What Happened Today: May 3, 2023
Skver bans A.I. bots; U.S. history test scores hit record low; more retailers flee San Francisco; 10 year-olds on McDonald's midnight shift
The Big Story
Some dozen rabbis within the Skver Hasidic movement have declared a prohibition against the use of AI-powered chatbots and other forms of artificial intelligence, the latest instance of ultra-Orthodox leaders forbidding the use of nascent digital technology among their followers. In an open letter written in Hebrew and published last Thursday, the rabbis declare that AI is “open to all abominations, heresy, and infidelity without limits,” adding that “it is possible that at this point, not everyone knows the magnitude and scope of the danger, but it has become clear to us in our souls that this thing will be a trap for all of us, young and old.”
Based in New Square, New York, the Skver community has taken a more restrictive approach toward the internet compared to some other Orthodox groups, notably the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which has largely embraced new technologies as a vehicle for reaching followers. Many Hasidic groups fall somewhere in the middle, urging followers to utilize so-called kosher internet filters that ban gambling, pornography, and other content deemed to be harmful. While the Skver statement appears out of step with the culture of technological progress, it echoes concerns voiced by high-level figures in the tech world, including Elon Musk, who have called for a moratorium on AI development until safeguards mitigating its dangers can be enacted.
Last summer, Hasidic leaders held two massive gatherings in Newark, New Jersey, calling on the tens of thousands of Orthodox Jewish women in attendance to shut down their social media accounts and spend less time online. “I miss the great times that we used to have before you got the cell phone that your boss gave you,” one young man said during a speech at one of the rallies. “Do you remember our conversations, when we used to laugh at our own stories, and not because we were listening to silly jokes on the little black box?”
Read More: https://www.jta.org/2023/05/01/religion/skver-hasidic-movement-bans-use-of-artificial-intelligence
In The Back Pages: Polish Responsibility for the Holocaust Was Not Minor
The Rest
→ Roughly 40% of American eighth graders are testing “below basic” levels in U.S. history, a stark decline in academic performance that began about a decade ago but accelerated significantly during the pandemic.
In 2014, just 29% of students who participated in the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress fell to the “below basic” level.
Falling to the lowest level since the testing began in 1994, the results of the most recent exam found students struggling with both basic and complex questions. For example, only 6% of eighth-grade students could offer an explanation in their own words for how Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech reflected core ideas from the Constitution.
Similar declines in academic performance have appeared in scores on math and reading, though some suspect that the particularly acute decline in history has occurred partly because social studies testing is not mandated and therefore less a focus for teachers.
→ Russia says a drone attack on the Kremlin on Wednesday night was an attempt by Kyiv to assassinate President Vladimir Putin, an accusation that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promptly denied, telling reporters at a press conference in Helsinki that “We don’t attack Putin, or Moscow. We fight on our territory.” The statements come after several videos posted on social media by an account with ties to Moscow law enforcement agencies showed what appear to be various drones near the dome of the Kremlin Senate building that exploded before reaching the structure. Putin rarely visits the Kremlin, particularly at the late hour the drones were apparently near the building. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cast doubt on the assassination allegations, saying that they should be taken with “a very large shaker of salt.”
→ A U.S. Department of Labor investigation has found two 10-year-old children working at a Louisville, Kentucky, McDonald’s on shifts as late as 2 a.m., officials said on Tuesday. Three franchisees with at least 60 other McDonald’s locations scattered across the Midwest were also found to have “employed 305 children to work more than the legally permitted hours and perform tasks prohibited by law for young workers,” the Labor Department said in a statement. The report comes amid a growing number of violations of federal child-labor rules, with the department finding 688 minors who were illegally working in hazardous conditions, the highest annual count since 2011.
→ Speaking of tough jobs for American children, Texas state Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins (D) proposed a recent amendment to an existing bill that would require schools to lower the current grade level to include third-grade students in receiving training on how to operate “bleeding control stations” during school mass shootings and other events involving “traumatic injury involving blood loss.” Because “there’s no appetite for doing gun reform,” Gervin-Hawkins told a local reporter, “then we’ve got to do something, and if we could save one life, then we’ve done at least that.” Among other skills, the 8- and 9-year-old students would learn how to use “tourniquets approved for use in battlefield trauma care by the armed forces of the United States.”
