Category: English

Source: – By Aislinn Conrad, Associate Professor of Social Work, University of Iowa

Artificial intelligence is rapidly being adopted to help prevent abuse and protect vulnerable people – including children in foster care, adults in nursing homes and students in schools. These tools promise to detect danger in real time and alert authorities before serious harm occurs.

Developers are using natural language processing, for example — a form of AI that interprets written or spoken language – to try to detect patterns of threats, manipulation and control in text messages. This information could help detect domestic abuse and potentially assist courts or law enforcement in early intervention. Some child welfare agencies use predictive modeling, another common AI technique, to calculate which families or individuals are most “at risk” for abuse.

When thoughtfully implemented, AI tools have the potential to enhance safety and efficiency. For instance, predictive models have assisted social workers to prioritize high-risk cases and intervene earlier.

But as a social worker with 15 years of experience researching family violence – and five years on the front lines as a foster-care case manager, child abuse investigator and early childhood coordinator – I’ve seen how well-intentioned systems often fail the very people they are meant to protect.

Now, I am helping to develop iCare, an AI-powered surveillance camera that analyzes limb movements – not faces or voices – to detect physical violence. I’m grappling with a critical question: Can AI truly help safeguard vulnerable people, or is it just automating the same systems that have long caused them harm?

New tech, old injustice

Many AI tools are trained to “learn” by analyzing historical data. But history is full of inequality, bias and flawed assumptions. So are people, who design, test and fund AI.

That means AI algorithms can wind up replicating systemic forms of discrimination, like racism or classism. A 2022 study in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, found that a predictive risk model to score families’ risk levels – scores given to hotline staff to help them screen calls – would have flagged Black children for investigation 20% more often than white children, if used without human oversight. When social workers were included in decision-making, that disparity dropped to 9%.

Language-based AI can also reinforce bias. For instance, one study showed that natural language processing systems misclassified African American Vernacular English as “aggressive” at a significantly higher rate than Standard American English — up to 62% more often, in certain contexts.

Meanwhile, a 2023 study found that AI models often struggle with context clues, meaning sarcastic or joking messages can be misclassified as serious threats or signs of distress.

These flaws can replicate larger problems in protective systems. People of color have long been over-surveilled in child welfare systems — sometimes due to cultural misunderstandings, sometimes due to prejudice. Studies have shown that Black and Indigenous families face disproportionately higher rates of reporting, investigation and family separation compared with white families, even after accounting for income and other socioeconomic factors.

Many of these disparities stem from structural racism embedded in decades of discriminatory policy decisions, as well as implicit biases and discretionary decision-making by overburdened caseworkers.

Surveillance over support

Even when AI systems do reduce harm toward vulnerable groups, they often do so at a disturbing cost.

In hospitals and elder-care facilities, for example, AI-enabled cameras have been used to detect physical aggression between staff, visitors and residents. While commercial vendors promote these tools as safety innovations, their use raises serious ethical concerns about the balance between protection and privacy.

In a 2022 pilot program in Australia, AI camera systems deployed in two care homes generated more than 12,000 false alerts over 12 months – overwhelming staff and missing at least one real incident. The program’s accuracy did “not achieve a level that would be considered acceptable to staff and management,” according to the independent report.

Children are affected, too. In U.S. schools, AI surveillance like Gaggle, GoGuardian and Securly are marketed as tools to keep students safe. Such programs can be installed on students’ devices to monitor online activity and flag anything concerning.

But they’ve also been shown to flag harmless behaviors – like writing short stories with mild violence, or researching topics related to mental health. As an Associated Press investigation revealed, these systems have also outed LGBTQ+ students to parents or school administrators by monitoring searches or conversations about gender and sexuality.

Other systems use classroom cameras and microphones to detect “aggression.” But they frequently misidentify normal behavior like laughing, coughing or roughhousing — sometimes prompting intervention or discipline.

