost — including, tragically, the cost in bigotry and violence — it so often extracts.”

Shimon Rafaeli, writing in Tablet, sums up the conundrum.

“We’re citizens of the global village, wearing sports shirts like the rest of the world, participating fully in Western culture,” he notes. “[That has] led many of us to abandon our historical identification with the collective Jewish story.”

If ever we needed reinforcement of that historical connection, the post-Oct. 7 protests around the world have made it clear. 

“The great post-Holocaust achievement of North American Jews was the gradual end of their ‘conditional acceptance,’” writes Yossi Klein Halevi. But now, “the sense of their acceptance in society – from universities to the political system to the streets – is eroding.”

Perhaps it was always an illusion.

This doesn’t mean we should drop all concerns for universal issues like combating climate change and racism to instead set up tefillin stands on every street corner. 

But, as per Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we have to think of ourselves first. As Jews and Israelis, our personal and national security trumps seeking the world’s goodwill by becoming assimilated universalists. As journalist Douglas Murray quips, “History shows that only one people will protect the Jewish people: the Jewish people.” 

Rabbi Amiel Hirsch, of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, addressed young Jewish universalists in his Yom Kippur sermon this year. “We tried to instill in you a sense of justice, righteousness and honor for all people. We did not intend for some in your generation to turn their backs on our people. We wanted you to be Zionists. We did not intend that our emphasis on tikkun olam would lead some Jews to join anti-Israel demonstrations.”

If the tides continue to turn against us, we must internalize that no universalist from outside the community is coming to help us. What that looks like will differ according to each person. For my family, moving to Israel was the best way to actualize this realization. 

How will you change when your particular overtakes the universal?

I first wrote about universalism vs. particularism for The Jerusalem Post.

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30 years of aliyah

by Brian on October 20, 2024

in A Parent in Israel,Just For Fun,Only in Israel,Politics,The Old Country,War in Gaza,War with Hezbollah

Last week, our family marked our thirty-year “aliyaversary,” three decades since we moved from California to Jerusalem in 1994.

Blum family in Jerusalem 30 years later (With son-in-law Gabe. Missing: granddaughter Roni.)

It won’t be a spoiler to state that there have been some stark ups and downs. Still, if life in Israel were just an unending litany of horror and remorse, I doubt we would have stayed. But the positives continue to outweigh the downsides. 

Here are 30 reasons we moved to Israel – and why you should consider doing so, too…even now. Some of these may be familiar; others, I hope, will be surprising, even personal.

