First They Came for the Jews in Civic Tech
And you said nothing, because you are not a Jew.
Government is Terrible at Technology. Maybe I Can help?
I’ve known technology my entire life. My father was a computer scientist. For as long as I can remember, we had a terminal in our house that dialed into the Yale University mainframe. I got my first email account in 1981, at nine. No one else had email, so I emailed my parents poems. After I learned to code, I wrote choose-your-own adventure games, obsessively refining both the lines of Basic and the story. The terminal was a portal to a secret world of scientists who communicated primarily via computer, made weird little games, programs and ASCII art.
But by 2015, the tech world had transformed from ASCII art and Usenet boards for weirdos into a horror show of dark patterns, misdirection and money. I’d run a tech consultancy for 14 years, over which time our clients’ goals mutated from helping customers to exploiting them. Hide the unsubscribe button! Lie about the best deal! Make returns impossible! My employees, too, were disgusted by what had befallen our beloved internet. We’d been drawn to technology and user experience (UX) design because we were interested in human behavior and tech’s possibilities for good, not spreading lies or harming users. We let a few contracts run out. I began looking for jobs, reporting stories, and researching a new book.
Meanwhile, the news was focused on the roll out of the Affordable Care Act. More specifically, the launch of Healthcare.gov. Which the White House promised would happen on a specific date, with the flip of a switch.
“Well, that sounds bad,” I said to the news. Never in my career had I seen a tech launch go as expected. Not once, never, it doesn’t happen.
Predictably, the launch was a disaster. Did they really not have any tech people in the White House? No, they did not. But they were hiring! Someone I knew from the UX world joined a newly-formed tech team at the White House. Giving tech advice to government sounded way more interesting than building another malicious site. But could I really shoot an email to the White House and get a response? Weirdly, yes. In April 2016, I started work at the United States Digital Service.
For a year, I lived an adrenaline-fueled existence. I was assigned to the Department of Homeland Security, where I carried three phones, each securely classified for a different use. I commuted weekly from my home in Brooklyn to my office in DC, kissing my kids goodbye on Monday and racing home to see them Thursday evening. A few other New Yorkers also did this commute — sometimes we ran into each other in Penn Station under the big board. We were serving our country, proud to be part of a movement to unite liberal and conservative America into the United States of America, modernize government and change the world.
From Tech Person to Cheerleader
After the 2016 election, I landed what I thought was my dream job: a fellowship at a think tank, where I’d be researching how to solve public sector problems. My one-year fellowship turned into three years, then grew into a Director role.
I visited DC regularly for meetings, or to testify on the Hill, and travelled the country reporting good government stories. Somehow, I’d become a professional cheerleader. But it was working! We launched a monthly publication that took off with astonishing speed. A group of colleagues founded an organization to provide free tech advice to local governments. Another formed a professional association.
A field had begun to develop, and it was exciting to talk to people in government who not only understood technology, but also wanted to improve government services for Americans. Our funders, the Ford Foundation, said the field was called Public Interest Technology (PIT), and were pushing strongly for a book to make the case. The head of the think tank asked me to edit a book of essays about PIT. I countered with a book, based on my research, about how to solve public problems in the digital age.
I knew the Tank did not think I was important enough to be the sole author, so I proposed co-authoring the book with a woman from Obama World who participated in the disastrous launch of Healthcare.gov. Ever the political animals, both she and my boss left midway through the book-writing to run the Biden transition team. I shouldered the burden, because we were changing the world.
President Obama recommended the book on Twitter, and my star rose. I spent a pandemic year promoting the book on Zoom, keynoting events, doing podcasts and SWSX and more conferences.
You have to understand: for six years I lived and breathed my work. I thought I’d found my people. Wherever I went, everyone knew my name, like on Cheers!. In 2019, after my entire family was in a car crash, my friends in the field created a fund for us to order food. I grew close with my team, my boss, and a network of like-minded colleagues. So close that my boss called me, frantic, on the first night of Passover. Even though she knew it was the first night of Passover. We were about to start the Seder, but she was my boss, so I took the call.
Her husband had been in a bike accident and couldn’t remember who the President was. She wanted my opinion, given my own brain injury experience. I talked her down, and suggested he get checked out that evening. Then I hung up and hosted Passover seder for 15 people.
You know where this is going.
My Obama Family Is Pro-Jewish Death?