These are not isolated technical glitches; they reflect deep flaws in how AI is trained and deployed. AI systems learn from past data that has been selected and labeled by humans — data that often reflects social inequalities and biases. As sociologist Virginia Eubanks wrote in “Automating Inequality,” AI systems risk scaling up these long-standing harms.

Care, not punishment

I believe AI can still be a force for good, but only if its developers prioritize the dignity of the people these tools are meant to protect. I’ve developed a framework of four key principles for what I call “trauma-responsive AI.”

1. Survivor control: People should have a say in how, when and if they’re monitored. Providing users with greater control over their data can enhance trust in AI systems and increase their engagement with support services, such as creating personalized plans to stay safe or access help.

2. Human oversight: Studies show that combining social workers’ expertise with AI support improves fairness and reduces child maltreatment – as in Allegheny County, where caseworkers used algorithmic risk scores as one factor, alongside their professional judgment, to decide which child abuse reports to investigate.

3. Bias auditing: Governments and developers are increasingly encouraged to test AI systems for racial and economic bias. Open-source tools like IBM’s AI Fairness 360, Google’s What-If Tool, and Fairlearn assist in detecting and reducing such biases in machine learning models.

4. Privacy by design: Technology should be built to protect people’s dignity. Open-source tools like Amnesia, Google’s differential privacy library and Microsoft’s SmartNoise help anonymize sensitive data by removing or obscuring identifiable information. Additionally, AI-powered techniques, such as facial blurring, can anonymize people’s identities in video or photo data.

Honoring these principles means building systems that respond with care, not punishment.

Some promising models are already emerging. The Coalition Against Stalkerware and its partners advocate to include survivors in all stages of tech development – from needs assessments to user testing and ethical oversight.

Legislation is important, too. On May 5, 2025, for example, Montana’s governor signed a law restricting state and local government from using AI to make automated decisions about individuals without meaningful human oversight. It requires transparency about how AI is used in government systems and prohibits discriminatory profiling.

As I tell my students, innovative interventions should disrupt cycles of harm, not perpetuate them. AI will never replace the human capacity for context and compassion. But with the right values at the center, it might help us deliver more of it.

Aislinn Conrad is developing iCare, an AI-powered, real-time violence detection system.

– ref. Protecting the vulnerable, or automating harm? AI’s double-edged role in spotting abuse – https://theconversation.com/protecting-the-vulnerable-or-automating-harm-ais-double-edged-role-in-spotting-abuse-256403

Source: – By Jonathan Krasner, Associate Professor of Jewish Education Research, Brandeis University

As commencement season comes to a close, many campuses remain riven by the Israel-Hamas war. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the undergraduate class president was banned from walking at her graduation after delivering a fiery – and unauthorized – speech accusing her school of complicity in Israel’s campaign to “wipe out Palestine off the face of the earth.” Anti-Israel protests broke out at graduation ceremonies across the United States, from Columbia to the University of California at Berkeley.

Since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, many American campuses have been punctuated by vigils, demonstrations and disruptions. But the loudest voices aren’t necessarily the most representative. Activists’ pronouncements on either side fail to capture the range of student opinion about the war and its reverberations at home, including the documented rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia.

This is certainly true for Jewish students – buffeted by the war, the hostage crisis, campus protests and federal politics. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has used campus antisemitism and anti-Zionism as a pretext to assault higher education and implement hard-line immigration policies.

Indeed, one of the most striking findings of my study
on Jewish undergraduate attitudes, published in May 2025, is how many students described themselves as conflicted, uncertain, disaffected and even detached. Interviews across the country convinced my research team that any attempt to gauge Jewish student opinion with either/or categories are reductive and misleading.

Moving beyond numbers

In the wake of Oct. 7, my office hours quickly became a refuge for distraught Jewish students as they processed their thoughts. Few were content with pat answers.

I began wondering how representative they were. Tufts researchers Eitan Hersh and Dahlia Lyss found that since Oct. 7, more students were valuing and prioritizing their Jewish identities, even while an increased number were hiding their Jewishness on campus.

