Letters, Winter 2026

Apolitical Hostage

Shai Secunda’s review of Eli Sharabi’s remarkable memoir Hostage (“Tunnel Vision,” Fall 2025) is mildly critical of Sharabi for not commenting on the politics of the hostage issue. Mr. Secunda writes, “Hostage contains hardly a hint of political discord in the dialogue between the captives or in Sharabi’s own reflections. This is remarkable, not least because the October 7 attacks followed the most fractious period in Israel’s history.” He adds, “It has been painful to watch the cause of the hostages become a divisive issue, fueled by some right-wing news outlets and members of the ruling coalition who portray Israelis rallying for the captives as political adversaries.”

I think Sharabi did well to avoid political analysis in his book, instead aiming to present his experience in a way that Israelis of all political outlooks can embrace. While Mr. Secunda makes clear his own political opposition to the current government, it’s worth noting that politicizing the hostages’ plight was also the result of the Israeli opposition’s efforts to pressure Netanyahu’s government, instead of focusing on Hamas’s backers in Qatar. Those who raised the demand for the government to make a deal at any price were not without political motivations, quite misguided ones in my opinion.

Ambassador (ret.) Marc J. Sievers
Director
American Jewish Committee, Abu Dhabi

Shai Secunda Responds:

I’m not sure why Ambassador Sievers detects even the mildest criticism in my treatment of Eli Sharabi. As I make clear, I stand in awe of his remarkable tenacity, his profound humanity, and his ability to stay above the political fray, not to speak of his gifts as a writer. This is noteworthy not only since Israelis discuss politics incessantly but also because Israel’s political reality had direct bearing on a question of mortal importance to Sharabi and his fellow hostages. As I note in my review, Sharabi’s omission of fractious political discourse was wise, as it helped gain sympathy across the political spectrum for the remaining hostages. Those Israelis and Jews around the world who kept protesting and reminding the Israeli government and the international community of the hostages’ plight ultimately helped secure the hostages’ release, largely thanks to President Donald Trump, who pressured the parties into a deal.

The Golem in the Machine

Abraham Socher’s “The Antisemitic Singularity” (Fall 2025) reminded me of something I read about golems and artificial intelligence a few years ago. In God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O’Gieblyn described her loss of Christian faith and subsequent obsession with technology. However, she soon found theological questions surfacing in secular, tech-obsessed circles and recounts the following anecdote:

One day two MIT graduate students, Gerry Sussman and Joel Moses, were chatting during a break with a handful of other students. Someone mentioned offhandedly that the first big computer constructed in Israel had been called Golem. . . . Sussman proceeded to tell his colleagues that he was a descendent of Rabbi Löw, and at his bar mitzvah his grandfather had taken him aside and told him the rhyme that would awaken the golem at the end of time. At this, Moses, awestruck, revealed that he too was a descendent of Rabbi Löw and had also been given the magical incantation at his bar mitzvah by his grandfather. The two men agreed to write out the incantation separately on pieces of paper, and when they showed them to each other, the formula—despite being passed down for centuries as a purely oral tradition—was identical.

Later, O’Gieblyn quotes Sussman:

“You know, we computer scientists are really the Kabbalists of today. We animate these inanimate machines by getting strings of symbols just right.” He notes that the mystical strands of Judaism affirm the underlying structure of computer science: “Creating and animating by the manipulation of symbols, which is what computer scientists both do and study, is but one aspect of our being created in God’s image.”

Unfortunately, as Socher points out in the article, strings of symbols often have a tenuous connection to the truth.

Kevin Sloan
via email

I very much appreciated Abraham Socher’s essay on AI and the Jews. It makes all too much sense that large language models pick up the deep assumptions that went into their training data. I know there are people who study how to keep bias out of AI, but they’re all thinking about race and gender rather than antisemitism.

Alisa Katz
via email

Abraham Socher Responds:

I thank Kevin Sloan and Alisa Katz for their perceptive remarks to which I’d like to add two and a half footnotes. Samuel Arbesman, author of the excellent recent book The Magic of Code, tells me that when he followed up with Gerald Sussman about the golem story, Sussman didn’t include the part about the Maharal of Prague’s secret rhyming incantation. (By the way, although Gershom Scholem suggested that the Weizmann Institute of Science’s WEIZAC computer should be called “The Golem of Rehovot,” I’m not sure that it ever was.) Alisa Katz notes that there is an entire class of professionals dedicated to keeping AI unbiased and aligned. Unfortunately, that usually amounts to telling the large language model golem what not to say rather than addressing how it thinks: recognizing probabilistic patterns in problematic data without recourse to the world on which that data is based.

