Cornell University Alumni

"we have to stop accepting this kind of elevation of Israel as the highest point."

"Comics, excommunication, and antifa are the trinity of our tools."

"(Diaspora Boy reminded me of the perception that Israel is the culmination of Jewish history. Does this belief need to change?) This belief needs to change in every way. Physically, in terms of male toxicity, which is inherent in this shit. Emotionally and spiritually, maybe we should stop saying “aliyah,” which means “going up” and “ascending,” for moving to Israel. No, I don’t think so. Israel should be considered one of the Diaspora communities in the world. That’s what I consider Israel to be. We’re in a constant state of Diaspora. Israel did not end anything, and it is certainly not higher than any other Diaspora community."

"My feminism is the feminism of Puerto Rican writer Clotilde Betances Jaeger, who, in 1929 responded to the racist comment of Carrie Chapman Catt that Latin American women were not helping to build peace, by stating that while peace was a central principle for Latin American and Caribbean women, it was based on freedom from US imperialism."

"Government is a sterile body and an abstract thing; whereas Jewish issues and Jewish debate gets to the kishkes."

"(On the question of authenticity there is also a leftist Jewish trend to try and go back to a time before assimilation. For example learning Yiddish and reconnecting to a culture that existed before the holocaust. Is this trend trying to uphold a romantic idealized version of Judaism that cannot exist anymore?) I don’t think learning Yiddish and whatever else they’re doing is pre-assimilation. Jews were speaking Yiddish when they were assimilated. The problem today is that the main Yiddish speakers are Hasidic, but we forget that in New York and Warsaw before the war there were tons of Yiddish speakers who were assimilated. It was more the language of cultural autonomy. The larger debate is something I grapple with too, and it goes back to your question about living off the fumes of a dead culture. But for most cultures, in order to create something new you need to be well steeped in the roots and branches of what came before. So I don’t think it’s simply nostalgia. I think they‘re learning Yiddish as a galvanizing point in order to bound forward with something new, whatever that might be."

"It’s outrageous that they claim the mantle of Judaism, while in my view they trespass some of the most basic post-enlightenment Jewish values. I come at it from a fierce Jewish-pugilistic perspective."

"They’ve been defining authenticity for so long, but they’re outside the sphere of mainstream political opinion. My fantasy is to flip the script. Why don’t we start admitting the obvious? That we are the authentic Jews. We embody the Jewish values of the past several hundred years of post-enlightenment Jewish history. These neo-cons are the aberration. They should stop speaking for us, but maybe it’s time to stop including them in the community. There’s so much focus in the Jewish world on Klal Yisrael, which basically means peoplehood. Under the guise of Klal Yisrael, we‘ve been conversing endlessly with each other in the spirit of inclusion, all while apartheid was being codified in the West Bank. Over how many years, decades, or centuries are we supposed to be in dialogue with people who not only refuse to acknowledge our authenticity but who are all-in in a project of ethnic-cleansing?"

"(Is Israel a particularly prescient example for the rise of right-wing politics across the world?) Yes, especially because of the ethno-nationalist aspect. It’s one of the reasons Israel has made these horrifying alliances with right-wing and sometimes even overtly anti-Semitic movements throughout the world. Including in America, but also in Europe. It was such a shanda when Netanyahu acquiesced to the Hungarian government’s extremist, right-wing, anti-Soros, anti-Semitic campaign — but really it just showed his true colors. Can we start calling Netanyahu an anti-Semite? Are we allowed to do that yet? Or is that going too far?... He certainly prefers Evangelicals to Jews."

"What’s happening in Israel and what we’ve been ignoring and normalizing for the past ten years has now suddenly hit our own shores."

"(What would it mean to have a leftist Jewish community that doesn’t always have to be so reactive — one that’s not always on the defense against conservative Jewish gatekeepers?) It would be as diverse as the Jewish community is today, with all the different strands, fluid identities, and multicultural expressions. Some of it would be nostalgic, reinventing nostalgia, some would explore inter-generational tensions, some would be based on new Jewish experiences and encounters."

