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[DESCRIPTION] Images of Touro University students are displayed on the screen and fade out as the Touro University logo fades in.

[TEXT] TOURO TALKS TOURO UNIVERSITY, Artificial Intelligence & Antisemitism, November 19, 2023, Touro Talks is sponsored by Robert and Arlene Rosenberg

[DESCRIPTION] Dr. Alan Kadish speaks to the camera with a Touro University logo as his background.

[TEXT] Dr. Alan Kadish

[Dr. Alan Kadish] Part of today's topic is to talk about the role of artificial intelligence in antisemitism. And it's also been a very complicated few days in the field of artificial intelligence with, in a bizarre episode, the president and chairman of ChatGPT being fired by the not-for-profit board and now in discussions for what's going to happen next. So both of the areas we're talking about this morning are in rapid evolution, and we hope to learn a little bit about them this morning.

I want to begin by introducing the panel, and then we'll have a bit of a panel discussion. So first, Malcolm Hoenlein, who is the Executive Vice Chairman Emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, but that doesn't really describe what he's meant to Jewish people and to opposing the spread of hate throughout the world over the past 30-plus years. He was active initially in freeing Soviet Jewry, in starting the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York that's done some great work to help all New Yorkers, and for decades being prescient as the Executive Director of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and particularly warning about the dangers of Iran decades before anyone else realized how pernicious an influence they would have in really creating tremendous upheaval in the world, mass murder, rockets fired at American troops, and being a bad actor on the world stage. So we look forward to hearing from Malcolm.

Michal Cotler-Wunsh is the Israel Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism. She's a prominent public speaker, researcher, and independent policy and strategy advisor with a background as an attorney, born in Canada, a native of Ra'anana, and a member of the 23rd Knesset in Israel. She's currently in Halifax at a Security Conference, trying to talk about some of the upheaval in the world.

Finally, Joel Finkelstein directs the Network Contagion Research Institute, which leads some of the most high-profile research in the world on the subject of social cyber threat identification and forecasting, and has worked on antisemitism, racism, anti-Asian hate, and extremism, and his work has appeared on the front pages of The Washington Post, New York Times, and a number of other media outlets. So I'd like to welcome the entire panel.

I'll start with Michal and her official position as Israel's Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism. A lot of different statistics have shown that there's been an increase in antisemitism in the last few weeks, and some of us would say in the past several years. So how big a problem has it become? And give us a little bit of your perspective as Israel's Special Envoy.

[DESCRIPTION] Michal Cotler-Wunsh speaks to the camera with a hotel room background.

[TEXT] Michal Cotler-Wunsh

[Michal Cotler-Wunsh] So it's not just an increase. It's a dramatic surge of hundreds of percentages, in some places, over 1,000% between the online and real world, the increase that we see. And I think that what's most troubling is that the very same antisemitism that fueled the atrocities of October 7 that burned, and bludgeoned, and mutilated, and murdered, and raped, and abducted thousands is the antisemitism that fuels the responses to the atrocities of October 7 that deny, that justify, that support, and that attack Jews around the world in their wake on campus, online, and on the street.

I think that that's actually a moment of reckoning for all of the spaces and places that have enabled the mutation of antisemitism. And as you said, this is not just a 10/7 thing. This is not a sudden increase. We have, all of us in this space that have been actually researching and tracking the mutation of antisemitism, Malcolm and Joel, in all of these spaces and places over decades, myself, from my international law and human rights background, understanding that the 1975 "Zionism is racism" Soviet propaganda, UN resolution is alive and well on 2023 US campuses in the name of progress.

Understand that this has taken decades. 10/7 and the responses to 10/7 have been decades long of a mutating virus, the most ancient hate in the world that we know of, antisemitism, into this current modern mainstream strain of anti-Zionism, the denial of Israel's very right to exist that enabled this mutation from the traditional, if you will, antisemitism that barred the individual Jew from an equal place in society to barring the Jewish nation state, the proverbial Jew among the nations, from an equal place among the nations. And what started in the UN did not end in the UN.

What happened on 10/7 is that all of the masks that were removed actually are an intersection between the fronts in which this war has been raging. The International institutions that weaponized and enabled the weaponization of human rights for the demonization, delegitimization, and double standards towards the state of Israel, the intersection on university campus spaces that, in that understanding of human rights as we'll call it the secular religion of our time have been plagued by the very same Zionism is racism.

And I'll add, Israel is an apartheid state because post the 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism that turned into an antisemitic hate fest, we know that every university campus across North America had an Israeli Apartheid Week. That's 22 years of graduates from all of those universities. And of course, enter the digital platforms, where we see an intersection, complete adoption of those terms that have been mutating over decades, "Zionism is racism," "Israel is an apartheid state," and the most Orwellian of all, "Israel is committing a holocaust and a genocide," terms that we should shudder to even utter and come out of our mouths, but that describe not only the atrocities of the Holocaust coined in order to describe them, but describe the atrocities of October 7 precisely, the war crimes, the crimes against humanity, and the makings of a genocide in an Orwellian inversion turned against Jews on campuses, online, in these international institutions.

And that is what 10/7 has done. It is an explosive sort of understanding that all of these have intersected. And at this one moment, all those masks are removed. And so what we see of the rising surge increase in antisemitism is not only troubling, but it is a call to action to be able to identify and combat that hate.

[Dr. Alan Kadish] Thank you. Malcolm, are you surprised about what's happened?

[DESCRIPTION] Malcolm I. Hoenlein speaks to the camera with a blank background.

[Malcolm I. Hoenlein] Not at all. And nobody who studies our Mesorah should be surprised. We say it every year at the Seder [SPEAKING HEBREW].

It uses the present tense to alert every generation that the enemy seeks to destroy us. The color of their uniforms may change. The language may change.

The enemy is the same. It started with Pharoh, who went against the Jews, not because they did anything wrong. [SPEAKING HEBREW], he warned. You have to deal shrewdly with them, but doesn't have one serious accusation. Rabbi Kamenetsky Zalzal once asked, do you mean in every generation there wasn't one that didn't have it?

He said, read the next paragraph about [SPEAKING HEBREW], the paragraph in the Haggadah, that while Yaakov thought he was living in relative prosperity, he was growing his family. He didn't like his father in law, didn't get along well, but the whole time, Lavan was plotting against him. And that was his warning that the generations that don't feel it or think they're immune to it, it's always beneath the surface. And I think that is why, for more than 30 years, I've warned about the danger of antisemitism.