  1. No longer an astronaut. In California, we would walk on Shabbat from one Jewish bubble – our home – to another – the synagogue. For everything in between, we were wearing “spacesuits,” hiding our identities from the outside world. Not so in Israel. 
  2. A collective Shabbat. Saul Singer and Dan Senor describe the importance of the day in their new book, The Genius of Israel: It’s like having “Thanksgiving every week.”
  3. The food. When we first made aliyah, it was all about the cucumbers and tomatoes. These days, I’m digging the fusion of Asian, Arabic and Ashkenazi cuisines. And a shout out to falafel, shawarma and shakshuka, of course.
  4. Healthcare. I’ve received outstanding care throughout my cancer journey thanks to a cadre of attentive doctors and a national healthcare system that puts where we came from to shame. No more stressing about $15,000 deductibles.
  5. The weather. Those living along the coast will likely complain about Israel’s hot and humid summers. For Jerusalemites, the nights are delightfully cool. And Tel Aviv winters remain mild albeit wet.
  6. The Mediterranean. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was never a beachgoer – the Pacific Ocean was just too cold. But the warm bathwater of the Mediterranean in August suits me just fine. Just keep the jellyfish at bay.
  7. “Datlashim.” When we lived in the U.S., I adopted a religious lifestyle. In Israel, I gradually became less stringent as I learned you can be proudly Jewish without following all the mitzvot. The Hebrew acronym for someone who is formerly religious is “datlash.” I doubt I would have gotten to this point if we’d stayed in the U.S. (I first wrote about datlashim in 2015.)
  8. Chutzpah. It’s frustrating when someone pushes their way in line at the supermarket. But Israelis’ ability to be blunt is a much-needed attitude in a mealy-mouthed world where everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. 
  9. Grandparenting. If we lived in the U.S., we’d probably still be grandparents, but it’s less likely that our children and grandkids would live within walking distance. 
  10. Antisemitism. Living in Israel – despite all that’s happened in the last year – still feels safer than not knowing if the person you’re talking to is an ally or enemy. That’s in large part because we can defend ourselves. Indeed, on October 7, we learned exactly what would happen to the Jewish people if there was no army to protect us. The military has, thankfully, since got its mojo back.
  11. A miracle happened “here” not “there.” The letters on the Hanukah dreidel in Israel spell out that the miracle of the holiday happened right “here” not somewhere over “there” as on Diaspora dreidels.
  12. Startup Nation. The last two years have battered Israel’s high-tech ecosystem, but with our innovation, entrepreneurship, and can-do attitude, we will bounce back. 
  13. Birth rate. When I was growing up, the world’s population was predicted to become unsustainable. Instead, the opposite is happening. In every Western country, the birth rate has dipped below the replacement rate. Not so in Israel, where we don’t have to run ads on TV, as in Denmark, to encourage young couples to have more sex.
  14. Public transportation. My kids say taking the bus in this country sucks. But in the suburb where I grew up, there was zero public transportation. So, if the bus comes every 20 minutes, not every five, I see that as a blessing, not a curse.
  15. Hiking. We were not outdoorsy types in the U.S. But we became hikers after moving to Israel. Is it as beautiful as Bali or as nice as Norway? Nope. But it’s ours, it’s accessible, and trekking is a shared national pastime. 
  16. Hebrew. Just because I don’t speak the language well doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the wonderful creativity that is generated every day by this revitalized tongue or my descendants, who are entirely bilingual. 
  17. Independent children. When our kids were young, we took them to a big park in Ra’anana. Israel is not a society of helicopter parents and we lost track of them briefly. We needn’t have panicked. A kindly mother brought them back to us.
  18. Israeli music. Egged bus drivers used to blast out music on their radios. That’s how I fell in love with Israeli rock, an affair that has continued to this day with indie bands like Lola Marsh.
  19. Bamba. While American parents were having a multi-decade freakout over peanut allergies, Israeli children were happily munching these peanut-flavored snacks. It turns out it was banning peanuts that was increasing the allergies. 
  20. Golden Burger. In the 1990s, fast food in Israel meant pizza or falafel. Now it’s all about the burgers. And the ones at Jerusalem’s Golden Burger are among the best I’ve had anywhere. Kosher, too.
  21. Cheaper Jewish education. Would our children have received a better education at a Jewish day school in the States? With a price tag of up to $60,000 a year, it wasn’t even a consideration. Ditto for college. The tuition for a year at Hebrew University: just $4,000. 
  22. The parliamentary system. Too many politicians in Israel’s government are corrupt, to be sure, but our multi-party coalition system gives everyone a voice, unlike with just two-parties where, if you don’t like the candidates, you’re stuck. 
  23. Happiness. Israel ranked fifth on the latest World Happiness Ratings – despite the wars with Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. A sense of shared purpose and feeling like you’re a part of something greater than yourself makes all the difference. 
  24. Connection. Forget six degrees of separation. There’s no one in the country who didn’t know someone killed or captured on Oct. 7. That same sense of connection is what fueled civil society to step up when the government went AWOL.
  25. Alternative Jewish communities. Kehilat Zion in Jerusalem calls itself an “Eretzisraeli” congregation. With musical instruments for Kabbalat Shabbat, a Sephardi nusach, and women-led davening, it’s far from mainstream Orthodox.
  26. Israeli TV. First it was Fauda, Shtisel and Srugim. That’s now expanded to include shows like The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, A Body That Works, Tehran and more that have made their way to Netflix and the international streamers.
  27. Life expectancy. Israeli citizens can hope to live to 82.3 years of age, higher than the U.S., UK, Canada and Germany. Maybe it’s all that falafel.
  28. Hatikva is a catchier national anthem…than the Star-Spangled Banner, at least, which no one can properly sing. HaTikva is melodic and brief, with lyrics relevant to our shared experience.
  29. To be normal as a Jew. This one was suggested by a fellow immigrant, from France, who added, “Perhaps to be normal, you have to live in an abnormal country.”
  30. Resilience. Visitors to Israel are routinely perplexed by the packed cafes and beaches that fill up so soon after a missile attack. Our unbreakable spirit may be the best reason to make aliyah. 