My Brandeis colleagues Graham Wright, Leonard Saxe and their research team, meanwhile, found that a clear majority of Jewish students said they felt a connection to Israel but were sharply divided in their views of its government. While most considered statements calling for the country’s destruction to be antisemitic, they differed about where to draw the line between reasonable and illegitimate criticisms of Israel.

These findings were instructive. But I was interested in learning more about the “how” and the “why” behind the numbers. Over the spring 2024 semester, my team and I interviewed 38 students on 24 campuses across 16 states and the District of Columbia. Participants reflected the broad religious, political, economic, geographical, sexual and racial diversity within the American Jewish population, particularly among Jews under 30. Some of the campuses were relatively placid; others were hotbeds of protest.

The ‘missing middle’

As my team analyzed transcripts, we identified six categories.

About one-third of the Jewish students we spoke with were actively engaged on either side of the conflict, whether through demonstrations or online advocacy. “Affirmed” students’ connection to Israel deepened after Oct. 7. “Aggrieved” students, on the other hand, had joined anti-war protests and voiced anger at Jewish organizations for ignoring Israel’s culpability for Palestinian suffering.

Many more of our participants, however, were ambivalent, despondent or even apathetic. As journalist Arno Rosenfeld put it in an article about my research, the majority of Jewish students inhabit a “great missing middle” in Israeli-Palestinian discourse.

Two-thirds of the students we spoke with are in this “missing middle,” divided into four categories:

• “Conflicted” students were inconclusively grappling with the moral and political complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• “Disillusioned” students struggled to reconcile their sentimental attachment to Israel with their disappointment – their sense that the country betrayed its own values in its treatment of Palestinians.
• “Retrenched” students turned inward, fearful of being identified as Jewish on campuses they perceived as hostile to Jews.
• The last category, “disengaged” students, were detached or actively steering clear of controversy.

Out of the fray

The most straightforward of these categories is the “disengaged” students. Some, like Bella, on the West Coast – all of the names in this article are pseudonyms – knew little about the conflict before the war. What they learned since convinced them it was unsolvable and that they were powerless to promote change.

The distance that some students felt from events in Israel and Gaza made it all the more baffling and odious to them when peers protested in ways that implied Jewish Americans were complicit.

“I’m not personally doing anything,” complained Salem, a first-year student in the Midwest. “I don’t have anything to do with this.”

Students whom we classified as “retrenched” reported anxiety, loss of sleep and a sense of isolation. Many of them were concerned that rejecting Zionism – that is, the movement supporting the creation and preservation of Israel as a national homeland for the Jewish people – had become a litmus test in their progressive circles. That was untenable for these students, because they viewed Zionism as a constituent part of being Jewish.

Interviewees like Jack, a junior in the Pacific Northwest, spoke of removing their Star of David necklaces and censoring elements of their biography, because they perceived a social penalty for being Jewish.

Rejecting simple narratives

By far, the largest group of Jewish students were struggling with mixed feelings about the war and its reverberations. What united these “conflicted” or “disillusioned” students was wariness of grand narratives and talking points that reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a contest between good and evil, or the powerful and the powerless. They also eschewed labels such as “Zionist” or “anti-Zionist,” saying they lacked nuance.

Consider Elana, a “conflicted” sophomore in the mid-Atlantic, who told us she was uncomfortable in most Jewish spaces on campus because they effectively demanded that she declare her Israel politics at the door. It seemed to her that activists on both sides were more comfortable retreating into echo chambers than engaging in dialogue across differences.

Then there was Shira, a “disillusioned” first year in the Midwest who viewed Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, however implausible, as the only alternative to mutual destruction. She refused to participate in anti-war demonstrations on her campus because she couldn’t abide the organizers’ confrontational tactics – but also to avoid blowback from pro-Israel family and friends.