I've talked about it. It was all evident. This is not something, as Michal rightly pointed out, and I'm honored to be with both of them, they're good friends and we work closely together, that this has been growing beneath the surface and above the surface.

But we didn't do what we should have done to stop it. And now we're facing an assault against the Jewish nation, the Jewish people, the Jewish state, Jewish history, the Jewish future. All of them are being undermined because it is not just the state of Israel.

The state of Israel is the collective Jew. It is against all of us. And we know it's coming from the far right, the far left, from minorities, from Muslim populations, from a variety of sources. And they have captured the imagination of so many young people.

If you would see every morning the reports we get summarizing the events on different campuses, the horrific assaults against Jews, the continuing growth of the anti-Israel and antisemitic movements, and nobody should be fooled by the division that they try to make that we're not against Jews, we're against Israel, we're against Zionists, we're against those Jews. We've heard that in the past. We know it's not true because many of the things that are being yelled at the demonstration reflect it.

We also have the globalization of economics, of politics, and of Jew hatred, which is a more appropriate term than "antisemitism," which is sort of antiseptic. And the growth of it in every sector, we see it more and more, by the way, in business, in the C-suites. We see it amongst professors, not just students.

We see it in literally every industry where it's swept under the rug, where people are afraid to speak up, but quietly will send us messages now to alert us to the fact that they are experiencing it. Three quarters of American Jews fear for their safety. The vast majority of college students fear for their safety. This is not just some wild perception. This is reality that they are confronting.

Finally, it has resulted in a remarkable achdus of the Jewish community. October 7, I think, is a watershed in Jewish history, and all of us will be affected. I unfortunately went down South the day after the chag, and I saw Be'eri.

I was in Sderot while the bodies were still there. It is something I will never forget. It's not something I can describe, but we will feel the reverberations for generations to come.

They have been empowered by this. They feel that this is the beginning of the end for the Jewish state, and it's the reason why we all have to support Israel to eradicate completely Hamas, and not lose faith, and not lose patience with it, and not succumb to the distorted media appeals. This is a woke culture that has infected and affected generations. This is not something that all of a sudden rose up last year or the year before. It just became more visible as the number of foreign students, the number of American students, including some Jewish students, but much more limited than they tried to portray it, have joined these radical movements, which really want to destroy the Jewish state.

We see also the linkages, the intersectionality to other causes, which has grown the movement and had people associate with it, even though very few of them can tell you which river and which sea they want to see Palestine be associated with. And this was tested. And they kept asking them what river and what sea, and they couldn't even name it.

So they are caught up in what has become the mode of the day. It's fashionable to be pro-Palestinian. It's supported by what we see at the United Nations, where anti-Israel resolutions abound.

And I won't go through the whole history, but the appointment of a commission of inquiry this year is just evidence that the first time, an unlimited time, unlimited budget just to prosecute and to propagandize against Israel, in addition to the two Palestinian committees, to put Israel as the only subject of a Human Rights Council. It gives legitimacy then to those who attack Israel, saying, look, it's the United Nations. It's not just us. Well, the United Nations is not a place that they can make easy reference.

We're seeing the change, if I can just say, about the campuses in particular, with quotas being introduced on Jewish students, which I hope will result in many more students coming to Touro. And you will see it perhaps more quickly than you think that the influx of foreign money, which Joel has done such an amazing job on, and its implications, which few people really understand, but to me, seeing that now in the high schools in America that you can have walk out of public schools in New York City and being sanctioned and okayed by the school system and no objections and principals, sometimes even encouraging students to walk out.

We see that this is something that's going to be with us in this generation and next generation. And the answer is that we have to build coalitions. There are many steps we can take, which I'm sure we'll discuss.

But the seriousness of this moment can't be underestimated. This is a critical time, and it will affect the lives of our children, and our grandchildren, and their grandchildren. And what security they will enjoy and what their lives will be like will be determined by what we do today.

[Dr. Alan Kadish] Thank you. I think we're all in agreement that this is a watershed time when we've now fully recognized what's been beneath the surface for a long time. Joel, you and I are both on college campuses.

And Malcolm alluded to the fact that we've seen this among students and also professors. The only footnote that I would put to what Malcolm has said is, I think, in my mind, it's actually the reverse. It's actually the environment that's been created on college campuses that's bled into K through 12 that's been promulgated by professors, many of whom have been influenced by the money that Malcolm has talked about, that have created this intersectionality Jew as both the other and as the white oppressor that's existed on college campuses that's driven a lot of this. So what have you seen on campus? What have you seen on social media? And how bad do you think the problem is?

[DESCRIPTION] Joel Finkelstein speaks to the camera with a photo of a city and the NCRI logo as his background.

[TEXT] NCRI Network Contagion Research Institute, Joel Finkelstein

[Joel Finkelstein] Well, OK. So I want to start off by saying I'm actually optimistic. And I think that there's a heavy price to pay for the optimism. The heavy price we have to pay for the optimism is that we have to see reality, and we have to have a conversation about what's happening here naked. That's the heavy price we have to pay.

Once you've paid that price, and we can really see how the sausage has gotten made, it turns out, it's difficult to understand, but it's not impossible. And once we do understand how the sausage has been created, how the, and by that, I mean the narrative war that has emerged at this moment, fully born across every different frontier of media, of the university space, of social media. How did this all come out all at once, like a "coming out of the closet" party? How did they manage that?

So we need to understand how that happened, and we need to especially understand the role that populists and authoritarians played in pushing us to this moment. And what we're going to find as we do that, especially through the lens of data, is that we've really been asleep at the wheel. We've been asleep at the wheel in our universities. We've been asleep in the wheel of our medias. We've been asleep at the wheel of social media.

And every one of these domains, we haven't had a critical mass of people who care enough to be able to investigate what's happening and get to the bottom of it. Now, the primary challenge that represents, especially with antisemitism, is when those conditions exist, we're facing a subject matter, this thing doesn't stop. It's not the kind of thing that stops, especially when it perceives it has the upper hand. It definitely doesn't stop when it perceives it has the upper hand.

Now, I'm afraid this is the kind of thing that is stopped. So we need to understand that what we're facing is a crucial security crisis. And our list of friends and allies appears to be growing thin because everywhere we look, what we're seeing in the data is that the populists and the authoritarians have seized the means of communication.

They've seized the thinking organs of our universities and our capacity to think. They've seized media. And they've created modes of influence in government.

