Peter Beinart & Ariel Koren on Google’s Deal with the Israeli Military

Until last week, Ariel Koren was a marketing manager at Google, where she spent more than a year organizing against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion agreement between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli military. Last week, Koren resigned from her position after facing retaliation for her activism. Join Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart for a conversation with Koren.

Ariel is the founder of Respond Crisis Translation and a multilingual person committed to the language community’s responsibility to fight back whenever language is weaponized to impede freedom of mobility. Ariel has worked as a trauma-informed interpreter in disparate emergency contexts, including for families experiencing detention, survivors of gender-based violence, and climate refugees. She has worked as a language access project manager at Google Translate and Google for Education and is a member of the Alphabet Workers Union. She is also one of the organizers who co-created Jewish Diaspora in Tech, an anti-nationalist Jewish organizing community of tech workers acting in solidarity with communities leading the fight against the carceral state, techno-militarism, and white nationalism. She speaks Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Mandarin, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, Ladino, and ASL.

Peter Beinart teaches national reporting and opinion writing at the Newmark J-School and political science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, an MSNBC political commentator, and a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He writes the weekly Beinart Notebook newsletter on Substack.