‘Safe spaces’ and ‘groupthink’

One unambiguous finding from our study was how often our interviewees used language prevalent in progressive discourse. They spoke repeatedly about the importance of “safe spaces,” and felt that listeners’ understandings mattered more than speakers’ intentions when evaluating “hate speech” and “microaggressions.”

Leo, a “conflicted” junior in the Deep South who uses they/them pronouns, acknowledged that some protesters who chant slogans such as “Free Palestine” and “Globalize the Intifada” may not recognize how many Jewish students interpret them: as antisemitic calls for Israel’s destruction. But that was no excuse, they insisted. “What I’ve noticed is that the people who are at those demonstrations have created their own definition of antisemitism,” without input from the vast majority of Jews – something progressive protesters would not have stood for if another racial, religious or ethnic minority were being discussed.

The use of provocative and arguably antisemitic language was responsible for keeping Jews like Leo and Shira, who evinced deep sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, from joining the protests.

Fundamentally, however, many of the Jewish students we spoke with said they’d welcome opportunities to discuss the war and the broader conflict. But the “groupthink” on campus was stifling, they complained, whether in Hillel centers that toe a reflexively pro-Israel line or student organizations that demand unquestioned buy-in to a set of progressive orthodoxies.

Joe, a “disillusioned” student in New England who just received his diploma two weeks ago, reflected, “When my friends complain that the ‘Free Palestine’ stickers on my campus are antisemitic, I think they just don’t want to be uncomfortable.” Discomfort can be productive, he added – as long as it is expressed in an environment that values intellectual risk-taking, dialogue across difference, and empathy.

Research discussed in this article was sponsored by the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University.

– ref. Conflicted, disillusioned, disengaged: The unsettled center of Jewish student opinion after Oct. 7 – https://theconversation.com/conflicted-disillusioned-disengaged-the-unsettled-center-of-jewish-student-opinion-after-oct-7-257521

Source: – By Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston

Christopher Pelkey was shot and killed in a road range incident in 2021. On May 8, 2025, at the sentencing hearing for his killer, an AI video reconstruction of Pelkey delivered a victim impact statement. The trial judge reported being deeply moved by this performance and issued the maximum sentence for manslaughter.

As part of the ceremonies to mark Israel’s 77th year of independence on April 30, 2025, officials had planned to host a concert featuring four iconic Israeli singers. All four had died years earlier. The plan was to conjure them using AI-generated sound and video. The dead performers were supposed to sing alongside Yardena Arazi, a famous and still very much alive artist. In the end Arazi pulled out, citing the political atmosphere, and the event didn’t happen.

In April, the BBC created a deep-fake version of the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie to teach a “maestro course on writing.” Fake Agatha would instruct aspiring murder mystery authors and “inspire” their “writing journey.”

The use of artificial intelligence to “reanimate” the dead for a variety of purposes is quickly gaining traction. Over the past few years, we’ve been studying the moral implications of AI at the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and we find these AI reanimations to be morally problematic.

Before we address the moral challenges the technology raises, it’s important to distinguish AI reanimations, or deepfakes, from so-called griefbots. Griefbots are chatbots trained on large swaths of data the dead leave behind – social media posts, texts, emails, videos. These chatbots mimic how the departed used to communicate and are meant to make life easier for surviving relations. The deepfakes we are discussing here have other aims; they are meant to promote legal, political and educational causes.

Moral quandaries

The first moral quandary the technology raises has to do with consent: Would the deceased have agreed to do what their likeness is doing? Would the dead Israeli singers have wanted to sing at an Independence ceremony organized by the nation’s current government? Would Pelkey, the road-rage victim, be comfortable with the script his family wrote for his avatar to recite? What would Christie think about her AI double teaching that class?

The answers to these questions can only be deduced circumstantially – from examining the kinds of things the dead did and the views they expressed when alive. And one could ask if the answers even matter. If those in charge of the estates agree to the reanimations, isn’t the question settled? After all, such trustees are the legal representatives of the departed.

But putting aside the question of consent, a more fundamental question remains.