And all of that is necessarily, they necessarily have to reach. It's not even a choice. If you're going to mobilize people based on feeling dispossessed, based on feeling as though they've been, I don't know, replaced "from a river to a sea" or a Charlottesville, there's one and only one soda that's going to cut the mustard. There's only one high-octane beverage that you can feed those people, and that's antisemitism.

So the thing about Jew hatred is that our analysis suggests that in the past, this didn't all come out at once. What you had looking at social media was a turn taking between right-wing groups who were saying Jews have replaced us and screaming about how their nations are coming under attack and being undermined by networks of Jewish elite who are working together to create an international order that's going to replace them. That, by the way, is Pharaoh's myth. These Jews are multiplying, and they're going to replace us. That's literally what he says.

And what we see is that when those themes are surging on social media, themes about a new world order taking over or George Soros destroying everything we know and love, that that predicts not only violence against Jews, it actually predicts vigilante attacks during the BLM riots. It predicts that the Stop the Steal elections in all of the populist tropes, it's the red meat that the populists use until they can churn out their activity up to the capitol buildings themselves.

And so what we see is that the antisemitism is a perfect mechanism of control. Guess who's trying to take over social media. Guess who's trying to take over the university.

Guess who's trying to take over media. Well, gee, that sounds a lot like you, fellas. So pretty convenient that you're blaming that on us.

Now, on the other side, you have folks that are nominally not interested in nations. They're interested in an international order of human rights. And wouldn't you know it, they're being replaced, too.

And so their screams about apartheid, displacement, and genocide, they use the exact same tropes. "Jews are a genocidal threat." They both are saying this. In fact, when we look at the signal on social media, what we note in our data is that

[DESCRIPTION] Joel Finkelstein shares his screen, displaying data of the use of the words "genocide", "apartheid" and "ethnic cleansing" from April 28, 2013 to October 23, 2023 in a graph format.

[Joel Finkelstein] the use of terms like "apartheid," "genocide," "ethnic cleansing--" these terms reach their peaks across all of social media by an order of magnitude.

Here was the first war in Israel, 5,000 times per minute in some places. And then here's the second war in 2023. This is 2021 Gaza. This is 2023. There's a ratio of 10 to 1 here for these terms across all of the social media channels that we analyze for Israel, meaning when you hear a nation mentioned with these terms, "genocide," "apartheid," "ethnic cleansing--" 10 times more than any other nation, this references Israel.

You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd guess this wasn't about human rights. This is about demonization.

[DESCRIPTION] Joel Finkelstein stops sharing his screen.

[Joel Finkelstein] And these surges that we see, we see not only, when these terms surge, we also see surges in mobilizations and protests, just like on the right. And we see surges in antisemitic attacks and mobilizations just as we see on the right, the exact same tropes, doing the exact same things.

And what are they doing? They're competing for the ball. They're competing for an eliminationist ball to say that, no, we are really the ones who have been dispossessed. You should join our group of aggrieved people. And we are really the key enemy of the Jewish people.

And so where they used to take turns, now they're all coming together. And they're feeding off each other simultaneously. So now let's have the honest conversation about what this looks like.

Law enforcement and lawmakers are completely overwhelmed. They don't understand how to manage this information disorder. The attacks that are coming out, they can't see them. The platforms are overwhelmed.

And the truth of the matter is, everybody here, the blame game that we play when we're doing this, guys, that's not going to work for us. The blame game isn't going to work for us. As the information disorder gets worse, what it does is it increases the demand for blame. The AI accelerates that because we can't tell the rate of information production gets so much higher, and we can no longer tell who's human. That's in part because humans are now, from a machine learning standpoint, increasingly difficult to distinguish from bots.

Our behavior is becoming more bot-like. Our activity is becoming more predictable. As everything breaks down, it increases the demand for blame. And there's one group in particular who's very good at being blamed.

So what do we do? What do we do about the fact that the lawmakers are themselves competing for likes and don't know what to do? That the universities,

[Dr. Alan Kadish] Before you talk about what we do, could you explain a little bit of how about how artificial intelligence feeds into this? Because up till now, we've been talking about the continuation and exacerbation of historical antisemitism by individuals. So where does AI fit into this? Where do bots fit into this? Just tell us a little bit about that.

[Joel Finkelstein] Well, look, what we can see is that previously, as this cycle in the past few years really got started, what we noted was that we saw increases in the number of hashtags related to Israel that were driven by bot-like accounts. And what you see is that the hashtags associated with Israel on Twitter, #israelicrimes, #apartheidisrael, at their origins, these were entirely bot-driven, and they were the most prominent associations with Israel on the entire platform.

So the reality is literally being fabricated. A consensus is literally being created artificially. And the thing is, that has a catalytic role because when people get online, what they see is a welcome consensus that verifies the fact that they have been aggrieved and that it's the Jews that are doing that. And that consensus is driven by bot-like accounts. Oftentimes, these are driven by foreign regimes, and they're driven by extremist groups.

And it's become more and more difficult to perceive their use because platforms are kicking people off because of what's happened with ChatGPT. As the artificial intelligence industry has grown, it's created a demand for the data on social media platforms. That has caused social media platforms to realize that a great business has been born beneath them. And the most important thing that they need to do is to capitalize on that by cutting off research access to their data, which means that, as these threats have grown, we are increasingly blind to how they're growing. As the threats emerging from social media are accelerating, partially through the use of bot technology, AI, and machine learning, the people who are at the other end of those threats are increasingly blind and incapable of perceiving them.

And so the result is that AI has created an accelerant. And the machine learning and the digital technologies, they've created a massive accelerant in the same way the printing press did for increasing the amount of information disorder. And the groups that are best at seizing that disorder are the ones who are most violent, the ones who are willing to control the narrative on the ground by whatever means necessary. So that explains a little bit about how, a top level how we've arrived here, Dr. Kadish.

[Dr. Alan Kadish] OK. So before we talk about solutions, Joel, I just wanted to touch base with Michal and Malcolm to talk a little bit about how international organizations have played into this. Both of you have talked about the UN and other international organizations. So where do you see their view on these things? How much is driven by politics? How much is driven by old-fashioned antisemitism? Or is it just an intersection between these? So, Michal, why don't you?

[Michal Cotler-Wunsh] So I want to make very clear, I mean, 10/7 is the intersection between all of those, the Politics, the traditional media, the social media, the university spaces. All of those spaces basically exploded and were exposed, many, many masks removed on 10/7. And I would say, it's a little bit of everything that you've identified, maybe some sort of intuitive or inherent antisemitism, maybe a lot, I would agree with Joel, of simply not understanding or knowing what to do. It is a black box.