"There aren’t a lot of types of views allowed in the Jewish community and there is a large group of Jewish youth who feel they don’t have a voice...It’s support Israel or else, but without open discourse the Jewish community loses. We need to be questioning the accepted truths of the Jewish world"

"Satirizing the powerless is not good satire"

"Ben Shapiro at Seder is a reclamation of Jewish religion, culture, and narrative after years of Shapiro’s hateful invective directed towards American Jews. … My art exposed the absurdity of an Alt-Right figurehead such as Shapiro, who has built a career attacking the vulnerable, laying exclusive claim to Jewish tradition, values, and ethics. … It's time we started calling the contempt shown by the Jewish right towards the American Jewish majority, its tacit and active alliances with white supremacists, and its repeated calls for our very erasure as Jews, what it is: anti-Semitism. And we should not tolerate it."

"Every slave of a golden cage feels some hatred towards their master. Wondering the cause of such restlessness, they begin their emancipation."

"Not even the ashes of heroes have peace. Being great is synonymous with loneliness."

"I keep coming back to is poverty because ultimately, whether or not an individual lives in poverty determines their access to education, housing, healthcare, and is therefore a root cause of many issues in these areas."

"I keep coming back to education because it is an important test case for understanding the broader issues we have been talking about, such as deciding who gets to set the objective function and how it is set."

"I never thought of myself as someone who works in education but somehow I keep coming back to it so there’s got to be something there."

"Mechanism design is like if you had an algorithm designed, but you were aware that the input data is something that could be strategically manipulated. So you’re trying to create something that’s robust to that. This is a wonderful approach, incorporating robustness into the process of designing inputs."

"Ambiguity is a bug in mathematics. If I give you a proof and it’s vague, then it’s not complete. On the algorithmic side of things, it forces you to be very explicit about what your goals are and what the input is."

"Math and theoretical computer science force you to be precise."

"Misrepresentation or underrepresentation in data sets can lead to invisibility which can perpetuate or even amplify social and economic disparities."

"We didn’t need to have this level of death and devastation, but we’re dealing with it, and we are doing our best to minimize the impact going forward."

"We’re just not utilizing [vaccines] most effectively around the world. I mean 30% of the world still has not received a single vaccine. in every country in the world, including in the US, we’re missing key demographics."

"I’m struck by how people actually are wearing masks wearing a mask below your chin is useless. And it gives you a false sense of security that you have something on that is protecting you. It will not ... Basically, we are asking everyone to play a part in this."

"One of the things that's just clearly evident is that we here in the U.S. are very special in having a developed country that sill has some amazingly dark skies especially in the western half of the United States. To find skies as dark as what we have out here, in say Europe for instance, you'd have to travel to far northern Scandinavia or you'd have to travel down to northern Africa, so we are very lucky here to have a wonderful transportation network as well as dark skies, so take that opportunity to go out and find those parks in the dark places of our country."

"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now, I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone."

"Don't tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election."

"... the same message has to ... be reiterated over and over again, because either people don't hear it, or they don't believe it, or they don't adopt it."

"Fauci knew from the very beginning that covid likely came from a Chinese lab. He took active steps to suppress the information and defame anyone who talked about it. This should be one of the greatest scandals in the history of the US. But instead it barely makes a wave."

"Speaker to Anthony Fauci: And would you also weigh in on this issue of hydroxychloroquine? What do you think about this and what is the medical evidence?"

"In a piece of legislation he introduced on Monday, Paul addressed the public’s growing weariness with the White House medical advisor by proposing to eliminate Fauci’s role as the director of NIAID altogether. “We’ve learned a lot over the past two years,” Paul said, “but one lesson, in particular, is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator-in-chief’…To ensure that ineffective, unscientific lockdowns and mandates are never foisted on the American people ever again, I’ve introduced this amendment to eliminate Dr. Anthony Fauci’s position as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and divide his power into three separate new institutes.” So it’s no wonder Dr. Fauci is nervous. Things are about to get very interesting for “America’s Doctor.”"

