Reading the Comments: A Jewish Response to Online Hate

In a press conference following the terror incident at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said, “Antisemitism and antisemitic behavior has become normalized. It’s been allowed, and that’s unacceptable… We have to stand up and say: ‘No, this is unacceptable.’” He was then asked how to deal with the hatred and virulent antisemitism in online comment sections, to which he quickly responded, “Don’t read comments… social media is terrible when you have people empowered to say things about situations they know nothing about.”

Not long ago, if you wanted to engage with a news story, you might discuss it over coffee, at the Shabbat dinner table, or after services at the synagogue. Today, the conversation often unfolds in the comments section following an online article, a social media post, or a YouTube video, and that is not always a healthy place to be.

Spend a few minutes scrolling through comments and it becomes clear how much hostility exists just beneath the surface. For Jews, that hostility often takes a very familiar form. Antisemitic and anti-Israel comments appear with alarming frequency, often posted by anonymous users hiding behind fake names and profile pictures.

Recently, I came across a comment on a New York Magazine article about the attack at Temple Israel. One commenter wrote that Jews were safer before the creation of the State of Israel. It was a striking statement, not only because it was offensive, but because it was so historically detached from reality. The Holocaust took place before 1948, and Jewish persecution spans thousands of years across continents and cultures. Yet there it was, presented as fact.

Moments like this raise an important question: How should we respond? Should we stop reading the comments altogether, or should we engage and try to correct misinformation? Should we report hateful content, even when it feels like nothing will come of it? There is no single answer, although Jewish tradition offers a helpful framework for thinking about these questions.

JewPT - a Look at the Future of Jewish Learning

Artificial intelligence keeps asking Judaism an old question in a new way: Who gets to answer?

Last year, I wrote about whether AI might someday replace rabbis. My conclusion was fairly clear. No matter how sophisticated these tools become, they lack the depth, context and human relationship that sit at the heart of Jewish life. But as AI continues to evolve, a more interesting question has emerged. If these tools are not replacements, what are they becoming instead?

One possible answer is JewPT, a new free AI assistant designed specifically for Jewish textual learning that was created by Jonathan Gugenheim, who lives and works in London in the FinTech industry. JewPT bills itself not as an “AI rabbi” but as a study partner (chevruta in Hebrew) for exploring Torah, Talmud and Jewish wisdom. The distinction is not just semantic. It sits at the center of an increasingly urgent conversation about authority, transparency and ethics in Jewish-facing technology.

The idea for JewPT did not come from a think tank or a synagogue boardroom. It began at home. Jonathan told me the project started when his girlfriend began her conversion journey.

Like many people entering Jewish life, she had questions. Lots of them. Each answer led to three more, in classic Jewish fashion. Some were simple. Others felt too basic or too vulnerable to bring directly to a rabbi. He realized there was no easy place for those questions to land.