Last week in The Free Press, Niall Ferguson and John-Clark Levin argued that history is being defeated by algorithms and artificial intelligence—a framework that led Ferguson, a historian, to conclude, “I failed utterly.” Nine writers then answered him in these same pages, some sharing his despair, others disputing his diagnosis.
This debate speaks directly to my life’s work. As the director of the Antisemitism Research Initiative at The George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, I document the point at which the normalization of antisemitism becomes operational—where the chant becomes a plot to action, and the plot becomes the basis for a federal complaint. I am also a historian from Mosul, in northern Iraq, who did not merely study the death of history but stood inside it, wrote about it under a death sentence, and spent the years after the war unearthing the deepest erasure my city ever suffered: the deletion of its Jews.
One of my credentials belongs to the world Ferguson is warning about. The other belongs to the world he believes is already lost. From where both meet, I can report that his alarm is justified, and his conclusion is wrong.