What do these reanimations do to the legacy and reputation of the dead? Doesn’t their reputation depend, to some extent, on the scarcity of appearance, on the fact that the dead can’t show up anymore? Dying can have a salutary effect on the reputation of prominent people; it was good for John F. Kennedy, and it was good for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The fifth-century B.C. Athenian leader Pericles understood this well. In his famous Funeral Oration, delivered at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, he asserts that a noble death can elevate one’s reputation and wash away their petty misdeeds. That is because the dead are beyond reach and their mystique grows postmortem. “Even extreme virtue will scarcely win you a reputation equal to” that of the dead, he insists.

Do AI reanimations devalue the currency of the dead by forcing them to keep popping up? Do they cheapen and destabilize their reputation by having them comment on events that happened long after their demise?

In addition, these AI representations can be a powerful tool to influence audiences for political or legal purposes. Bringing back a popular dead singer to legitimize a political event and reanimating a dead victim to offer testimony are acts intended to sway an audience’s judgment.

It’s one thing to channel a Churchill or a Roosevelt during a political speech by quoting them or even trying to sound like them. It’s another thing to have “them” speak alongside you. The potential of harnessing nostalgia is supercharged by this technology. Imagine, for example, what the Soviets, who literally worshipped Lenin’s dead body, would have done with a deep fake of their old icon.

Good intentions

You could argue that because these reanimations are uniquely engaging, they can be used for virtuous purposes. Consider a reanimated Martin Luther King Jr., speaking to our currently polarized and divided nation, urging moderation and unity. Wouldn’t that be grand? Or what about a reanimated Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, speaking at the trial of a Holocaust denier like David Irving?

But do we know what MLK would have thought about our current political divisions? Do we know what Anielewicz would have thought about restrictions on pernicious speech? Does bravely campaigning for civil rights mean we should call upon the digital ghost of King to comment on the impact of populism? Does fearlessly fighting the Nazis mean we should dredge up the AI shadow of an old hero to comment on free speech in the digital age?

Even if the political projects these AI avatars served were consistent with the deceased’s views, the problem of manipulation – of using the psychological power of deepfakes to appeal to emotions – remains.

But what about enlisting AI Agatha Christie to teach a writing class? Deep fakes may indeed have salutary uses in educational settings. The likeness of Christie could make students more enthusiastic about writing. Fake Aristotle could improve the chances that students engage with his austere Nicomachean Ethics. AI Einstein could help those who want to study physics get their heads around general relativity.

But producing these fakes comes with a great deal of responsibility. After all, given how engaging they can be, it’s possible that the interactions with these representations will be all that students pay attention to, rather than serving as a gateway to exploring the subject further.

Living on in the living

In a poem written in memory of W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden tells us that, after the poet’s death, Yeats “became his admirers.” His memory was now “scattered among a hundred cities,” and his work subject to endless interpretation: “the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”

The dead live on in the many ways we reinterpret their words and works. Auden did that to Yeats, and we’re doing it to Auden right here. That’s how people stay in touch with those who are gone. In the end, we believe that using technological prowess to concretely bring them back disrespects them and, perhaps more importantly, is an act of disrespect to ourselves – to our capacity to abstract, think and imagine.

Nir Eisikovits directs UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center, which receives funding from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He’s also a data ethics advisor to mindguard.com

Daniel J. Feldman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. AI ‘reanimations’: Making facsimiles of the dead raises ethical quandaries – https://theconversation.com/ai-reanimations-making-facsimiles-of-the-dead-raises-ethical-quandaries-256771

Source: – By Agnes Mueller, Carol Kahn Strauss Fellow in Jewish Studies at the American Academy in Berlin, Professor of German and American Literature, University of South Carolina

The consequences of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s war in Gaza have reverberated far beyond the zones of conflict.

In the United States, for example, a growing number of people, including some Jewish groups, assert that political leaders are exploiting concerns about antisemitism for their own political goals, from cracking down on academic freedom to deporting pro-Palestinian activists.