"The chief fearmonger of the Trump Administration is without a doubt Anthony Fauci, head of the at the . Fauci is all over the media, serving up outright falsehoods to stir up even more panic. He testified to Congress that the death rate for the coronavirus is ten times that of the , a claim without any scientific basis. On , Fauci did his best to further damage an already tanking economy by stating, “Right now, personally, myself, I wouldn’t go to a restaurant.” He has pushed for closing the entire country down for 14 days. Over what? A virus that has thus far killed just over 5,000 worldwide and less than 100 in the United States? By contrast, tuberculosis, an old disease not much discussed these days, killed nearly 1.6 million people in 2017. Where’s the panic over this? If anything, what people like Fauci and the other fearmongers are demanding will likely make the disease worse."

"Tony, Tony Fauci, he's a nice guy. He said it is not a threat, it is not a problem. Then he said do not wear a mask, don't not not not do not wear a mask under any circumstances But he's a nice guy so I keep him around."

"We have immunological data and you have now clinical efficacy data. Everybody was asking the question: Where’s the clinical efficacy data? Now it has come out with the CDC MMWR this morning. So, we know it’s safe. We know that it is effective. So, my message and my final message — maybe the final message I give you from this podium — is that: Please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated COVID-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community. I urge you to visit Vaccines.gov to find a location where you can easily get an updated vaccine. And please do it as soon as possible."

"This is material that is quite formidable, that is infecting people with inhalation anthrax, infecting them in the absence of direct contact. You can call it whatever you want to call it with regard to grade and size or weaponized or not weaponized. The fact is, it is acting like a highly efficient bioterrorist agent."

"You've got to balance the compassionate-use aspect with trying to figure out whether it works."

"I'd say we have a couple of people who've recovered, they've gotten excellent medical care and the specific therapy, ZMapp … may have had a role in it but we don't know."

"There is no doubt they [Trump administration] will be faced with the challenges their predecessors were faced with ... we will definitely get surprised in the next few years"

"As experience has taught us more often than not the thing that is gonna hit us is something that we did not anticipate. Just the way we didn't anticipate , we didn't think there would be an Ebola that would hit cities. [...] If you develop an understanding of the commonalities of those, you can respond more rapidly."

": Bottom line. We don't have to worry about this one, right?"

"It’s a very, very low risk to the United States, but it’s something that we as public health officials need to take very seriously... It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about. Because we have ways of preparing and screening of people coming in [from China]. And we have ways of responding - like we did with this one case in Seattle, Washington, who had traveled to China and brought back the infection. [...] We’ve just got to make sure that we are totally prepared [since] infectious diseases will continue to emerge on the human species. And we’ve got to be essentially perpetually prepared."

"The only people who need masks are those who are already infected to keep from exposing others. The masks sold at drugstores aren't even good enough to truly protect anyone. If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn't really do much to protect you. People start saying, 'Should I start wearing a mask?' Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask."

"You don't want to go to war with a president [...] There's a temptation that you have to fight to tell the president what you think he wants to hear. I’ve seen really good people do that."

"I don't think that we are going to get out of this completely unscathed, I think that this is going to be one of those things we look back on and say boy, that was bad."

"It could be really, really bad. I don't think it's gonna be, because I think we'd be able to do the kind of mitigation. It could be mild. I don't think it's going to be that mild either. It's really going to depend on how we mobilize."

"It's really, really tough because you have to be honest with the American public and you don't want to scare the hell out of them. And then other times, in attempts to calm people down, [leaders] have had people be complacent about it. This is particularly problematic in a ‘gotcha” town like Washington."

"I feel like I'm 45. And I act like I'm 35. When I start to feel like I don't have the energy to do the job, whatever my age, I’ll walk away and write my book"

"Even before we knew it was a coronavirus, I said it certainly sounds like a coronavirus-SARS type thing. As soon as it was identified, I called a meeting of top-level people and said, 'Let's start working on a vaccine right now.'"