After Hamas attacked Israel on 10/7, I learned my work family was either uninterested in protecting Jewish Americans, or believed Jews deserved it. The same people who worked overtime to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees now turned a blind eye to the burgeoning antisemitism crisis at home.
I was on a few listservs of tech people who responded to public emergencies, or helped each other out with expertise and jobs. Hurricane in Puerto Rico? Here’s a spreadsheet of resources. Ice storm in Texas? Immediate database for people in need, and four connections to private tech who will wave fees and offer free services. Gang violence in Mexico? Our hearts go out to everyone affected. Terrorists mutilate and kill not only Israelis but Americans, rape women to death, and drag bodies into tunnels in Gaza? Silence. No one’s hearts went out to those affected by the attacks. Instead, the list discussed the Paperwork Reduction act, and the useless Responsible AI practices everyone was starting, thanks to a Biden Executive Order.
As the unfathomably gruesome details of the attack began to crystalize, my world cleaved in two. Non-Jews consumed antisemitic reports from NPR and the New York Times over coffee and an açaí bowl, while Jews wept, attended funerals and agonized over every hostage.
My days filled with death and terror. Everyone knew someone who knew someone whose kid/aunt/grandparent was dead or being held hostage in Gaza. In Israel, my friends’ and families’ lives became a repeating series of funerals, shivas, bomb shelter nights, reserve duty, and terrible news.
Meanwhile, my Instagram feed became a portal to a world teetering on the edge: reports from the Nova festival massacre, vacation pictures from Spain, a jewelry designer excited about globalizing the intifada, new baby news, video of the destruction at Kibbutz Nir Oz, an Obama World colleague elated by the Palestinian freedom movement, my city councilor also ready for revolution and birdwatching.
On LinkedIn, a private sector exec was excited about a career change and self care. Yay self-care! We all need sooo much self care right now, what with globalizing the intifada. A poem about having laundry to do and a genocide to stop appeared in a few people’s stories. Isn’t being a force for good in the world exhausting? First it’s Monkeypox, then a hurricane, and now Genocidal Zionists!
And an Obama World colleague, a fellow User Researcher I’d known for years but who had never revealed her ethnicity to me, posted that AS A JEW, she supported Hamas’s actions. I messaged her, suggesting she examine her internalized antisemitism. She re-asserted that Israel deserved it, plus, doubling down on this assertion was the most Jewish thing she’d ever done1.
Nights were worse. I dreamed of hazy figures walking across the desert with bloodstains at their crotches. Clearer now, one of them is my son walking toward me. I see the bloodstain. He brushes it off. Just a little rape, no big deal.
The New York Times is a Sorting Hat
Then, before Israel even responded, the New York Times published a context-less graphic, using Hamas-supplied data, comparing the number of dead Israelis to dead Palestinians, and it was time to pick a side. Are you Team Jews Are People, or Team Kill The Jews? Team Hamas or Team I’ve Been to Israel? The people in my life sorted themselves, with unexpected results.
A college friend, with whom I’d marched for women’s rights and gay rights, who eagerly stuffed a Black Lives Matter poster in her window after the death of George Floyd, remained mute on social media. I confronted her, Jewishly, saying I didn’t think she would hide me. This is apparently a very offensive thing to say to someone?
My friend explained that her wife’s friend was a professor of Middle East something. The Professor said there were two sides, and she wasn’t the only one! Therefore, my friend of 30 years decided not to take a side. Like Switzerland. Best not to offend.
I thought of the Hot Mitzvah party she threw on her 43rd birthday, which was offensive as hell.
“What,” I asked, “is the other side to 1500 Jews being raped to death? That they deserved it?”
“Of course not,” she said. “But it’s complicated.”
“Why?” I asked. “Was it complicated when Al Quaeda flew planes into the World Trade Center? Would it be complicated if 1500 queer people were raped to death for being queer?”
We’d taken hundreds of walks together over the decades, on sidewalks and beaches from California to Maine. This would be our last.
“You kicked your Blue Lives matter friend out of your Hamptons share because you didn’t think there was another side!“ I screamed. “Sometimes, there aren’t two sides! The other side believes that it’s okay to rape and murder Jews!”
“I see,” she said.
We hugged, parted, and then she opted for less polarizing, less Jewish friends. I opted for friends who weren’t antisemites. Our 10-year text thread dropped. Her wife passed me on the street and didn’t say hello, despite years of shared vacations and child raising.