I first posted this list at The Jerusalem Post.

Five years ago, I wrote about “25 reasons to live in Israel.” There’s some overlap but I tried to keep the lists unique. Read the previous column here.

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The black swans of Rosh Hashana

by Brian on October 6, 2024

in Cancer,In the News,Jewish Holidays and Culture,Living Through Terror,Politics,War in Gaza,War with Hezbollah

Mathematician Nassim Taleb popularized the term “black swan effect” to refer to the kinds of big phenomena one never thought would happen and that have a potentially catastrophic outcome. 

The origins of the expression date backs to the second century CE when the Roman poet Juvenal referred to “a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan,” as the Romans had only encountered white swans. A complete biological theory was developed to explain the swans’ singular coloring – that is, until the 17th century, when Dutch mariners discovered black swans in Australia, thereby rendering the paradigm obsolete in the blink of a black eye.

While Taleb may not have come up with the term “black swan,” he applied it to statistically unexpected events of such large magnitude that they profoundly affect history. A small number of black swans, Taleb says, can explain just about everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions to elements of our personal lives.

Taleb’s black swans can be characterized by a triplet: rarity, extreme impact and retrospective predictability.

  • Rarity: A black swan event is an outlier that exists beyond the realm of normal expectations. Nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.
  • Extreme impact: The Black Plague of the Middle Ages is frequently cited here. In the modern age, Covid-19 serves a similar role, since the pandemic arrived unexpectedly and transformed society.
  • Retrospective predictability: Human nature prompts us to concoct after-the-fact explanations for how a seemingly inexplicable black swan event could occur. If we can predict a black swan, the thinking goes, we might be able to better manage it if it happens again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about black swans as Rosh Hashana approaches this year, just days before the one-year anniversary of October 7, the Middle East’s most infamous black swan of the last year. 

The events of. Oct. 7 were rare (hopefully), had extreme impact (Israeli society has changed drastically in the 12 months since), and we are now in the phase of trying to make sense (after the fact) of what happened on that dark day and the subsequent unleashing of unbridled antisemitism around the world.

What Oct. 7 taught us is that everything taken for granted can be flipped with little or no warning. That’s a message in keeping with the High Holyday season liturgy, which hints at the existence of black swans. 

On Rosh Hashana, we pray that our actions over the past year will warrant inscription in the Book of Life, while at the same time admitting that we have little control over our fates and that black swan-inspired change can happen on a dime when we least anticipate it.

Black swan events are everywhere. 

  • When a soldier or civilian is killed, everything changes radically for his or her family. Retroactively trying to understand the “why” behind the death is in keeping with black swan theory.
  • A cancer diagnosis frequently comes out of the blue; it immediately changes the way you approach life, increases your awareness of the imminence of death, while reorienting your personal and professional priorities.
  • When the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, everything changed – for the people who died, of course, but also the long-term direction of nuclear warfare.
  • Natural disasters – an earthquake, tornado or tsunami – all leave the playing field vastly changed from what it was just moments before. 
  • Some analysts may claim they can foresee a stock market crash, but for most people, it feels like a loose brick on a tall building aiming squarely at our livelihoods. 
  • On the positive side, marriage changes things – hopefully for the better – as does the birth of a new baby, which alters the life of the child’s parents (and grandparents) forever.

