Our fall Annual General Meeting usually ends in the late evening and then fades into memory until next year's DARA celebration.

Not this year. Last month, a reporter from the Canadian Jewish News attended the 2019 AGM and filed their report a few days later. The piece appeared in both the print and online editions, quoted heavily from DARA Chair Dr. Leon Kadish, and featured our DARA newsletters prominently. 

Look for that CJN article in this DARA newsletter - plus we discuss racism in health care algorithms and report on recent anti-Semitism on the University of Toronto campus.

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DARA in the news: CJN and the Lancet

Few causes have garnered our attention so much as rampant anti-Israel sentiment at the Lancet. For years, we have engaged with the prominent medical journal in efforts to impact its tone. We even launched a petition five years ago calling for its editor, Richard Horton, to be fired.

The Canadian Jewish News recently recognized our efforts in its coverage of our AGM.

The timing is apt: the Lancet has adjusted its attitude to the Jewish state and now presents a mostly balanced take on health care topics in the Middle East. While many factors played a part in this change, we are proud to take a bow as one of the important groups that neutralized this font of anti-Israel opinion.

The CJN quotes DARA Chair Leon Kadish from his remarks at the AGM:

“Due to combined, protracted efforts by us and several other organizations, this situation has unbelievably been reversed. Richard Horton is now calling for the introduction of Holocaust studies in the curriculum of health professionals.” 

Using DARA newsletters spanning three years, the CJN articles map Horton's progression from something approaching an anti-Israeli provocateur to a fair-minded editor of a publication that medical professionals admire. The article ends with a quote from a recent DARA newsletter.

“No one will mistake Horton for a pro-Israel advocate," we wrote. "But he hardly needs to fill that role. All we request from Richard Horton is a fair shake. Since his trip to Israel in 2014, Horton has taken the first steps along that path.” 

We look forward to welcoming the CJN back next year to the DARA AGM.

How to tame racist algorithms

Machine learning is transforming almost every industry, helping us predict the future and save costs. But what dangers lurk when algorithms meet medical care?

That was the subject of a recent piece in Science magazine, which highlights the risk of racial bias in the algorithms that increasingly guide our lives.

The article reports on the use of artificial intelligence in the U.S., where governments and private insurance programs use it to predict health care needs. Researchers found racial bias in an algorithm that decides who and who doesn't need extra care.

Health care practitioners can take some hope from the research.

"The race problem isn’t rooted in the algorithm itself," says the article, "but in the way people have used it. The algorithm was predicting not future health status but future health costs, using data on people’s past health costs."

Because black patients historically received less health care than white patients, their health costs skew lower.. This lowers the amount of future care recommended by the algorithm for black patients.

If the algorithm - or the humans guiding it - can separate past health costs from future health needs, practitioners will be able to put their faith in the machines that increasingly make critical decisions. If not, practitioners and their patients could fall victim to the racism that many have hoped machines will eliminate.

Advocates of AI had better move on this issue STAT. One observer last year compared the sophisticated technology to asbestos.

“It turns out that it’s all over the place, even though at no point did you explicitly install it,” said Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain. "And by the time we recognize any potential dangers, it’s hard to remove."

Report from University of Toronto: When anti-Israel becomes deeply anti-Semitic

While we at DARA concentrate on health care, we can't ignore particularly flagrant instances of anti-Semitism - especially when they pop up in academia, an adjacent interest of ours. And especially when they arise in the figurative backyard of so many DARA members.

Which brings us to last week's shameful anti-Semitism at the University of Toronto, where the Graduate Students Union refused to side with Hillel in its request to provide kosher food in the school cafeteria.

Hillel U of  T is campaigning for school leadership to offer kosher options for Jewish students. To supports its efforts, Hillel asked several groups to join the campaign..

The union said no, citing Hillel's "pro-Israel" activities, which don't mix with its commitment to social justice.

"[T]he Executive Committee strives to abstain from this type of discourse in order to ensure the will of the membership is accurately reflected in any votes on these motions," responded a member of the executive committee.

The group later apologized half-heartedly in a statement.

"The email response... has unintentionally caused harm toward the Jewish community at U of T," reads the statement. "Although the response was not on behalf of the UTGSU's Executive Committee, the UTGSU Executive Committee is nonetheless deeply sorry for this harm."

Perhaps the most alarming part of this story how anti-Israel student leaders conflated anti-Semitism with anti-Israel beliefs. One poster on Twitter put the matter best:

"I don't support BDS," he wrote, referring to the campaign to boycott Israel. "but this isn't about BDS or Israel," they wrote. "This is about preventing access to food in Toronto for some Jewish students. This is just plain old anti-Semitism,"

Yet last week's controversy at U of T underlines one of the secondary dangers of anti-Israel activity. By serving as a wedge issue, it isolates Jews and others who support Israel. The episode brings to mind Lawrence Summers's famous analysis of some actions that are at the very least anti-Semitic "in effect" if not in intent.

Hillel sought help on a neutral issue. Instead it received rejection that upped the ante and set a hateful baseline for future interactions. 

The Graduate Student Union reportedly wants to meet with Hillel to discuss "how to remedy harm and how to mitigate future harm toward Jewish students on campus."

We hope the episode can launch what pundits call a teachable moment.