Debate about the war in Gaza feels fraught in Germany, too, where concerns about rising antisemitism have been used to criticize some Muslim communities. The Holocaust looms over discussions about Israel, with many claiming the country’s sense of historical guilt has made it, until recently, reluctant to criticize Israeli politics.

In the wake of the country’s reunification in the early 1990s, about 200,000 Jews from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union came to Germany. In more recent years, waves of predominantly Muslim refugees from the Middle East have entered a space that already had a large population of Turkish immigrants and their descendants. However, many Germans oppose these more open immigration policies, with widespread backlash against Muslim migrants.

In recent decades, some of Germany’s migrants and their children – some Jewish, and some Muslim – have used fiction to explore their identity and these contested issues in new ways, challenging simple narratives. As a scholar of German literature and Jewish studies, I have studied how literature creates new spaces for readers to explore the similarities between their experiences, building solidarity beyond stereotypes.

‘The Prodigal Son’

Many of today’s young Jewish writers were born in the former Soviet Union and arrived in Germany with their parents as part of the “quota refugee” program. Initiated in the early 1990s, this program invited Jewish migrants into a newly unified Germany – intended to show that the country was taking responsibility for the atrocities of the past. The newcomers were flippantly called “Wiedergutmachungsjuden,” “make-good-again Jews,” referring to Germans’ desire to atone.

One of them was Olga Grjasnowa. Born in 1984, Grjasnowa came from Azerbaijan to Germany at age 11. She has written about Holocaust memory, as in her 2012 novel “All Russians Love Birch Trees,” and said in a 2018 interview that all her books are “Jewish books.”

Her 2021 book “Der verlorene Sohn,” “The Prodigal Son,” echoes Holocaust memory, but in a historical novel set in 19th-century Russia.

The protagonist Jamaluddin – the name derives from the Arabic word for “beauty of the faith” – is born in the Caucasian region of Dagestan, as the son of a powerful Muslim imam. To negotiate a peace deal, the boy is given as a hostage to Russia, where he grows up in the Orthodox Christian court of the czar. Though initially treated as an outsider, Jamaluddin assimilates and becomes a high-ranking officer, a life that ends when he must return to Dagestan. But there, too, he now feels homeless, regarded with suspicion as a stranger.

“The Prodigal Son” deals with abduction, deportation, exile and constant wandering. Jamaluddin’s fate is shaped by authoritarianism, repression, war and discrimination – themes that are familiar in Holocaust literature, though here they befall a Muslim boy in another time and place.

Repeatedly, the novel makes mention of Jewish communities and their own suffering under the czar. As Jewish boys are being forced to march from remote villages to Saint Petersburg, Jamaluddin is “furious and ashamed” of his fellow officers. But he also begins to feel self-pity, flooded with memories of his own departure from home.

This scene depicts a historical reality under Czar Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825-1855: Russian Jewish boys were conscripted, sometimes kidnapped, to serve in the army. For contemporary audiences, the description can also evoke the death marches of Jewish prisoners during the Shoah, the Hebrew term for the Holocaust. Several additional moments in the book connect Jamaluddin’s experiences with images of Jewish flight and expulsion.

New conversations

Jamaluddin’s fate as an outsider between cultures can also bring to mind migrants’ experiences and emotions today. In 2022, one-quarter of Germans were either migrants themselves or had a parent who was not born in Germany. The largest minority group are Muslim-born Germans of Turkish descent, who are still routinely discriminated against.

Antisemitism, meanwhile, is pervasive but less obvious. The Germans’ relationship with Jews was long dominated by silence and guilt – and Jews themselves were mostly invisible until the end of the Cold War, when Jewish migration from the former Soviet states picked up. My 2015 book “The Inability to Love” describes how mainstream German authors, fueled by guilt and shame over the Nazi past, fell into a philosemitic antisemitism: Outward displays of repentance for the Holocaust and public policies that ostensibly embraced Jews clashed with privately held prejudice.