Context in the Promised Land

I appreciate Allan Arkush’s thoughtful review of my book Promised Lands (“Jerusalem Holiday,” Fall 2025), particularly his integration of Hadassah, her mother, Lena, and my own voice. However, I find problematic his characterization of my “own concern with Zion” as “at bottom, a rather ambivalent one” and his critique of my historical analysis.

In Promised Lands, I strove both to recognize (and acknowledge) my own subjectivity and also to scrutinize my assumptions, to explore contrary evidence, and to contextualize my account. Historians are tasked with making the past—its people and places—come to life and explaining their values, fears, aspirations, and choices. History requires standing in others’ shoes and judging by their standards. Toward those ends, I mined Hadassah’s letters, diaries, and photographs to determine the people and ideas she encountered. It was clear that her world contained a range of Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist individuals and concepts. When I compared Magnes’s pamphlet to Junior Hadassah’s Primer, I aimed to recover the competing ideas to which Hadassah was exposed. Similarly, when I called the Warburgs non-Zionists, I used a term that the dynamic duo whom Hadassah spent time with in Egypt would have used to describe themselves. Although the Warburgs visited and contributed financially to Palestine, they nevertheless did not support the creation of a Jewish state. Felix, for example, chaired the Committee of Seven at the Non-Zionist Conference held in New York City in fall 1928.

If the study of history were only a matter of re-creating lost worlds, it might be a static field. Instead, it also represents an ongoing conversation to explain change over time, particularly how we have come to where we are today. In my book, I endeavored to draw on multiple sources to tell and reconcile competing narratives. Thus, when describing Ein Harod, the kibbutz where Hadassah worked, I moved beyond her personal account of largely peaceful interactions among Jews and Arabs to compare her experience to the perceptions of other contemporary Jews and Palestinian Arabs and to contextualize what she saw within the secondary literature, including works contending that territorial expansion instigated military engagements.

Using the tools of a historian, I neither aimed to pay tribute to my grandmother nor to blame her for myopia. Instead, I sought to recover my great-grandfather Mordecai Kaplan’s vision of ethical nationhood and the creative efforts to implement it of not only Hadassah but a generation of female teachers, social workers, and activists for whom Palestine, and later Israel, came to represent a vehicle for pursuing personal and communal engagement, opportunities to learn, and a chance to participate in significant labor when few other such opportunities existed. As our current era of rising authoritarianism and violence undermines efforts to create a shared democratic society, remembering an earlier generation’s dreams and lacunae might help to forge future directions.

Sharon Ann Musher
Professor of History
Stockton University

Allan Arkush Responds:

Sharon Ann Musher was perfectly correct to characterize Frieda and Felix Warburg as non-Zionists. What I thought odd was her failure to describe them in more detail, given their social prominence at the time. Nor did I question the accuracy of her description of Hadassah Kaplan’s outlook on Palestinian-Jewish relations. Rereading what Professor Musher had to say on the subject, it still seems to me that she portrays Kaplan as having been insufficiently alert to the complexities of the environment in which she found herself in ways that I still think anachronistic or unfair. Nonetheless, she has written a fascinating book, which I am glad to have read.

Teaching Freedom

Deborah E. Lipstadt’s insightful review of Shaul Kelner’s A Cold War Exodus (“Our Great Cause,”Fall 2025) raises an important question: Why has the story of the Soviet Jewry movement been largely absent from current Jewish education and discourse? I have heard many explanations. The movement feels too recent—neither current events nor settled history. No major national organization has championed its inclusion in day and supplemental school curricula, camps, or adult study. And its outcome—joyous, unified, successful—defies our communal habit of teaching Jewish perseverance primarily through tragedy.

For three decades, the movement mobilized Jews of every age, ideology, and background, embedding activism into ritual, education, and identity. Yet few young Jews today even know it occurred. That must change. The artifacts, archives, and firsthand voices of this movement are fading quickly, but this story must be preserved. What better way to engage and inspire today’s students than to remind them that ordinary, everyday people such as themselves once led a global campaign that freed 1.6 million Jews?

Simon Klarfeld
Executive Director
Soviet Jewish Movement Education Project