Then, American society began to actively disparage and attack Jews in America. Who knew my heart had the capacity to break again and again? My neighbors in the most Jewish borough of the most Jewish city in America launched the great hostage sign war on behalf of the Great State of Iran. Ceasefire Now signs sprung up around my neighborhood, though the Iron Dome was still actively exploding missiles from Gaza and Lebanon.
A professor at UCLA feared for the Arab patients of Zionist doctors, while Obama World cheered the White House intern walkout for a ceasefire. So brave, those interns. No mention of the American citizens held hostage underground by a terrorist organization.
Then: good news! My daughter was selected for the State debate tournament. For the first time in weeks, we felt light and festive as we boarded the subway, headed toward a celebratory meal. Two stops in, a young Asian woman wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh sat across from us, and our conversation came to a halt. No one could think. We could only stare at a woman who had never been to Israel casually wearing a symbol of Jewish annihilation around her neck. I glared at her wildly until she moved. Only after the terror scarf was out of view could we resume our conversation. That night, I dreamt I was in a Hamas tunnel that was also the New York City subway. I screamed until my husband shook me awake.
We tried again for some relief from the ever-present pain, and visited a film exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. Then we poked around an exhibit on the history of activism in New York (led primarily by Jews2), and were treated to a livestream of Jew-hate.
That evening, a friend from Austin forwarded me an email from her Rabbi. Protestors had materialized outside her synagogue’s Shabbat service3. The Rabbi was kinda happy because Shabbat attendance was way up! They needed the overflow seating! On the down side, the protestors planned to return every Shabbat. Also, they were calling for violence, in a state armed to the teeth. My friend armed herself with the Magen David necklace she’d been gifted at her bat mitzvah and marched off to services.
I shared the Rabbi’s email with a colleague at the Department of Homeland Security. He responded with a heart emoji. He’d eagerly worked on reuniting families separated at the southern border, and the Afghan evacuation. Jews in danger in America? Sympathy heart.
In December, we lit Hanukkah candles over Zoom with my son, who was now in Paris.
The Israeli robotics company he was interning for had reconfigured in France, where they could get parts delivered.
He lit candles with his coworkers the night before, and reported that Jews everywhere sing Maoz Tzur.
“I thought maybe it’s an American thing, but then everyone started, and I was like, okay! We all sing a ridiculous song!”
We laughed, lit candles and sang about the Jewish victory over the Hasmonean Greeks, and how to stay strong and Jewish. The next day someone set fire to Shalom Japan, the trendy Jewish-owned restaurant in Williamsburg.
Then, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) — which is neither Jewish nor a voice for peace — slithered into my Instagram feed when the As A Jew, the User Researcher from Obama World, shared her JVP banner for the Columbus Circle Hanukkah protest4.
As A Jew was exhausted from her work tirelessly advocating for Palestinians via art. She was the right kind of Jew, whose only Jewish activity was advocating for Jewish death. Over a hundred Obama World people liked her post, outing themselves as Team Hamas, or at least Team Clueless. Go As A Jew! Thank you for making this very important banner!
The next day, my daughter texted me a picture of a submission to her school’s literary magazine, asking, “Is this antisemitic?”
“They lit the flame,” read the poem, so “they must be annihilated.” They meaning Jews. The school had already suffered a lockdown and a lunchtime riot. Were they going to care about a little antisemitism in the literary magazine? And was this a battle I needed to take on? For Jewish students everywhere?
In Yonkers, security escorted a Jewish high school basketball team out of the building after the home team revealed itself to be aligned with Hamas. In Queens, a Jewish teacher locked herself in a closet to escape a mob of angry students. A subway car full of Hamasniks demanded all Zionists identify themselves and exit the train.
Later, at a living room meeting of Jews, a few men fantasized aloud about being in that subway car, revealing themselves to be Zionists and then beating the shit out of bigots. A gay man wearing a kippah, just returned from two weeks of volunteer work at IDF bases, said he felt safer in a war zone than at 72nd and Broadway. He’d decided to make Aliyah. An Obama World chat discussed dogs and the upcoming election.
What Was I Cheerleading?
It took a while for me to understand what was happening. The field I’d helped cheerlead was now focused on stoking antisemitism in America, rather than making sure Americans had food, a home, a job, reproductive rights or access to healthcare.
I’d watched the transformation at the Tank, but dismissed it as a few people who didn’t understand Jews. First, the Tank denied me a full Directorship because, as my boss told me, they’d already filled their White Director quota. I said I wasn’t White, but she said I was.