As a legislator, I founded an interparliamentary task force to combat online antisemitism. I'll tell you, we engage the social media platforms. We also engage tech experts in order to be able to make accessible the questions we need to be asking.

The end of the day says, they themselves don't know. It is a black box. And we would be remiss if we were waiting for somebody else to figure out what it is to do.

And in many, many ways, it's also our own passivity. And what I mean by our own, it is us, the consumers of information. Joel has actually made accessible to us that we have been here before as humanity with the advent of the print press, and so on, and so on. But in many ways, in our understanding of what we are doing on social media, thinking that we are the consumer, whereas, in fact, we are the product, it is a completely different understanding of the business model that has served social media platforms.

And by the way, even the application of external mechanisms like the free speech understanding, it's not free speech at all. It's very expensive speech. My echo chamber looks nothing like Joel's, or yours, or Malcolm's because the algorithm decides what I want to see. I'm not walking through Hyde Park and listening to the guy standing on a box. That is not the free speech model that it is.

The business model that the social media platforms created, and there's no malice involved. It's about money. It's a business model, for crying out loud. It's just that we never held them to account. We legislators, we, the public, we, all of the understanding of international organizations that should have been at the forefront of this because this is a global challenge that requires global solutions.

And I want to make very clear, and I think Joel referred to it, antisemitism is just a predictive example. It's not just about the attack on Jews. It's not just about the enabling of the mutation of antisemitism that happened offline to be translated into online hashtags, memes, and words. It's not just that at all.

It is actually that the way that we consume information is going to consume us as humanity. And what we have seen in the last, this crazy TikTok bin Laden letter, if we are surprised, then we're not watching because if you can deny the atrocities of 10/7, or support the atrocities of 10/7, or justify the atrocities of 10/7, and here's another intersection. As Antonio Guterres said about 10/7 did not happen in a vacuum, well, what did we think was going to happen vis a vis bin Laden, or vis a vis 9/11? You can deny, you can support, you can justify, and you can attack people on the streets in their name because you have been actually, in the name of resistance, suddenly awoken.

Now, I want to say, in a very real way, and to refer a little bit to what Malcolm said before, this is not the first time we've been here as a people. And our most important call to action is zachor. It's to remember. The reason we are told to remember is so that we have tools exactly at moments like these in this call to action because, you know what, 2023 is not 1943.

We have a state, we have sovereignty, we have an army, and we have half of us in that nation state that we returned to after thousands of years of exile and persecution as an Indigenous people. And we have half of us in the rest of the world in relative safety, with critical responsibility to address this existential war as boots on the ground, Israel on the frontlines. And by frontlines, I don't just mean the army. I mean the entire Israeli society, as Malcolm said, is now deployed to this war on the ground.

But the other half of us have to be deployed to this war on the ground, what I call the unconventional war for public opinion, of which we have described some parts of it. And it is raging, and it has been raging for decades. And that call to action cannot be expressed any better than with another attempted genocide that we remember from our history in ancient Persia, where if we remember what Mordecai said to Esther, [SPEAKING HEBREW].

If you will be silent at this moment, then salvation will come to the Jewish people. But you and your home will be destroyed, and it will come from another place. We have both of that understanding of faith and of hope. In the words of the late Rabbi Sacks, "Hope is not optimism. Hope requires action and courage now," because, [SPEAKING HEBREW] --each one of us as boots on the ground in workplaces, in university spaces, in online spaces, in the water cooler at work, at high school situations.

This is a call to action for each of us as boots on the ground. And just as those soldiers and those civilians ran into the fire with 140% conscription rate, that's unheard of. 100% of the people were called up. 140% showed up.

That's the call to action. 140% of us have to show up 140% of the time to be able to win this. And I want one last moment to say, this is not a war against the state of Israel or Jews.

This is a war against our shared humanity. It is a critical time to transcend and reach across difference. I am sitting now, as you said, at a conference with dissidents from all over the world that understand that when genocidal regimes and leaders say something, they mean it.

They don't have a process. There's no governance. They're actually going to annihilate the state of Israel and murder Jews, but then they're going to continue towards the West.

This is not just about us. We may be the bloody canary in the mine shaft, but the mine shaft will collapse. And that, our history has taught us again and again.

So if I go back to that zachor and to the one thing that I would say we have to remember as a resource is the international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention it. We have a definition of this mutated strain of antisemitism that enables to identify and combat everything that we are seeing from the Holocaust denial piece to the attack on the individual Jew for the state of Israel piece to the demonization, the delegitimization, and the double standard coined by Natan Sharansky in order to be able to identify exactly what enabled the atrocities of the Holocaust and what enabled the atrocities of 10/7, the demonization, the delegitimization, and the double standard, whether it's at any of the fronts that this has raged, whether it's in the international institutions, in the university spaces, in the social media platforms, on traditional media.

And that is our guide. It is a resource, a critical resource. When I engage university presidents, police chiefs, and I've tracked university spaces for a long time in how we got here. When I speak to university presidents, it's a call to action to universities to say, you have failed in your mission. You have become places that, rather than teaching people how to think, you're teaching people what to think.

And that first moment of understanding has to come from the fact that Zionist now codes Jew. So your diversity, equity, and inclusion principles, they apply to everybody except for David, who's a Jew, and Katherine who's a Zionist, and Kathleen, who happens to believe in the right of the state of Israel to exist. It's a call to action. And the international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition is the first critical step to being able to identify and address and moving forward.

[Dr. Alan Kadish] I have to say that I very much appreciate your work with college presidents. I've been extraordinarily disappointed in the last few weeks by the thoughts and comments of some of my colleagues. So, Malcolm, before we get back to Joel's solutions, do you think we can count on anybody to help us? Or do we have to do this all on our own?

[Malcolm I. Hoenlein] Well, first of all, I do think we have many potential allies. We have to do much more to reach out to build coalitions like we did in the past. It has been my contention, and I have argued this for many years now, several years, for sure, and Michal was present at some of the international gatherings where I advocated for the creation of a movement like we did for Soviet Jewry, not individual organizations.

We're spending well into the nine figures. Were winning a few battles, but were losing the war. And we could reallocate those funds if we were to reach to recreate the kind of movement that we saw expressed in Washington this week, where Jews of every stripe, every kind, came together and tens of thousands of non-Jews. Had the Jews not organized the rally, they would not have been there. And the same thing was true with Soviet Jewry, that we could take on Russia, which was a formidable enemy that spanned two continents.

