Stuart N. Brotman is the former chairman of the U.S.-Israel Science and Technology Foundation. He serves on the board of Friends of Israel Sci-Tech Schools.
( May 29, 2026 / JNS )
Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas, warns that artificial intelligence is supercharging disinformation and fueling what he calls “hybrid” conflicts—wars fought as much in the realm of images and narratives as on physical battlefields. For many Jews, that description is not a thought experiment. It is daily life online.
Ask any Jewish student who has opened a phone after a flare‑up in the Middle East. AI‑curated feeds deliver a torrent of content about Israel and the Gaza Strip, much of it emotionally charged, context‑free and sometimes flatly false. Generative tools can now fabricate images and “eyewitness” accounts that never happened, while recommendation algorithms quietly learn that outrage about Jews and Israel is a reliable way to keep users engaged.
The pope is right to worry about what happens to truth when machines learn to tell convincing lies faster than humans can correct them. But for Jews, disinformation is not only a philosophical or civic problem. It is a security problem rooted in centuries of experience with blood libels, forged texts and conspiracy theories that have repeatedly spilled into violence.
Recent research bears this out.
A 2025 report by the Anti‑Defamation League found that some of the leading AI models show measurable anti‑Jewish and anti‑Israel bias, including generating classic antisemitic tropes and skewed accounts of the Israel‑Hamas conflict. Other studies describe “digital antisemitism” as the largest propaganda machine targeting Jews since the Holocaust, with social media and AI working together to push users toward increasingly extreme anti‑Israel and anti‑Jewish content. For example, text‑to‑image and text‑to‑video systems have been shown to produce dehumanizing caricatures of Jews on request or to pair the word “Jew” with visual codes drawn straight from 20th‑century hate campaigns.
In Catholic language, Magnifica Humanitas calls this a betrayal of human dignity: When technical systems treat people as manipulable data points, the “image of God” in each person is obscured. Jewish tradition shares that insight but adds another word: idolatry. When we treat prediction, virality and engagement as ultimate values, worth optimizing for at any cost, we are not just making a technical mistake. We are bowing to a new kind of golden calf.
The Torah’s command, “Distance yourself from falsehood,” has always been more than a warning against casual lying. Rabbinic sources forbid misleading the public, slandering individuals and what later authorities call gezel da’at, or stealing another person’s understanding of reality. In the age of AI, these prohibitions acquire startling new relevance. A system that reliably generates distorted narratives about Israel or that normalizes antisemitic talking points under the guise of neutral information isn’t simply “hallucinating.” It is enabling a large‑scale theft of understanding.
Seen through that lens, Magnifica Humanitas only points to half the problem. The encyclical is eloquent about the cultural and spiritual damage done by ubiquitous disinformation and calls on governments to regulate AI so that it serves truth and peace. A Jewish response must press the argument further: If we take our own traditions seriously, then designers, deployers and regulators of AI are not just invited to act ethically. They are obligated to prevent foreseeable harms, including harms to Jews, which flow from systems trained on poisoned data.
Those harms are not abstract. After Oct. 7, researchers documented waves of Israel‑related disinformation online—from fabricated images to wildly misleading casualty narratives, circulating at a pace no human fact‑checking operation could match. AI‑driven moderation tools sometimes struggled to detect antisemitic content when it was coded as “anti‑Zionism,” even as they aggressively flagged or down‑ranked Jewish and Israeli speech that mentioned security threats. For Jews on campus or in Diaspora communities, those distortions came paired with a spike in harassment and physical intimidation.
In that environment, calls for “media literacy” or “critical thinking” are necessary but not sufficient. The encyclical insists that the powerful—states, corporations, tech leaders—have specific responsibilities because they shape the systems that shape us. Jewish ethics agrees and would translate that insight into more concrete demands: transparency about training data; independent audits focused specifically on antisemitism and Israel‑related outputs; and real consequences when platforms or providers repeatedly fail those tests.
There is also an opportunity here. Not all uses of AI in this space are toxic. Jewish and Israeli researchers are collaborating with technologists to detect coded antisemitism online, using AI to spot patterns that human moderators might miss. Civil society groups are experimenting with tools that flag synthetic images or misleading captions before they go viral. These efforts echo a theme in Magnifica Humanitas: Technology is not inherently dehumanizing, but it must be ordered toward justice and solidarity if it is to be worthy of the human beings who create and use it.
For that to happen, however, those most affected by AI‑driven disinformation need to be at the table. When Catholics now join others in declaring AI disinformation a moral emergency, that should include a frank acknowledgment that Jews are often the canary in the coal mine. If a system misrepresents Jewish history, treats Jewish lives as expendable or fumbles basic questions about Israel’s right to exist, it is unlikely to be trustworthy on anyone else’s story either.
The pope has used his teaching authority to call the world’s attention to the dangers of AI run amok. A Jewish response can welcome that warning and add a practical test: Any AI governance regime worthy of the name must confront, head‑on, how these tools are already being used to recycle and amplify Jew-hatred in the language of our time.
Only then will “magnificent humanity” be more than a phrase.