Sometimes, paradoxically, we yearn for a black swan event. 

Our political discourse and our tragically flawed leadership (worldwide, not just in Israel) are in desperate need of change. We can’t continue with the current hate-fueled divisiveness. Lately, though, it seems pointless to even dream. 

And yet, the message of Rosh Hashana and black swan theory is that this, too, can change without notice. Fresh starts are always possible.

After all, if the United States can ping-pong between Donald Trump as president in 2016, Joe Biden four years later, and potentially back to Trump in 2024, the same could happen here. The current Israeli coalition could fall; sane and competent ministers could take over after new elections; Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar could release the hostages and decamp to Tunisia; the Iranian people could rise up and overthrow the ayatollahs.

“This war will almost certainly [produce] a new generation of leaders inside of Israel,” notes British journalist Douglas Murray, author of the best-selling book The War on the West. “This past year has produced remarkable people who stepped up to the moment. My hope is that a new generation of Palestinian leaders will come along at some point, too.”

The average Israeli has little sway over any of these black swan events. Instead, we take comfort from the concluding lines of Rosh Hashana’s Un’taneh Tokef prayer:

  • Who will live in quietude and who will be tormented?
  • Who will enjoy tranquility and who will be distressed?
  • Who will be impoverished and who will be enriched?
  • Who will be degraded and who will be exalted?

That’s my hope for the coming year – that we will live in quietude and tranquility, that we will no longer be degraded and impoverished by our leaders and enemies alike but will be enriched and exalted, and that a new reality will upend the region, whitewashing away the destructive black swans in our midst.

I first shared my Rosh Hashana prayer at The Jerusalem Post.

Black swan image: Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

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Post-debate dilemma: Who’s better for Israel? Harris or Trump?

by Brian on September 22, 2024

in In the News,Politics,The Old Country

When Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. president, I was initially apprehensive. While I remain repulsed by Republican contender Donald Trump’s lack of empathy, unbridled narcissism and many of his past and proposed policies, Harris has a checkered record on my biggest culture war bugaboo, namely how beholden or not she is (or will be) to the progressive, anti-Israel left wing of her party.

Donald Trump

Harris’s performance in last week’s U.S. Presidential debate put my worries to rest (mostly). And compared to Trump, who rambled, demeaned and lied, Harris was sharp, focused and, ultimately, presidential.

Kamala Harris

I still have some not insignificant reservations, and I truly wish these weren’t the only two candidates running, but Harris will be getting my vote. 

That’s not where I started.

When Harris was first “anointed” as the then-presumptive nominee, I was ready to write a column on why I couldn’t vote for either Trump or Harris. For the first time in my voting life, I planned to say, I was going to sit this election out. 

After all, during the 2019 primaries, Harris was dubbed by The Hill, “the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.” That’s far from where I’m holding these days. Harris has since tried to walk back her woke bonafides, such as her former support for “defunding the police,” though I don’t entirely trust her to not return to those progressive roots once elected. 

Trump, on the other hand, while a nightmare for his domestic policies, was actually pretty good when it came to foreign policy, whether by design or accident. From a purely Israeli perspective, I briefly considered holding my nose, checking my moral compass at the door, and voting for the man in November. 

Still, while Harris’s statements on Israel’s seven-front war have not been as supportive as I’d prefer, she has at least tried to check the right boxes. Her husband, first gentleman Doug Emhoff’s reaction to the execution of the six hostages, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was as authentic as it was gutting. He seems like a mensch. Too bad he can’t be the vice-presidential candidate instead of Tim Walz, a likable guy who nevertheless opined about the post-October 7 antisemitic protesters that they “are speaking out for all the right reasons.” 