The same thing here, we are facing both a hidden and a visible enemy, the dark web, which I visited many years ago and was taken to in a place where they had these secret abilities. And they asked me what I wanted to see, and I said, can I see where Iran creates these antisemitic websites? And they took me down into Dante's Inferno. You go down, and down, and down, and all of a sudden, you're exposed to all these vipers coming out. It's unbelievable.

And if we destroy 100 of them, they create 1,000. If we destroy 1,000, they create 5,000. It's unbelievable to understand. And part of the problem is that the vast majority of people, overwhelming majority of Jews and non-Jews, don't understand how the web works. They don't understand the nature of the threat that we are facing, how virulent it is, how much it is poisoning the minds of young people, otherwise intelligent young people even, that we see on the campuses falling for these falsities and these lies and these distortions.

So number one, we have to become much more sophisticated, which is why I've been working with Joel for quite a while and others who are trying to do the right thing and have the capability and capacity to do it. For too long, we wanted to ignore antisemitism throughout the system, political leaders, others, the IHRA definition is a watershed. I think the laws against BDS are very important. There are other things that we will talk about.

But when we remind ourselves about what the impact of this is, of people not wearing a yamaka in the street, of young people being afraid to go to a Jewish school and afraid to go to a public school now, that these are profound changes that will impact generations to come. They're not going to forget these scars. And when Michal rightly pointed out about the lesson from the Haggadah, Haman thought that Jews were vulnerable because they were [SPEAKING HEBREW]. We were a spread-out nation and, therefore, disunited. Esther's antidote was [SPEAKING HEBREW], go and gather all of the Jews.

So the first thing we have to do is to unify and to build on the achdut that we see in Israel and in America. We have to solidify it. We have to put aside our differences, not dismiss them, but put them into context so that we can work together. This is going to require a collective effort of the entire Jewish community to become more professional, to put more funds into the positive activities.

And sometimes, well-meaning instruments are created, but really don't have any impact. They're laughed off by our enemies. We've had three forms of antisemitism throughout Jewish history. Avraham Avinu was told, you cannot live amongst us as a Jew.

Yitzhak was told, you cannot live amongst us. And, Yaakov, you cannot live. Those are the three forms, annihilation, forced conversion, and expulsion. And we are seeing those things recreated in every generation. And only those who learn the lessons of the past can deal with it.

So this is not a new disease. It's just coming back in a more virulent form. And the old antidotes do not work. It's not sufficient.

And number one, we got to stop the denial. And that is true of some of your colleagues in academia, and I'm sure you've experienced it many times. They don't want to admit to it.

I had a debate with a professor at NYU who, till now, still denies the virulence of the antisemitism. So I took the president's conference to NYU, and we had the students speak from their own experience. And half the presidents walked out crying because they had no idea how bad it was, what happens in the classroom, the things that are not visible all the time as the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel demonstrations and manifestations are.

And a lot of this can be traced. Again, the foreign funding, which Joel has been working on and exposed this past week, the $13 billion in funds unaccounted for, universities are not admitting to it. But also, the amount of money they're pouring into the internet to develop these antisemitic sites, to have teams of people pouring out messages. They flood congressional offices, often using bots, using artificial intelligence.

We haven't even begun to understand it. And I'm sure that most of the people we talk to, including myself, we really don't know enough about it and enough about how it works and what it can do, its potential, because we've only begun to see it. But we do see the results of it. And the results is that a generation is being raised that will become the leaders of the next generation. And I think we all have to take a much more serious account about what our obligation to future generations is by addressing this, by applying the funds most productively to this, to be visible and vocal and, at the same time, work intelligently behind the scenes to change the current course of trajectory that we're on.

[Dr. Alan Kadish] So, Joel, you were the optimist here. And Malcolm and Michal talked about some of the things that we potentially can do. I'd just like to reiterate what Malcolm said, which is, I spoke to a college president at a conference last week who said, it's not a big deal. It was just a couple of incidents.

There's incredible denial. And we have to figure out how to break through that. So, Joel, what do you see as the solution here? And you've spent tireless efforts to try to develop this and figure it out. So go ahead and tell us how we should move forward.

[Joel Finkelstein] Well, look, I mean, this is a solution that is actually about everybody. This is not about the Jewish people. And I think that the thing to remember is that when we're talking about these problems like the universities and the money that the NCRI and IOSCO with Charles Small and others, the work that we did showing the penetration of undocumented funds into the university, and even much of the documented funds, I mean, these are funds that are having a huge impact. What we see is that when the money comes in the year before, we see increases in antisemitism the year after. The universities that accept a lot of this money are seeing 300% increases in antisemitic incidences versus those that don't.

And we see the same thing happening with political climate on campus, that where this money goes, we see shutdown attempts. We see cancellations and political campaigns to silence academics and a growth of authoritarian behaviors and endorsement of a liberal ideas. The largest predictor of the endorsement of illiberal ideas and illiberal forms of protest on campuses across the United States is how challenging it is to talk about the Israel-Palestine issue. Of the issues that get people mobilized on campus, wouldn't you know the number one is the Israel-Palestine issue. Those mobilizations and attacks actually correlate with what happens online.

That's what I mean about epistemic domain and narrative warfare. These components are all interconnected. Many of them are paid for, and it's the best messaging money can buy with groups of eager people who are willing to hear the good news about how bad Jews are.

So that's sticky. It creates a stickiness in campus climate. It creates a stickiness online. It doesn't just go away when these things come out of the woodworks. They stay around and create a residue that is increasingly difficult to contain.

OK. So the question is, how do we manage this? Well, listen. If we figure out how to manage this, that's great because it turns out, this is a problem facing democracy. I'm describing how democracies get taken over.

So what I'm really suggesting is that there is a way to manage this problem, but we have to invert things. We have to invert the way we're thinking about the problems. Jews aren't victims. The Jewish people are the solution to this problem.

And really, they represent an exemplar, a new model of how vulnerable communities can be instrumental in managing the problems that face them, not just on behalf of themselves, but on behalf of the international community and on behalf of nation states. Judaism and the way that this model of international rights work, it's both an international and national human rights movement. It's both of those things.

So how do we create a support infrastructure, an exoskeleton, to the solution that we have? And Malcolm really defined the solution. There's nothing new about the solution. The solution is that we need to be organized as a community in ways that allow people to feel that they're connected to a kind of nervous system.