Many examples of new German literature show contemporary Jewish and Muslim characters with complex identities – protagonists who are not seen as simply Jewish, Muslim or belonging to only one culture, pushing back on reductive stereotypes.

For example, Kat Kaufmann’s 2015 novel “Superposition” tells the story of the young, popular and charismatic Izy, a Russian Jew who lives in Berlin as a jazz pianist. Her love interest is Timur, an Eastern European man with a typically Muslim name. When Izy thinks of her and Timur’s future son, she imagines him growing up with the luxury to conceal where he is from – to define his identity as he wishes, unlike previous generations.

Stories by novelists such as Dmitrij Kapitelman, Lena Gorelik, Marina Frenk and Dana Vowinckel also depict moments of connection between Jews and other Germans, or between Jews and Muslims.

Turkish and/or Muslim writers such as Fatma Aydemir and Nazlı Koca – who now lives in America, writing in English – tell similar stories of young characters navigating German culture as marginalized individuals. They often depict young women who struggle to reconcile their culture of origin with German social expectations and xenophobia today.

“I wanted to question the idea that we all have one single identity and that’s it,” Aydemir told the literary site K24 about her novel “Ellbogen,” whose protagonist finds herself fleeing to Turkey, her family’s original home, after a personal crisis. “I think things are way more complex, more fluid than most of us want to believe.”

This younger generation of German Jewish and Muslim writers is recasting entrenched debates, showing characters whose identities are multidimensional and more open than the burdened past or fraught present politics would suggest. Today’s young writers are creating new, brave spaces for conversation and empathy.

Agnes Mueller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Germany’s young Jewish and Muslim writers are speaking for themselves – exploring immigrant identity beyond stereotypes – https://theconversation.com/germanys-young-jewish-and-muslim-writers-are-speaking-for-themselves-exploring-immigrant-identity-beyond-stereotypes-252968

Source: – By Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

When shots rang out in Minnesota, targeting state Democratic politicians, the headlines quickly followed a familiar script: a mentally unstable suspect and the well-worn label “lone gunman.”

According to media reports, the Minnesota gunman, Vance Luther Boelter, was a deeply religious anti-abortion activist and a conservative who supported President Donald Trump.

The term lone gunman, routinely deployed in the aftermath of mass shootings and political violence – that the suspect was simply acting alone, so there’s no one or nothing else to blame – may offer a comforting explanation, but it’s dangerously simplistic.

It obscures the conditions that made the violence possible in the first place. It casts the perpetrator as an isolated anomaly – mentally unwell, unpredictable, detached from broader movements or ideologies.

As a scholar of extremism, I argue that the use of this term ignores the larger symptoms of deeper societal failures such as rising political extremism, systemic hate or the normalization of violent rhetoric.

The lone gunman myth

The idea of the lone gunman has long held sway in American public discourse, with perhaps no example more iconic than the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Warren Commission that was set up to investigate concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, a finding still contested by many.

But more significant than the historical debate is how the lone gunman label became entrenched in the national psyche. It presents a digestible narrative, one that absolves institutions of responsibility and short-circuits more difficult questions about what conditions produced the attacker in the first place.

More recent examples reveal how this myth continues to serve as a shield against systemic scrutiny.

After the 2012 mass shooting that killed 12 people and injured 70 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, media coverage quickly centered on James Holmes’ mental state, with little emphasis on the culture of gun access, misogyny or disaffection with peers that shaped his actions.

Similarly, after Dylann Roof murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, early coverage emphasized his apparent isolation and mental state. However, he had openly stated his motivations in a racist manifesto and had long-standing connections to white supremacist ideology that motivated and shaped his violence.

Radicalization is rarely solitary

In most cases, so-called lone wolves are not as isolated as the term implies. Researchers have increasingly shown that radicalization is a social process.

Individuals absorb extremist views through online echo chambers, algorithmic recommendation systems, peer validation and reinforcement from political and media figures.

