‘Hack the hate’: YU president links Shoah memory to AI responsibility, asks techies to join fight

‘Let us hack the hate, fill that void with light … and build a future where kindness and justice and innovation for good will prevail.’”

—Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University

Yeshiva University’s president called on technology leaders to take an active role in combating antisemitism and online hate, framing the challenge as both a moral and creative responsibility, in remarks at “Hack the Hate NYC 2026” on April 14, Yom Hashoah.

Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, speaking at the Yeshiva University Museum on West 16th Street, addressed an audience largely composed of professionals working in artificial intelligence and technology, urging them to consider the broader societal impact of the tools they build.

“Tonight, we stand in the shadow of memory,” Rabbi Berman said. “We remember 6 million Jews — lives of infinite dignity, extinguished by hatred that sought to erase truth itself.”

He described the Shoah not only as an act of mass violence, but as “an assault on reality,” arguing that its legacy continues to echo in modern forms of disinformation and digital hate.

“Antisemitism and hatred more broadly spreads at the speed of technology,” he said. “Disinformation travels faster than truth. Lies are amplified and reality is blurred.”

At the same time, Rabbi Berman emphasized that technology also offers an unprecedented opportunity to counter those forces.

“If technology can spread darkness, it can also spread light,” he said. “That’s why this moment and this room matters so deeply.”

Organizers said the event was designed to showcase how Israeli tech innovators and global Jewish communities are building a “digital iron dome,” leveraging new technology to intercept viral blood libels and ensure accurate representation in the systems training the next generation of artificial intelligence.

Hack the Hate is an international initiative led by Generative AI for Good and the 8200 Alumni Association, in collaboration with Yeshiva University’s Sy Syms School of Business,  the World Jewish Congress Tech Human Rights Institute, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and  Combatting Antisemitism, Gesher, Maccabee Ventures, and President Isaac Herzog’s Voice of the People initiative.

Rabbi Berman told attendees that their work in using emerging technologies — including generative AI — extends beyond technical innovation.

“More than coding products, you are shaping what people see, what they believe and how they understand one another,” he said. “And that is a sacred responsibility.”

Drawing on Jewish teachings, he framed the issue in moral terms, citing the belief that every person is created in the image of G-d.

“To deny that image, to reduce a person to a caricature or a conspiracy, is a moral failure,” he said. “The question is larger than how we fight hate. It’s how we build a world where hate has no place to grow.”

He said that last year, he cited the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook who said “that the right-eous do not fight darkness directly — they increase light.”

“This year I would add that in a digital age increasing light also means creating it,” he continued. “It means designing platforms that elevate truth, building systems that reward dignity and training models that reflect wisdom” and are grounded in ethical principles.

Ben Good, public policy director for Meta, discussed how the company was dealing with the rise of online antisemitism, including Holocaust denial and distortion promoted by users across digital platforms. He said the tech industry needs to ensure that new systems such as Meta’s own Llama are developed with a deeper awareness of how anti-Jewish hatred manifests in the digital sphere.

“Meta is firmly committed to combatting antisemitism on our platforms, and we are optimistic about the promises of new technologies that we can deploy in that fight,” Good said during a chat with World Jewish Congress Tech Human Rights Institute [TechHRI] Executive Director Yfat Barak-Cheney.

He said that the accuracy of a post — such as one that denies the Holocaust — does not determine whether it will be blocked on Meta platforms.

“We remove Holocaust distortion and denial, not because it’s false, which it is, but because it’s antisemitic," he said. "It is hate speech against Jewish people, so we’ve drawn a clear line against it."

The evening also saw the launch of One Five Seven (157), presented by Dr. Maya Ackerman and Hannah Geller, as part of the Voice of the People initiative. It is designed to embed accurate, diverse and positive Jewish representation into AI systems, reduce antisemitic bias and equip institutions to engage responsibly with the opportunities and risks of the AI era.

Ackerman showed sometimes humorous if often blatantly offensive examples of stock images widely disseminated online that purport to represent American Jews and Jewish characteristics.

She said AI companies are increasingly working to align the messages diseminated by their creations.

They “used to try to be balanced, which it never was,” Ackerman said. “Right now the pretense has been dropped.”

She warned that it’s a mistake to compare AI to social media.

“I still hear this narrative a lot — Wikipedia is problematic, social media is problematic, and that’s why AI is problematic,” she said. “That maybe used to be the case, but right now AI companies have spent billions of dollars and hired farms of people in all sorts of countries to do alignment so that the AI systems are progressively saying more and more of what the AI companies want them to say.”

“It’s getting worse and the Jewish community is sitting on it and trying to solve AI as a small subsection of social media,” she warned.

“Now that I’m on the inside and I know how we operate, I’m finding it devastating that we have not put serious resources behind AI already, that somehow it’s expected that some little non-profit is supposed to take care of it.”

One Five Seven takes its name from the world’s approximately 15.7 million Jews. The project is rooted in the conviction that as artificial intelligence increasingly shapes how societies understand identity and history, Jewish communities must help ensure that those systems learn from truthful, representative and dignified source material.

Chen Shmilo, former CEO of the 8200 Alumni Association, and Shiran Mlamedovsky-Somech, founder and CEO of Generative AI for Good, announced the creation of the One Signal Collective, an innovation community aimed at connecting Israeli technological expertise with the lived experience and practical needs of Diaspora Jewish communities. The initiative seeks to establish a framework through which entrepreneurs, researchers and investors can collaborate on deep-tech responses to online antisemitism, including Holocaust denial in large language models, cross-platform incitement, and other emerging forms of digitally amplified hate.

Mlamedovsky-Somech presented Hearing Their Voices, an AI platform that amplifies “silenced voices of survivors of conflict-related sexual violence through ethical AI” by allowing the victims to testify publicly without revealing their identities. The platform counters Holocaust Inversion by placing the testimony of Israelis alongside women from Syria, Iraq and Iran, transforming isolated denial into a documented cross-regional pattern.

Ofer Familier, co-founder and CEO of dig, demonstrated how AI tools can identify the evolution of viral hate narratives, expose bot-driven amplification, and map the emotional triggers that allow antisemitic conspiracies to spread rapidly and at scale online.

Familier’s presentation showed how a false and inflammatory narrative accusing Jews of involvement in the murder of Charlie Kirk was able to gain rapid traction online, He emphasized that tools were urgently needed to intervene before digital blood libels harden into mainstream discourse.

Rabbi Berman described generative AI as “one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever created,” noting its dual potential.

“It can distort reality, but it can also deepen it,” he said. “It can spread division, or it can cultivate understanding. The choice is ours.”

Throughout his remarks, YU’s president returned to the theme of responsibility, particularly in light of Holocaust remembrance.

“On Yom Hashoah, we remember what happens when the world turns away, when hatred is left unchecked,” he said. “But we also remember something else — that from the deepest darkness, we rebuilt.”

He urged the audience to view their work as part of that ongoing rebuilding.

“We’re here not just to remember a world that was destroyed,” he said. “We’re here to build a world that must be.”

Closing his remarks, Rabbi Berman called on attendees to take an active role in shaping a more ethical digital landscape.

“The truth does not disappear. It waits to be carried,” he said. “And now it is in our hands.”

“Let us hack the hate,” he added. “Let us fill that void with light … and together, we will build a future where kindness and justice and innovation for good will prevail.”