Well, technology can help with that, and it can help us create transparency and blow shofars everywhere on all the places that democracies are falling apart. And attacks on Jews appear to be the leading symptom of where that happens. So let's take a look at what this looks like. I'll share my screen here.

[DESCRIPTION] Joel Finkelstein shares his screen to show the presentation. The first side includes a video of a highlighted lock over a network.

[TEXT] Social Cyber Technologies for Protecting Vulnerable Communities

[Joel Finkelstein] OK. So let's talk about these new technologies to keep communities safe. These new technologies are really crucial for us to be able to see the threats.

This is the opposite use of AI. Rather than using AI and machine learning to endanger people in ways they can't see, let's use AI and machine learning so that we can better understand the threats that map reality that's coming to us, not distort it. And let's use that to get a better fix on how this happens. That starts with the platforms.

[DESCRIPTION] Slide illustrating a logic chart with social media icons for various platforms ('Scaled Ingest' section).

[TEXT] A National Early Warning Service on Hate and Incitement. Logic Chart. Scaled Ingest, Iterative Machine Learning Training, Integration with OSINT Analysis, Outcomes.

[Joel Finkelstein] What I'm describing here is not just a solution for Jews. It's fundamentally a solution for democracies. We need to have all the data. Democracies need to demand that an independent, neutral third party can see what's happening on social media and act as a real-time trust and safety team. When we have this, what we can do is we can create machine learning classifications over this data to allow us to be able to perceive all of the activities that are happening in social media in close to real time.

[DESCRIPTION] Slide illustrating a logic chart with social media icons for various platforms ('Scaled Ingest' section) with a bracket leading to a cycle with a machine learning icon and magnifying glass ('Iterative Machine Learning Training' section).

[TEXT] Machine Learning Classification Of Antisemitic Content - Flexible Front End Dashboard Analysis-Human in the Loop

[Joel Finkelstein] And what that gives us is the ability to literally take out all the needles from the haystack. Any antisemitic comment that gets made, any individual speaking out hatred of a given person, we now have a database of who these people are. We have a network of how they're related to each other.

We know the surges in real time, which often predict real-world activity. We can now see it coming.

[DESCRIPTION] Slide illustrating a logic chart with social media icons for various platforms ('Scaled Ingest' section), with a bracket leading to a cycle with a machine learning icon and magnifying glass ('Iterative Machine Learning Training' section), with an arrow leading to a box with a report icon, alert icon and globe with arrows and exclaimation point icon ('Integration with OSINT Analysis' section).

[TEXT] Scaled Research Reports, Rapid & Automated Alerting, Threat monitoring & real time support

[Joel Finkelstein] And instead of being helpless, we can work with communities.

We can create a top-down capacity to send out scaled research reports, automatic alerting, threat monitoring. We can really create eyes and ears that hear over where and how this stuff is happening. And that changes the game

[DESCRIPTION] Slide illustrating a logic chart with social media icons for various platforms ('Scaled Ingest' section), with a bracket leading to a cycle with a machine learning icon and magnifying glass ('Iterative Machine Learning Training' section), with an arrow leading to a box with a report icon, alert icon and globe with arrows and exclamation point icon ('Integration with OSINT Analysis' section) with arrows leading to a david star icon, globe and human icon, scale in a badge icon, warning icon, iphone with negative emojis icon and a speaker phone icon ('Outcomes' section).

[TEXT] Presenting to Jewish Orgs, Briefing World Leaders, Briefing Law Enforcement Worldwide, Early Warning to Jewish Communities, Campaigns against online Antisemitism and intolerance, Online public service announcement campaign

[Joel Finkelstein] because once we can see this, once you can map the battlefield, you can present incisive information to Jewish leaders like Malcolm, like Michal, like so many people, who can brief world leaders.

We can help support law enforcement agencies to be more effective and to understand where threats are coming from themselves because they can't see this and desperately need our help. We can launch online campaigns against this stuff that might actually work because we can see what's working and what isn't and measure things. So this is a top-down function.

We're working with General John Allen, who's a four-star Marine General, who led our forces in NATO against ISIS in managing this problem. And he's somebody who is helping us shape this initiative and understands what it's like to manage a nihilistic populist threat that's hard to contain.

[DESCRIPTION] Slide with a network of profile icons containing some sort of combination of a "fake" tag, pink chair or person speaking connected to them.

[TEXT] The State of Reporting Today. Now... stale, messy, random, unsecure

[Joel Finkelstein] So right now, the problem that we have in terms of how we're organized, you know, I think Malcolm said, according to the Megillah, that we were all disparate and removed from each other, and nothing could be further from the truth. I don't know how many WhatsApp groups you guys are involved in, but there's so many disparate WhatsApp groups, it's laughable. And you have people who are talking about God knows what, putting up fake things, reporting incidences.

They see what's happening, they say it, it's getting into a WhatsApp group, or maybe they're talking to the ADL, or maybe they're talking to the FBI. But I guarantee you that we're not all talking together to make a sense system out of what we're seeing. That's really important. We need to do better.

[DESCRIPTION] Slide with a depiction of an algorithm network connected to another network with cyclical arrows.

[TEXT] Sofar Ai algorithm. Authorities, Core Community.

[Joel Finkelstein] And so I'm creating an operation called shofar.ai. Shofar.ai turns the victim, the Jewish, the victim minority group, it could be anybody, into a networked solution that documents, and visualizes, and analyzes the threats that are occurring in real time so that instead of waiting to hear about something on a WhatsApp group that may or may not be true, we can begin with the cell phone of every single person in the group. In WhatsApp groups that connected to each other, we can now begin getting detailed information about events using the AI and the language models to begin asking questions.

Let's get to each individual person who experienced this or witnesses and turn that into an automatic report. And let's use AI to accelerate that.

[DESCRIPTION] Slide describing what Shofar.ai does, with categories and bullet points illustrated with icons.

[TEXT] Sofar.ai. Shofar.ai data collecting: text, images, video, audio. Artificial Intelligence: categorized, labeled, tagged. Synthesis: data visualization, trend identification, incident prediction. Use cases: law enforcement, public policy, non-profits, local decision makers.

[Joel Finkelstein] Guys, if we can do that, all of a sudden, we're taking all this information that we all have, and we're categorizing it, and labeling it, and tagging it, and we're visualizing it. And we can see from the university level to the nation itself how bad this is getting and where. We can do trend identification.