During last week’s debate, Harris did exactly as she promised when she boasted about being a prosecutor (she was formerly California’s attorney-general) taking on a convicted felon: She relentlessly goaded Trump who fell for the bait and promptly lost the plot. 

After Harris demeaned Trump’s rallies by saying that “people leave early out of exhaustion and boredom,” an agitated Trump began ranting about a debunked conspiracy theory that, in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants “are eating the pets of the people who live there… They’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats.” 

Trump continued his parade of derangement by arguing that Walz wants to execute babies who are already born and that Harris supports paying for “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison” (that one is actually true). At least Trump didn’t recycle his comments from an event organized by the conservative Turning Point Action where he proclaimed, “Christians… you won’t have to vote anymore…four more years [and] it will be fixed.” 

When it comes to Israel, Harris repeated the assertion that she has over her “entire career and life supported Israel” and that “I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself.” (I was less comfortable with her next sentence where she repeated the mantra of a two-state solution, something most Israelis and Palestinians don’t believe is possible for the foreseeable future.)

But Trump’s retort that Harris “hates Israel” and that “if she’s president…Israel will not exist within two years” was more fear-mongering than fact, as was his supposition that when you “look at what’s going on in the Middle East…this would have never happened” under a Trump presidency.

While that’s clearly electioneering hyperbole, it emphasizes my biggest worry about a second Trump presidency: his unpredictability. You never know what’s going to come out of his mouth next. 

While right now, Trump backers argue their candidate is more pro-Israel than Harris, imagine, for example, if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were caught on a hot mic referring to Trump’s appearance in, say, a disparaging way, how quickly Trump would turn on the premier. He did, after all, essentially boycott Netanyahu after the latter dared to call Biden to congratulate him on his 2019 win.

The Republican Party’s isolationist tendencies could spell more trouble for Israel going forward than any past benefits, such as moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem or spearheading the Abraham Accords. Trump may have claimed in 2017 to be “the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen,” but hosting white supremacists and Holocaust deniers like Nick Fuentes and Kanye West doesn’t bode well for the Jews.

Harris’s positions on healthcare, abortion and taxation align with my political leanings on U.S. domestic challenges. I still worry that she may entertain enacting a ban on arms sales to Israel, a policy that groups like the pro-Hamas “Uncommitted” are advocating for. Her admonition – that bombs and missiles should be limited to “defensive” purposes – could be “weaponized,” so to speak, by our enemies. Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Zvika Klein rightly worried in a recent column that Harris could become increasingly “susceptible to the influence of progressive leaders who have been critical of Israel.”

But between a candidate who on the debate stage exuded confidence and clarity and one who presents, as the Post’s David Brinn writes, as “an unhinged loose cannon whose moods and utterances flit with the wind,” I’ll take my cue from Taylor Swift, who endorsed Harris following the debate, and whose lyrics from her most memorable song could be applied to Trump’s attempt to retake the presidency:

“We are never, ever getting back together.”

I first reluctantly endorsed Harris at The Jerusalem Post.

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Can you still feel joy?

September 10, 2024

As Jody and I embark on a vacation, we wonder – can we still feel joy while our people are in the midst of war? And then Hersh happened.

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Coping with PTCD – Post-Traumatic Covid Disorder

August 26, 2024

Covid is back. It seems like everyone I know has been exposed or infected this summer. That includes me. Do you have PTCD?

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Is R48 the best hotel in the world?

August 26, 2024

When I asked a colleague for a recommendation for a hotel, he didn’t hesitate. “The R48,” he replied. “It’s probably the best hotel I’ve ever stayed at – anywhere in the world!”

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Anniversary: A love story

August 11, 2024

Every year in mid-August, my wife, Jody, and I celebrate our wedding anniversary. This year, I wanted to mark the occasion by recounting our story.

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How to fight antisemitism

July 28, 2024

The resurgence of antisemitism in the 21st century has been unnerving and dangerous, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise, writes Bari Weiss.

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