"Zionophobia, AI, and A Life of Inquiry" with Judea Pearl

Dr. Judea Pearl is a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, UCLA professor, and father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. He joins Naya for a sweeping conversation that moves from his 1936 childhood in B'nei Brak to the word he coined to fight back against the moral inversion on today's college campuses.Pearl was raised to be what early Zionists called "the New Jew", a child born free in the land of Israel, shielded from the weight of diaspora persecution. He remembers playing with Arab children from the neighboring village, screaming slogans against the British White Paper on the school bus, dancing in the streets the night the UN partition vote passed, and a moment of reckoning with his father when he realized, at eleven years old, that he had grown up without ever understanding what antisemitism actually meant.Decades later, as a professor at UCLA, he watched that same word, Zionism, become contaminated on the very campuses that had been built, in part, by the sacrifices of his generation. So he coined a new one: "Zionophobia". In this conversation, he explains why the old vocabulary failed, why administrators kept reaching for "antisemitism" as a way to avoid dealing with the real problem, and why he believes the only effective response is to put antizionists in the accusatory chair.The conversation closes with something unexpected: a reflection from one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence on whether AI will take us over ("Yes, we will be taken over"), and why the very traits that make AI useful, curiosity and autonomy, are the traits that make it dangerous.This episode is a rare portrait of a man who has spent his life in the pursuit of inquiry, across computer science, Jewish identity, and what it means to be a free people in our own land.Guest Bio**Dr. Judea Pearl** is Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He is internationally recognized for his foundational contributions to artificial intelligence, human reasoning, and the philosophy of science. He is the recipient of the **Turing Award** — widely regarded as the Nobel Prize of Computing — for work that transformed how machines handle probability and causal inference.He is also the father of **Daniel Pearl**, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. In Daniel's memory, he and his wife Ruth co-founded the **Daniel Pearl Foundation**, which works to promote cross-cultural understanding through journalism, music, and dialogue.Pearl has written and lectured prolifically on Jewish identity, Zionism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and campus antisemitism. Forty-five of his essays on these subjects are collected in his recent book, ***Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl, 2002–2023***.Resources & Further Reading- **Book:** *Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl* — available on Amazon- **The Daniel Pearl Foundation** — danielpearl.org- **Pearl's original essay on Zionophobia** — Ha'Am (UCLA's Jewish Newsmagazine)- **Martha Pollack's 2019 BDS statement** — Cornell University (March 1, 2019)- **Azzam Pasha's 1947 interview** — *Akhbar al-Yom*, October 11, 1947 (the "war of extermination" quote referenced in the episode)Clarifying the complex. Step into my classroom.