And then what we can do that is a documentary case to support investigations at universities. We've documented everything now. We know who the usual suspects are in any university, in any state. And with this comprehensive capacity for recording for memory, with this comprehensive capacity for memory, we can then inform law makers of what's really happening and what isn't, not for profits.

We can inform public policy with the real facts. And we have incredible people behind this,

[DESCRIPTION] Slide displaying list of Principals and Advisors along with their photo, name, title, and experience.

[TEXT]Principals and Advisor. General John Allen (Board Member), 4-star General (ret) and Former Commander of NATO ISAF. Former President of the Brookings Institute. Jeanne Tisinger (Board Member), Former CIO Central Intelligence Agency and experienced board member. Jack Donohue, Cheif Operations Officer, Former 3-Star Chief of Strategic Initiatives, NYPD. Malcome Hoenline, President Emeritus, Conf of Presidents. Paul Goldenberg, Advisor, Dept of Homeland Security Founder, SCN.

[Joel Finkelstein] and most of them aren't Jewish, Malcolm and Paul excluded. We have Chief Jack Donahue is the former Chief of Intelligence in Cyber for the NYPD. We have a former Chief Information Officer from the CIA and, of course, General John Allen helping us with all this stuff.

[DESCRIPTION] Slide displaying network visualization of groups using #Israel on Twitter in 2021.

[TEXT] George Galloway. Eye on palestine. Abier Khatib. AJ Plus. AJ English. Jerusalem Post. Stand With Us. Israel. Hananya Naftali. Aya Iseleem. Sarah Hassan.

[Joel Finkelstein] So the problem we face is that the way that things work now online, we're actually in a digital ghetto. This is a hashtag #Israel taken from Twitter in 2021. Here's the Jewish community in the digital ghetto, and here's everybody else using hashtag #Israel. So we need to figure out ways to break out of that. And these tools can help us do that.

Our analysis shows that non-Jews are far more effective in breaking this problem than Jews are.

[DESCRIPTION] Joel Finkelstein stops sharing screen.

[Joel Finkelstein] They have no problem breaking out of these bubbles that we have such problems breaking out of. Well, that makes sense because this is really an international issue. It actually is.

When they're screaming about genocide, when they're screaming about apartheid, it's very clear what the problem is. And so we need to make this, this is not about Jews. It isn't.

We're simply, but we could be an example of a new mode of human rights that is highly participatory. And it requires that it's opt-in. It's chosen.

My sense is that there's a lot we can do together, and we haven't even begun scratching the surface of that. But I think now it's time to do that. And so I'm ending by saying I'm optimistic that as tough as this stuff is, what has happened over and over again in history is that when the cards are down, the people who really care about each other come together, and they show who they really are. I'm seeing that everywhere. I'm seeing it in every single person I talk to.

The Israelis aren't at war. Every single person in the Jewish community is at war. That's the sense that I got. So we might as well organize and [SPEAKING HEBREW].

[Dr. Alan Kadish] So that's great. I want to ask each of you, we have a ton of questions from the audience. But if I had to boil down the most common question, it's, other than understanding what you're talking about and supporting your work, what can we do as individuals? Coming together is great.

We did that at the rally. We've done that in other ways. And as several of the speakers have pointed out, the Jewish community really has, to a large extent, come together. But what can we do as individuals specifically to try to support the effort of coming together and combating this absolutely terrible virulent disease? We've done it before, as all of you have said. And it goes back to, I'll introduce a bit here.

It goes back to Avraham and Yitzchak at the Akeda, at the binding of Isaac, where the reason Abraham was able to successfully complete the task was, as the pasuk says, [SPEAKING HEBREW], as the Torah says, that the two of them walked together, and that was how they were able to succeed. So how do we translate that into action? So, Michal, what would you suggest as individuals that we can do at this point, at this terrible but yet potentially Importantly turning time?

[Michal Cotler-Wunsh] So what I think, is that we have built all of the infrastructures for this moment in time. And that means that each one of us has a responsibility to hold to account those infrastructures that we have built or that we are members of for this moment in time to stop being reactive and begin to be proactive in being able to engage this. All we're doing, we're playing whack-a-mole.

We're playing whack-a-mole on social media spaces. We're playing whack-a-mole on university spaces. We're playing whack-a-mole with chiefs of police, in individual cases. We're playing whack-a-mole.

And with that, we're not going to be able to advance. That is a huge recognition. And I agree with Malcolm. The denial doesn't just come, by the way, from university presidents.

It comes still, believable or not, after 10/7, and I'll say, I engaged right here in this Halifax forum, it comes from our own people that still have a hard time understanding that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. If we can't say that, anti-Zionism, the negation of Israel's very right to exist in any border, is antisemitism, what 10/7 showed is this has nothing to do with Palestinians. Anybody that cannot condemn the atrocities of 10/7 and that cannot actually unequivocally, without a but at the end of the sentence, say, I do not support baby burning, rape, and the abduction of thousands, that is exposing that this has nothing to do with peace, or humanity, or human rights of anybody.

Now, we have to be very, very clear first ourselves. It's a first awakening and recognition for us. The next step, as I said, is to stop playing whack-a-mole.

We have multiple infrastructures that are being created. And I agree with Joel 1,000%. If we do not create a transparent system, and by transparency, I mean transparency of policy, transparency of algorithm, and transparency of implementation, then we are not going to be able to head this off.

And playing whack-a-mole, continuing to removing, and content moderation, and reporting, reporting of any kind, as I said, on every space, is going to be insufficient. We are at an existential moment. And like Malcolm said, [SPEAKING HEBREW], that's a first step. It is critical. And I have to say, I have met in, I'm going to say, the average American and average Canadian that I meet on the street, they understand that this is an attack on them.

They actually understand it. That means that we have a responsibility to be in the lead here and to actually be, that's what it means to be [SPEAKING HEBREW]. It's not chosen. It's actually to take extra responsibility right now to transcend and reach across real or perceived differences of denomination, of religion, of geography, of politics, that's a big one, right now, in this heated political reality everywhere, in all of our democracies, and to understand that what binds us together is this line in the quicksand that 10/7 drew very clearly for those of us looking between civilization and the regimes that are intent on collapsing civilization and building an alternate reality on the rubble of it, whether it's Iran, Putin's Russia, China.

China has piped in on TikTok. You know what, just because it's utilitarian antisemitism, it seems to sell. So why not? And that's what's happening right now as we speak.