I brought a 30-year career in technology, experience as an author, user experience designer, researcher, and journalist, and had already been the team’s Director of Strategy. But I was too blindingly White to run a program on my own. So for two years, my co-Director was a non-technical project manager5. She was also an active antisemite.
After I turned the team over to Co-Director to take medical leave, she ended my contract, then rewrote the definition of the field. PIT was not about technology designed with the public good in mind, but the “intentional inclusion of a collective need for justice, dignity and autonomy6” and spreading misinformation about Israel.
In between posting support for a ceasefire, Co-Director shared pictures from tennis matches. Ceasefire now! And can you believe Djokovic’s last win? The war wasn’t real to her. The hostages weren’t people. She could casually support Jewish annihilation, followed by a tennis game and dinner.
The Antisemitic Virus Runs Deep
Not long after Passover and the campus protests, an Obama World colleague who had always seemed like an earnest, well-meaning guy, shared a viciously antisemitic chart.
Ed Note: My favorite part of this chart is the fantasy that the IDF planned a ground offensive around both the Met Gala and the SuperBowl. My second favorite is that all progressive work came to a halt in an election year so people could make visually modern, easy to read antisemitic charts.
Finally, I understood the silence on my listservs, the seething groundswell of antisemitism. People had been, as they say in DC, back-channeling. They’d been compiling spreadsheets and databases and charts for the sole purpose of demonstrating Jews are genocidal. I thought PIT was about fighting for people to receive the government services they deserved. But today, it is about digitizing Blood Libel to make it more efficient, easier to spread, and more visually appealing.
Before the Hamas attack, Blood Libel often liked my posts. After, he lurked in my stories. Maybe he was sympathetic to Jews, or interested in me as a human? I’d messaged him a few months earlier when he shared an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, previewing his upcoming take on Israel, funded by far-left nihilists and based on a week-long tour of the West Bank.
But the chart was beyond appalling. I messaged Blood Libel.
He’d not been in my stories cheering me on, but waiting for me to demonstrate I was not a Genocidal Zionist. Everyone else he knew had expressed copious amounts of sympathy. I was literally the only one not sad about Palestinians, and that made him sad, because either you cared about Palestinian pain, or you were a Genocidal Zionist.
“I evacuated my son from a terrorist attack and have attended a series of shivas,” I wrote back. “Where is your sympathy for me, a human you know personally?”
But Jews don’t need sympathy, because we control the banks and the media and win a lot of Nobel Prizes and annoyingly seem to be everywhere and successful at everything. What Blood Libel needed from me was an apology for existing as a Jew, plus some birding or quilting for Palestine, in order to embolden Hamas and further harm Palestinians.
I’ve lived with this conflict since I was born, through bombings in Europe7 and my grandmother’s hysteria over every attack in Israel. At 17, I spent six weeks on a peace trip to Israel during the First Intifada, lived in an Arab village, a Moshava, and at Neve Shalom/ Wahat al-Salam. I thought the Israeli/Arab peace process would be my life’s work, before the internet seduced me from one impossible problem to another.
Instead of focusing on the rising antisemitism at home, the bomb threats and school encampments, my “work family” — the people I devoted every waking moment to for the last six years — were ignorantly stoking it. Co-Director took my old team to SWSX to learn about Blood Libel from an actively antisemitic Humanities professor.
I messaged the Tank’s strategy director, who once told me she was honored to work with me, asking if her Tank’s strategy for renewing America was to harm Jews. She ignored me, posting about the lack of diversity at the Academy Awards. Jews were still reeling from the presence of antisemitic pins and an antisemitic Best Director speech from a man who directed a Holocaust movie without Jews.
Out of desperation, I texted my former boss who was now on the Tank’s board, and the most powerful person I knew. She always said she’d “kinda run the country for 8 years.” I thought we were friends. Maybe she would be an ally?
How funny that I texted! She was with her Jewish friends8 and they were just talking about the rising antisemitism. She was terribly sorry, but couldn’t think of a single way to help. I asked her to tell the Tank President to stop platforming antisemites. We haven’t spoken since.
How We Live Now
Over a year later, the shock has worn off. I expect people to be antisemites, unless proven otherwise. When I attended a shiva for Omer Neutra — a kid who could easily have been my son — the Long Island synagogue was packed. With Jews. I waited for an hour to speak with the parents, per Jewish tradition.