This is evident in cases like that of Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Bowers’ defense attorneys said in a March 2023 court filing that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Though he acted alone, Bowers was deeply embedded in far-right networks on the social media platform Gab, where he echoed white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Similarly, Payton Gendron, who killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, cited previous mass shooters as inspiration and plagiarized sections of a white nationalist manifesto. His radicalization was nourished in extremist online forums on platforms such as 4chan and Discord.

Even attacks without manifestos or explicit ideological tracts often follow recognizable scripts. The El Paso shooter, who killed 23 people in a Walmart in 2019, wrote that he was targeting Hispanics as part of a defense against an “invasion” of immigrants – echoing language used by some conservative analysts, pundits and political figures in mainstream U.S. media and government.

Again and again, attackers are seen to be acting in ways that align with a broader rationalization or ideology, even if they do not carry official membership in a particular group or organization.

The politics of the ‘lone gunman’

Importantly, the lone gunman narrative is applied unevenly, especially along racial lines.

White perpetrators are frequently described as mentally ill or troubled loners. Their violence is compartmentalized as the result of personal demons. In contrast, as the Sentencing Project – which is working to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system – has shown, Black, Muslim or immigrant suspects are often held up as proof of a broader threat: religious, ethnic or cultural.

This double standard not only reinforces racial stereotypes but also shapes how law enforcement and the media view violence committed by white actors – as an aberration rather than a pattern.

The media can play a crucial role in perpetuating the lone gunman myth.
Consider how swiftly the media and politicians labeled the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, perpetrated by Omar Mateen, as an act of Islamist terrorism. Even though Mateen had no meaningful connections to any terrorist groups, his Islamic religious beliefs were used to construct a narrative that he was part of a global threat.

By contrast, the FBI hesitated to call Dylann Roof’s actions “racial terrorism.” Terrorism is defined as a form of political violence, where the threat or use of physical force by individuals or groups is not only intended to influence or disrupt governmental authority but to instill fear and force political change. The FBI designated Roof’s crime as a hate crime perpetrated by a disturbed young man.

This distinction between calling Roof’s attack a hate crime rather than racially motivated terrorism sparked significant criticism from scholars, activists and commentators. Many argued that Roof’s white supremacist motives and the symbolic target, a historic Black church, made it a clear case of racial terrorism.

Moving toward a more honest understanding

This asymmetry matters.

I argue that it shapes public perception, policy responses and resource allocation. It allows white supremacist violence to flourish under the radar, often dismissed until it becomes undeniable – usually after multiple lives have been lost.

At the same time, politicians are frequently reluctant to acknowledge the ideological underpinnings of such violence, particularly when those ideologies overlap with their own rhetoric or voter base.

After the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, where the gunman explicitly cited the “Great Replacement theory” in his manifesto, several Republican politicians who had previously echoed similar anti-immigrant rhetoric condemned the violence but avoided addressing the ideology behind it. The Great Replacement theory is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that falsely claims white populations are being deliberately replaced by nonwhite immigrants, especially Muslims, Latinos or Black people, through immigration, higher birth rates and federal government policy.

Despite the shooter’s clear ideological motivation, once again many officials focused on mental illness or the violence as an isolated case of extremism. The impact of the messages about immigration and demographic change in contributing to a climate of racial fear and conspiracy were left unacknowledged.

The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly identified white supremacist violence as one of the top domestic terrorism threats. Investigations related to domestic terrorism and violence have increased significantly over the past few years. In a 2023 interview with “PBS NewsHour,” Seamus Hughes of the University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Technology and Education Center said that “the FBI was investigating 850 people three years ago. Now they’re investigating 2,700.”

Yet meaningful, structural reforms, whether in tech and social media regulation, gun control or public education, have remained elusive. I believe connecting the larger social, political and cultural issues that surround extreme violence is critical to building healthy communities.

Art Jipson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The term ‘lone gunman’ ignores the structures that enable violence – https://theconversation.com/the-term-lone-gunman-ignores-the-structures-that-enable-violence-259107