So we are going to have to be that much smarter, that much more agile. And part of the problem with those infrastructures is they're not always as agile as they need to be, much more agile, and much more proactive, rather than reactive. But the first step is to recognize and to be able to say ourselves, anti-Zionism is the new mutated, modern, mainstream form of antisemitism to which we are all committing to identify and combat together, not just for the state of Israel, not just for the safety and security of Jews around the world, but actually for the safety of the world as we know it.

And that is an incredible message. And we have the playbill. Our history, our [SPEAKING HEBREW], everything that was mentioned here today, we have the playbill. We just have to follow it.

[Dr. Alan Kadish] Malcolm?

[Malcolm I. Hoenlein] So I'd like to look at this in two parts. One is the highly sophisticated things that Joel talks about. For most people, and I don't know all the people who are watching, how it affects them. But I would bet that the vast majority don't have the capacity or the experience, they have the desire, to impact what happens on the internet. That's why we need to have operations like Joel's and others that can guide us and enable us to impact that area as well.

But there's a lot of things that what I call the conventional warfare against antisemitism that will address the attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions. And it starts with reporting that people and their schools, everybody has to get people accustomed to reporting to the police, so we have the statistics. We know that the vast majority of hate crimes probably go unreported. And even if they get reported, they're not labeled as hate crimes.

We have to pursue it. We have to make sure there are prosecutions then. And if there's a case that people are in the courtroom to show the judges that there is support for it, we have to look at SCN, at Secure Community Network, and approach them to make sure our institutions have the proper security, that you get the grants from the federal government to help supplement the cost of hardware for protection of our institutions.

It's unfortunate that we've become Europe in this regard, but we are. And we have to be ready to admit it and acknowledge it. And there are going to be other changes that are going to be essential. I think what Mark Rowan did, and Bill Ackman, and what others have done to take a stand and to say, we're going to cut off our contributions to universities, that got their attention in ways that all the moral preaching does not.

And if alumni, and if parents of students, and especially if donors, those whose names are on the buildings of universities across the country, stand up and take account after he threatened and said to send a small contribution, $100 or something instead of your usual big gift, all of a sudden, 7,000 people did it. When law firms started saying, we're not going to hire people whose values clearly do not reflect ours, if you could support a terrorist entity, you don't belong in our law firms, that has a real impact. All of a sudden, Harvard students can't read.

They said, we didn't know what we signed. It was somebody else with the same name. It was all kind of excuses that it wasn't them. Well, you know what, they have to be held to account. They're adults.

They're old enough to be able to express their views. And many of them, to vote, well, they got to be old enough to stand up for what they do. And that's why they wear masks, because they're hiding their identities. They're not really courageous and bold fighters for principle, et cetera. This is expressions of hate.

And it's like the Klan used to put on masks, these guys are putting on masks as well. I think that it's very essential that people become more acclimated to writing their political leaders. They hear from the other side. They don't hear enough from us.

Officers, and I had members of Congress even at the rally come to me and say, listen, get your people to write. My staff has to see their support. They have to see that they appreciate it when we go out on the limb.

Somebody like a Richard Torres or everybody, every senator, and 90% of the Senate and the House vote with Israel. We have this very vital aid bill. We have to support it. It is part of this battle.

Getting Israel to be able to defend itself is essential. Has any of us think what it would be like if we didn't have a Jewish state today? We can't even imagine it. But it's a threat that we have to take seriously.

So we have to, from our, we also have to see to it that prosecutions take place and follow the cases. We have to make sure there's accountability at every level. The IHRA definition is vital, getting more institutions, universities, state council, city councils, state legislatures to adopt it is vital.

We have to see to it that the efforts we make with other groups and that we expose the big lie. Hold media to account. Call radio talk shows. Write letters to the editor, everything that can at least hold the media to account.

We're seeing the broadest deception, and distortion, and misrepresentation in media, where they literally make up accounts about what goes on in Gaza, what goes on in other places, or mock what the Israeli government that tries to home to the truth and, because of that is, handicapped. Sometimes, I'm not sure it's the best policy. I think it would be better if they could just invent things like the other side does.

We also have to hold our leadership to account. We have to see to it that what it took to get the 300,000, we have to make sure that it's sustained, that there has to be a new spirit of activism, that we have to educate our young. We had, Dr. Kadish, you and I are older than the others, but we remember Soviet Jewry. We marched for Syrian Jews.

We marched for others. It united the whole community. Nobody can understand today what the Soviet Jewry movement was like, how it encapsulated the entire community and mobilized them. And then non-Jews joined with us. Today, we didn't have that cause.

October 7 changed that. It's a battle, not for territorial security. It's a battle for life. This is about our future, our collective future as Jews and the future of the Jewish state. So what I believe is that each person has to evaluate what they can do.

I got calls now from leaders in media entertainment sectors who, five years ago, would not have returned a call. Now they're calling us and asking for help and wanting to volunteer. And you see that even people in the media now speaking out courageously, some of them, and others who are cowering behind all sorts of fake fronts.

We have to hold everybody to account. We have to mobilize every resource. it's a time where we need the financial resources. We need the human resources. We need to hear the voices of every individual and the collectivity as well.

[Dr. Alan Kadish] Thank you. So we could go on forever, but I think we've hit the end of our time. I just want to close with one thing, which is to say is, to reiterate the fact that what I see going on college campuses is not just antisemitism, but it's a paradoxical rebellion against Western liberal values. And that's what's behind what's driving the lionization of the Palestinian movement, that anyone who's been successful, anyone who's built up a Western liberal culture has suddenly become suspect among a segment of college students.

So we need to fight the information battle on social media. We need to fight the information battle on campuses, and we need to fight the information battle among not just the American public, but the public around the world. And I think a lot of what we've heard today hopefully will contribute to doing that.

And as I said, I'm sorry we don't have all day to talk about this, but all of us have to go continue the work. I very much appreciate the audience participation. And really, my thanks to Michal, to Joel, and to Malcolm, not just for being here today, but for the work they've done on behalf, not just of the Jewish people, but on the behalf of humanity. And we've got to continue at this extraordinarily dangerous time to do that and to incorporate what we've heard today, to continue the fight, and build a society that's better.

And I thank all three of you for your contributions to that. Thanks again, everybody. Have a great day. And let's remain optimistic, as Joel said.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[DESCRIPTION] Blank screen with text and Touro University logo.

[TEXT] TOURO TALKS, TOURO UNIVERSITY, WWW.TOURO.EDU