Two hostage families spoke to the mourners, pleading for us to hold out hope for the Bibas family and Romi Gonen. A group of Yeshiva University students spontaneously began singing Acheinu. The room swelled with Jewishness as voices joined the prayer. Busloads of Jews arrived, from Manhattan, the Bronx and New Jersey. To my knowledge, there was not a single non-Jew in attendance.
My work family is gone. With few tech people or actual experts remaining, the Tank is a full-time DEI shop, when they’re not advocating for the Chinese government. The friends and colleagues I’ve shed are also the people who think Jews Don’t Count. To them I am a quirky White lady. In America, Jews must to be White in order to maintain our Black/White framing of policy and thought. No one is interested shades in between, because that’s complicated. Jewish isn’t one of the five accepted race categories on the US census. Therefore, we are White colonizer oppressors.
Sometimes people in the field wonder what happened to me. I used to be so vocal for the field. Did my focus change? Am I still alive? What’s it like being a genocidal Zionist these days? But, Obama World forgot the most basic thing about me: I’m a researcher and a writer.
So don’t worry about me. I’m researching and writing about you and your complicit silence. I tried to warn you, but you didn’t listen. I tried to tell you I wasn’t White, and that your implementation of DEI violated its own principles. I told you about the synagogue bomb threats in Brooklyn, the antisemitic graffiti I clean up in Prospect Park on a daily basis, and you didn’t care. I told you Jews were being forced out of PIT and demonized by their coworkers, and you thought: but don’t Jews control everything and complain a lot?
I tried to show you what it’s like to be a Jew in America today, and instead you focused on the excruciatingly slow rollout of an online tax tool, an Obama-era dream project that seems entirely beside the point in 2024, and will be killed by the current administration. You worked on reforming the federal hiring process, as though we don’t live in a violent oligarchy that needs to be torn down and rebuilt. You focused on digitizing forms for broken processes. You sprinted around the country preaching the importance of plain language, as though Jews in America weren’t living a daily nightmare.
At the Tank, we used to knowingly quip, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.”9 Here are the results of the system of exclusion and hate built by the Tank, PIT companies, universities, and everyone who was “too busy” to deal with antisemitism:
This is how American Jews live today. It is also how you get to the mass murder of 6M Jews. In Germany, the right’s biggest concern was eliminating the Jewish element. Surprisingly, the left’s biggest concern was not stopping Jewish oppression and murder. The left was fixated on preventing a civil war. If a few Jews got exterminated in the process, meh. The Jews would be fine10.
America, your Jews are not fine, but your systems are working perfectly to achieve the results we are seeing.
In my next few essays, I will share my reporting on other places where Jews have been forced out, including a civic tech organization, and two universities.
Please subscribe to get the next essay in this series.
-Hana
Just a guess that she doesn’t light Shabbat or Hanukkah candles, attend Seders unless they use an anti-Zionist Haggadah, fast on Yom Kippur, attend shul on Rosh Hashanah, or literally anything else that makes a Jew a Jew.
See: workers rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and the settlement movement.
Because the correct way to help Palestinians is to terrify Jews in a country 7000 miles away.
IDFK - real Jews aren’t protesting on Hanukkah because we’re observing the holiday. JVP was only a few months away from demonstrating their deep desire to erase Judaism, with a backwards seder plate and an anti-zionist Haggadah for people who don’t understand Passover.
Co-Director was born in Jamaica, but was able to become an American after the Jewish family her mother worked for sponsored their citizenship. Co-Director never asked herself WHY a Jewish family might want to help a Black family become Americans.
I haven’t a clue what this means.
In 1985 my family lived in Paris. We’d been shopping at Galleries Lafayette just a few hours before it was bombed. Then, my brother and I were traveling through Madrid to Miami when the El Al counters at the Rome and Vienna airports were attacked. Both bombings were brought to you by Hezbollah and the PLO, the predecessor to Hamas.
She often mentioned her Jewish friends to me when we worked together. According to the Tank’s DEI training, that is the opposite of what you are supposed to do when encountering a marginalized person, but according to their DEI training, Jews are not marginalized or oppressed.
Edward Deming, who applied systems thinking to management.
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt, 1963
Thank you for this outstanding piece as I try to wrap my head around the violence against Jews in Australia and to write something. Sending a big hug across the oceans in solidarity.