→ Leaning all the way into artificial intelligence, the top chief executive of IBM, Arvind Krishna, said he will pause hiring new staff in roles that could be replaced with AI technologies, particularly the back-office workers that amount to roughly 26,000 employees. “I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” Krishna said this week. The possible replacement of 7,800 workers would amount to one of the most aggressive integrations of AI from corporate America yet, though such moves could soon become the norm for companies like IBM that have made software and cloud services such a large part of their business.
→ Downtown San Francisco will lose two Nordstroms and one Nordstrom Rack retail location, joining a spate of major retailers that have closed down because of rising theft and physically dangerous conditions for shoppers and employees. Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, the owner of the mall where one of the stores was located, said in a statement that the closure “underscores the deteriorating situation in Downtown San Francisco.” Since 2020, 20 retailers have closed up shop in the downtown area, including Office Depot, Banana Republic, Uniqlo, and Gap. Whole Foods announced it would shutter its flagship location in April, with a spokesperson saying then, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening.”
→ Around half of all Americans are unprepared for their retirements, according to a new report from Fidelity, one of the largest providers of 401(k) plans. Some of that financial vulnerability is because nearly 50 million Americans now work for employers that do not offer retirement plans, and another part of it is that those who depend on their 401(k)s and IRA-type plans cannot expect the same reliable income one might get from a pension or social security. Ultimately, the insufficient savings will mean a greater reliance on social safety programs like Medicaid and tax rebates, which will be expensive for states, including Pennsylvania, which projects the cost would be about $14.6 billion over the next decade.
→ Following a four-day manhunt, on Tuesday Texas authorities apprehended the man accused of killing five of his neighbors, and they say they’ve arrested several other people who allegedly helped the suspect hide from police. The killings took place on Friday after neighbors asked the man to stop firing his semiautomatic gun in his front yard because the noise was keeping their baby awake. According to officials, the man had then reloaded his gun and entered his neighbor’s home, where he shot and killed five people, including an 8-year-old boy. The alleged shooter was pursued by local, state, and federal authorities who acted on a tip and found him in a closet hiding under a pile of laundry.
→ Harley Davidson can’t find enough repo men to help it recover motorcycles from owners delinquent on their payments as it saw its credit loss rate hit 3.2% in its first quarter of 2023, up from its usual 2%. Vaughn Clemmons, who leads the American Recovery Association, says the dangers of collecting motorcycles aren’t worth the hassle, with recovery rates as low as 10%, and often no payment in the event of a failed repossession. In the past, that risk was sometimes worth it, but as repossessions generally declined amid the stimulus payments and improved unemployment conditions during the pandemic, repo men found more profitable use for their tow trucks in the roadside assistance marketplace. Motorcycles in particular are difficult to repo because owners usually store them in a garage or off the street. “Who wants to back up in a driveway at 3 a.m. and get shot at?” Clemmons said. “You can make the same money doing something else.”
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Polish Responsibility for the Holocaust Was Not Minor
A new book explores the role of non-Germans in implementing the ‘Final Solution’ in the East
There are two central questions of the Holocaust: why it happened and how. A recent book, Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland, edited by the historian Jan Grabowski and by Barbara Engelking, the director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, is a significant addition to our understanding about how the Germans pursued the so-called Final Solution in Eastern Europe—namely, with the help of local non-Jewish populations.
The German effort to find and murder every Jew was a vast undertaking encompassing three continents. The Germans and their collaborators persecuted Jews from North Africa to Norway. They deported Jews to their deaths from the Channel Islands in the West and hunted Jews in the Caucasus in the East. The Germans killed Jews throughout the war, shooting Jews and their Christian companions barely 300 yards from the U.S. Army in Pisa in August 1944. Even within a global conflict that mobilized over 100 million men, the so-called Final Solution required considerable manpower and effort. Night Without End, a 546-page edited and abridged English version of a 1,700-page, two-volume Polish study, is part of a wave of recent historiography demonstrating how much of that effort came from the Jews’ neighbors.
Poland was the center of the slaughter. Of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, some 3 million were Polish Jews. There were 108,149 Jews in the eight Polish counties under examination before the mass killings of “Aktion Reinhardt” during 1941-43. Night Without Endexamines the fate of the 9,543 who survived this mass slaughter. By the end of the war, only 2,387 were still alive. The Germans called this final stage of the Holocaust—the elimination of the survivors of the initial waves of mass killings—the Judenjagd (hunt for Jews). It was a shared enterprise, involving Germans, the Polish authorities, and Poles who lived near the Jews.
