Recently, my son came across my father’s 1943 City College yearbook on a bookshelf in our family home. It was wedged between The Book of Ruth and the three-folio set of Chronicles: News of the Past, a quirky retelling of the Bible in modern newspaper format. Although the yearbook must have resided there for decades, neither I nor my siblings had ever noticed it, and our father, who died in 2021, had never mentioned it.
It was an exciting find. It was a pleasure to see my dad sporting a youthful mustache in his class photo and discover that he was a proud member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The 11’’-by-14” hardcover yearbook, titled 1943 Microcosm, is dense with text, graphics and black-and-white photographs of neat groupings of young men in suits and ties. Toward the back are the requisite pictures of individual seniors, mostly 21-year-old men (plus a handful of women), the vast majority with Jewish surnames. Like my father, they were the children of Jewish immigrants and would not have been able to afford college if not for the enlightened free tuition policy of City College.
There were campus protests then too, in particular over academic freedom. But overall, 1943 Microcosm is the story of a world gripped by uncertainty. The year the graduating class entered, 1939, was “noted for its numerous invasions and the outbreak of World War II, which will be inscribed indelibly on the pages of world history,” write the yearbook’s editors. They report that student activism against the war vanished in the wake of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, and that two years later, diehard isolationists were silenced by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. “December the Seventh effectively ended all haggling on foreign policy, promoting unity and a diversion of energy to problems of the conflict,” the editors say, ultimately concluding that “to discover another period as memorable as that experienced by ’43 would indeed be difficult.”
They weren’t wrong. There is no question that 1939 to 1943 were devastating years for Jews and for the world. The atrocities being committed by the Nazis were not necessarily common knowledge in 1943, but students were aware they’d likely soon be shipping out to fight and that some of them wouldn’t survive. The ones who did would become part of the “the Greatest Generation” and build a new and better world on the foundations of two massive wars.
The yearbook also tells another, subtler story, that of the march of technology. The years 1939-1943, its editors report, saw a waning of liberal arts and the waxing of technology, in particular multiple categories of engineering. My dad, a French literature major at Brooklyn College, transferred to City College to major in the far more practical subject of mechanical engineering, which would eventually lead him to a doctorate in physics. He and his classmates must have felt pressure to do something concrete that would add to the war effort. My father, for one, spent most of his career working in laboratories run by the Department of Defense. The class of 1943 would have known about atomic energy, but of course had no inkling of the top secret Manhattan Project, which was developing a bomb that when unleashed would end the war—and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives.
The world as seen from the perspective of 1943 led me to think about our times. Last Rosh Hashanah, we had no idea of what was to come: October 7 and all the events that flowed from it—the death and the destruction—had yet to happen. Any way you look at it, the Jewish year of 5784 has been a distressing one. In Israel, Jews suffered a shocking assault that embroiled them in a hard-to-win war with lives of hostages hanging in the balance. Elsewhere, Jews faced appalling antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred. It was also a catastrophic year for Palestinians in Gaza, who suffered and continue to suffer immensely. In fact, it wasn’t a great year, period. In many places, it was “business as usual”: The Russians relentlessly pummeled Ukraine; the Chinese Communist Party persecuted the Uyghurs; armed conflict, famine and disease plagued parts of Africa; political crises ground on in Haiti and Venezuela, and there were countless other tragedies and injustices. With strongman-style leaders proliferating across the world, even the hard-fought goal of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” was in danger of perishing.
As 5785 unfolds, we Americans will elect a new president and, assuming there’s a smooth transition of power, double down both on solving intractable conflicts and on pushing back against the zealots behind them. We also need to grapple with growing inequality and intensifying climate change. But that’s not all. As in 1943, world-changing technology is looming, really a cluster of such technologies, and they are poised to change the lives of the now 8 billion or so humans on our planet.
One book on my summer reading list was The Coming Wave, written in 2023 by Mustafa Suleyman, the founder of the AI companies DeepMind and Inflection AI. If you haven’t read it, you should; like Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari, he writes from a stratospheric perspective. Suleyman predicts that a technological tsunami, consisting of more powerful AI, synthetic DNA that can easily be tinkered with, and Chinese-led advances in quantum computing, is about to hit humanity. Containing the wave is nearly impossible, he argues, although he offers ten suggestions that I would more accurately characterize as hopes. If he is correct or even in the ballpark, we can’t head into 5785 pretending it’s going to be business—or life—as usual. Nor, as some people wish, can we hurtle back to a simpler time: He argues, as others have, that we are already dependent on AI, tailored DNA and other technologies to feed billions of people; without them humanity will face widespread starvation.
I hope Suleyman is wrong, or at least not completely right. Either way we have a lot to reflect on during the high holiday season—the Days of Awe, with the emphasis on “awe.” We can’t see what’s ahead any more than those bright young people in the photographs in 1943 Microcosm could, but we have to go forward as bravely as they did.
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