The eight essays in the book use a microhistory approach, patiently sifting through inconsistent and difficult sources to describe the fates of individual Jews. One microhistory technique is to note evidentiary gaps, forcing readers to confront the absence of testimony and records resulting from murder and impunity. We learn, for example, that Władysław Węgrzyn, a member of the Home Army (Poland’s main resistance), agreed to hide Sabina Blaufeder and Genia Raber, prewar acquaintances. Węgrzyn later betrayed the women. We do not know why.
The Germans organized a system of control that spread terror throughout the Polish countryside, a system based on what Engelking and Grabowski term “German law and lawlessness.” The village security apparatus also targeted escaped Soviet POWs and peasants, weaving a web of fear and death. German terror unleashed dark forces in Polish and Ukrainian societies. While the Germans destroyed the Polish nation, many Poles exploited the assault on the Jews to settle scores, enrich themselves, promote nationalist and antisemitic politics, or to survive at the expense of Jewish friends and neighbors.
Microhistory, as the name suggests, is particularly effective at reconstructing specific episodes in great detail. For instance, Grabowski details hour by hour the murder of Jews in the Węgrów ghetto on Sept. 21, 1942—Yom Kippur—the same day as the final mass deportation from the Warsaw ghetto. During the killings, the 16-year-old son of Müller, the head of the German Schutzpolizei, donned his Hitlerjugend uniform and participated.
Similarly, Tomasz Frydel analyzes the social dynamic in the Polish countryside set in motion by the German occupation. Germans brutally retaliated against some Poles who helped Jews, thereby exploiting Polish fear. The Germans and Polish police sometimes killed Poles who hid Jews, which in turn led other Poles to preemptively murder Jews they were concealing—either with their own hands or by surrendering them. Dagmara Swałtek-Niewińska provides the example of Wojciech Gicala, who asked his village leader what to do with the 18-month-old Jewish infant from the Pinkes family he was sheltering. A Polish policeman shot Gicala and the child.
The book provides a vital service by dispelling the connected Polish myths of Jews as passive victims and of Poles as rescuers. The tale that the Jews went to slaughter silently absolves Poles morally of their failure to become involved. As elsewhere in Europe, local non-Jews invented tales to remove themselves from history. Many later claimed not to know what the Germans were inflicting upon the Jews. Or they claimed that the Germans always killed those who aided Jews, thereby excusing their lack of assistance.
Similarly, there is a deliberate policy in Poland, as elsewhere in Europe, to play up the role of non-Jews in rescuing Jews. Rescue becomes a morality play: Decent, principled Christians saved weak, confused Jews; sometimes the Germans killed the Christian rescuers. Grabowski calls such discussions of rescue, absent the larger context of wartime Poland, “a fallacy and misrepresentation of history.” Few Poles were willing to help Jews, and those who were endured threats and sometimes retaliation, including murder, from fellow Poles.
The essays describe inventiveness and resolution in the villages, forests, or labor camps where Jews endured unprecedented catastrophe. Amassing food was difficult, non-Jews often hostile. Only one elaborate bunker survived in Złoczów county, built under the foundations of a house, with access to a well. Few possessed such means.
A remarkable episode of resistance came from Yochanan and Abraham Amsterdam in the Dulecki forest in southeast Poland. The Amsterdam family, of Sephardic origin, possessed land near the forest, owned a tavern, and gave money to the local Catholic church. Yochanan Amsterdam wrote “Ten commandments of the forest” about how to avoid danger. At the height of their activities, the Amsterdams sheltered 60 Jews. Eventually the German-Soviet front reached the edge of their hiding place. On Nov. 27, 1944, the last 48 members of the Amsterdam group ran for the Soviet positions. After crossing a minefield and braving shooting from the Germans and the Soviets, 36 were alive.
The essays dissolve the myth that the Germans always killed those who helped Jews. While the Germans always murdered the Jews, their actions against those who helped Jews varied. For example, after Poles betrayed Janina Rogińska in Węgrów for hiding 10 Jews in June 1943, the Germans shot her and the Jews. Yet in August 1943, in the same county, the Germans merely fined Witold Ratyński for sheltering nine Jews (all of whom they shot).
Similarly, it was impossible for Poles to remain ignorant about Jewish suffering. Jewish pain was public, and it was sometimes a catalyst for Polish participation in antisemitic violence. Szraga Fajwel Bielawski heard Maniek Karbowski, his “friend” and neighbor, offer to bring an axe to break down the door of the house in which he was hiding. Bielawski heard Poles laugh as Jews were rounded up. According to Alina Skibińska: “The German perpetrators did not try to hide what they were doing from the locals; everything happened openly and publicly. Whoever wanted to know, knew; whoever wanted to hear, heard.”
Night Without End demonstrates how the Germans’ genocidal goals were impossible without the collaboration of Poles. Polish neighbors could identify Jews in a way Germans could not. Village Jews were integrated into the surrounding population. Shtetl Jews, by contrast, were middle men relying on weaker social ties such as former employees and business contacts.
Poles chose to kill Jews. In Nowy Targ county, Polish village guards, not the Germans, scoured the woods for Jews. Polish volunteer firefighters hunted Jews. In Łuków county, Poles betrayed Jews for a bag of sugar. The essays mention Poles raping Jewish women. Some resisters became oppressors. The Home Army liberated 120 prisoners from the Germans in Nowy Wiśnicz in June 1944. In autumn 1944 some of these released prisoners attacked a Jewish bunker, killing seven of the eight Jews inside. According to Engelking and Grabowski: “Sizable parts of Polish populations participated in liquidation actions and later, during the period between 1942 and 1945, contributed directly or indirectly to the death of thousands of Jews who were seeking refuge among them.”
For Jews, flight was torment. Escapees from the Siemiatycze ghetto returned, unable to find anywhere to hide. The few that reached the forest lasted two weeks. Some surrendered to the police, who executed them in the Jewish cemetery.
Some Jewish women lived as forced laborers in Germany by pretending to be Christians. Contrary to the notion that labor camps always meant death, some Jews survived them, especially the poorly controlled ones in Dębica county in Poland. Within the camps, Jewish farmers had a better chance of living because of their agricultural experience. The Germans encouraged the belief that Jews would live by working, but neither work nor collaboration spared Jews.
Getting through the occupation, however, did not mean survival. The postwar period was often lethal, too. Lonek Lindenberger and Ludwik Herz from Nowy Targ were saved by Oskar Schindler. Poles murdered them in 1946.
Regional differences mattered. In eastern Poland, where the German occupation was relatively short, Soviet partisans helped Jews. Poles who felt threatened by Ukrainians were more likely to aid Jews. In Bielsk Podlaski, the descendants of the petty nobility were more sympathetic to Jews. These former noble families also lived in self-sufficient hamlets that were distant from villages filled with hostile peasants. As Engelking and Grabowski rightly argue, “the oft-mentioned, alleged ‘inevitability of the Holocaust’ consisted of many elements that were by no means inevitable.”
Night Without End represents an ongoing revolution in Holocaust historiography. The most interesting studies no longer focus on German policy toward the Jews nor Nazi mechanisms of murder. Instead, historians are researching local non-Jewish populations and their complicity in German crimes. This scholarship often encounters opposition, at times suffused with antisemitism. A 2018 Polish law imposed up to three years imprisonment for Poles and foreigners who claim that “the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” The law initially exempted artistic and academic activity. Following criticism, Poland dropped the criminal penalties, allowing instead for civil suits. In a sleight of hand, it removed the artistic and academic exemption, placing historians at the mercy of vexatious litigation and intimidation.
Most importantly, Night Without End offers a defense against attempts to dismiss the significance of the Holocaust and its memory. In politics, left- and right-wing extremists protect Holocaust deniers and complain falsely that Holocaust remembrance suppresses the commemoration of other crimes. In academia there are claims that Germany engages in excessive Holocaust memorialization. Night Without End, however, demonstrates that the Holocaust still has much to teach. Contrary to the myths, the responsibility for industrial-scale murder was wider, the reality of the Holocaust harsher, and Europe’s moral abyss deeper.
Andrew Apostolou is a historian of the Holocaust. Most recently he spoke on “Collaboration as a strategy in Greece” at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris.
My mother, Barbara Reichmann, was one of the Jewish women mentioned who escaped Poland and survived in Germany as forced labor, passing as Christian. She volunteered for this because, fearing Polish anti-semitism as described in the piece, she felt she’d be safer from detection as a Jew among Germans than among Poles. She and her companion, Sabina, were not in a camp but lived and worked in a resort hotel in Ulm. Shortly after their liberation and establishing themselves as displaced persons in Munich, they married other Holocaust survivors. Sabina died in childbirth. My mother, father and I, four years old, through the auspices of HIAS emigrated to America. You can read her story in the award winning Claiming My Place: Coming of Age in the Shadow of the Holocaust by Planaria Price and Helen Reichmann West.
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