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Voice of Democracy

2023-2024 theme, "what are the greatest attributes of our democracy".

Voice of Democracy Program

Established in 1947, our Voice of Democracy (VOD) audio-essay program provides high school students with the unique opportunity to express themselves in regards to a democratic and patriotic-themed recorded essay. Each year, nearly 25,000 ninth through 12th grade students from across the country enter to win their share of more than $1.3 million in educational scholarships and incentives awarded through the program. The national first place winner receives a $35,000 scholarship paid directly to the recipient’s American university, college or vocational/technical school. A complete list of other national scholarships range from $1,000-$21,000, and the first place winner from each VFW Department (state) wins at least a scholarship of $1,000.

Before submitting your essay, read  the rules and eligibility requirements , and find your sponsoring  local VFW Post  as applications must be turned in by  midnight, Oct. 31 . Download and complete the 2023-2024 Voice of Democracy entry form here .

2022-2023 National VFW Voice of Democracy Winner

Scotland Stewart, a sophomore at Franklin County High School in Winchester, Tennessee,, was named the 2022-2023 Voice of Democracy first place winner. Scotland’s speech on the theme, “Why is the Veteran Important?” won him a $35,000 college scholarship. Scotland was sponsored by VFW Post 1893 in Estill Springs, Tennessee. Watch as Scotland delivered his speech during the VFW’s Parade of Winners award  ceremony or read it here .

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The McCourtney Institute   for Democracy

Voices of democracy.

The Center for Democratic Deliberation is a co-sponsor of the  Voices of Democracy  project, an online curriculum and teaching resource with multimedia texts, critical essays, and other pedagogical materials focusing on great speeches in U.S. history.  The Web site was originally developed through a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Now that the grant has expired, the Web site is supported by the CDD and the University of Maryland.

In addition to pedagogical materials categorized under themes such as “War and Peace,” “Freedom of Speech,” and “Social and Economic Justice,” Voices of Democracy includes a refereed online journal edited by J. Michael Hogan and Shawn Parry-Giles. Voices of Democracy aligns with the CDD’s mission of enhancing the quality of public deliberations and promoting civic, rhetorical, and historical literacy.

Learn more about Voices of Democracy

Suring senior's Voice of Democracy essay takes first in state, will compete nationally for $30K scholarship

Sophia lally's entry will be among 53 advancing to national contest, where the top prize is $30,000..

SURING - Sophia Lally opened her Voice of Democracy contest essay by describing what she imagined Thomas Jefferson was feeling as he began to write the Declaration of Independence.

Her third such entry into the scholarship program, sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Lally knew she did her best work when writing in narrative style.

“I came up with a person or somebody who I can write in the perspective of to start the essay, and usually after that, the ideas just come a little easier,” the Suring High School senior explained.

The theme of this year’s program? “Is This the Country the Founders Envisioned.”

“I looked a lot at the Bill of Rights because I was trying to figure out what was most important to the Founding Fathers when they started the country, and then just kind of went from there, and thought about how the world is now and how it represents those ideals,” she said.

Lally’s essay impressed the contest judges, as on Wednesday she was presented first place honors in both the district and state competitions.

That latter was a surprise, as she thought the presentation was just for the former.

“They said look at the other side of the certificate, and there was the one for state,” she said. “I was trying not to freak out too much. I was very excited.”

Lally said she spent three or four hours writing and revising the 731-word essay, and then another hour recording herself reading it. The contest rules require students to submit audio presentations, and 35% of the score is based on delivery. Content and originality counted for 30% and 35%, respectively.

“The first year I did it, I was nervous, and it took me a long time (to record),” she said. “It went a lot quicker this time. I had better ideas this time and how to make it sound like I wanted it to sound.”

Lally will be among 53 state and territory winners whose essays will be judged at the national level.

In past years, the VFW has flown the winner to attend its national legislative conference in Washington D.C. in late February or early March. The youths are taken on tours of the White House, the Capitol, the Smithsonian and other museums, a river cruise and other activities in a 3½-day trip, culminating in an awards ceremony, said Lynn Rolf III, the national VOD program chair.

But with the pandemic, the trip is off, though Rolf said he’s working to schedule a program for the group this summer.

The national winners will be announced in a virtual program to held online around April 1, according to Randi Law, a spokesperson at the national VFW office in Kansas City.

“I don’t know what to expect. I wasn’t thinking I’d even get this far, so it will be interesting to see,” Lally said. “Obviously, there’s a lot of very talented people in this round, it gets harder and harder to compete.

First place earns a $30,000 scholarship, while second and third places receive $16,000 and $10,000, respectively. The rest will receive prizes of at least $1,000.

Lally has already picked up $300 for winning the local contest, $400 for district and $1,500 for state.

“It’s definitely going to be very helpful, and I’m very glad I applied this year,” Lally said.

Lally has been accepted at Concordia University in Mequon, where she’ll enter the accelerated program in occupational therapy, which will allow her to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 4 1/2 years.

Lally's parents are David and Jennifer Lally. She has an older brother, Caleb, and younger siblings Ethan and Grace.

The program receives about 57,000 entries nationally each year. Several hundred students entered in Wisconsin, with the 10 district winners judged for the state award, according to Rod Fifield, the Voice of Democracy Program chairman for the district in northeast Wisconsin, which roughly is the same as the 8th Congressional District.

Wisconsin has only had one first place winner of the national Voice of Democracy program, back in 1957, 10 years after it began. Three others from the Badger state reached third place in 2005, 2007 and 2018.

Sophia Lally's state-winning VFW Voice of Democracy essay.

Is this the country the founders envisioned.

By Sophia Lally 

Thomas Jefferson sat down at his desk, his heart beating in his chest as he dipped his quill into the ink. His hand shook as he moved it, pausing above the paper. He suddenly found himself frozen, the weight of what he was about to write had sunk in. He was drafting the very document that would give the country he had seen rise from nothing, its independence from England. The next words he would write would become the foundation of everything that country would represent, all of the values it would hold, and what the people of that country would stand for. His head filled with visions of people celebrating, living in freedom, with opportunities abounding. He finally put the quill to the paper and wrote, “A Declaration of the Representation of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” 

While nobody knows exactly how this moment looked, I am sure it was filled with hope. After many years of living without representation, a long war, and many men killed, the idea of forming a new country with more freedom, representation, and rights than any other country in the world, must have been exciting. Benjamin Franklin once said, “Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.” This firm belief that freedom is a basic right has been shown in the importance that is put on the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to bear arms, and freedom of religion. 

On November 11, 1620, the Mayflower arrived in America. This ship was full of people who had been willing to endure not only years of oppression for their religion, but also two months of sickness, storms, and dangerous conditions on the water. That arrival in America marked a new beginning for these people, one where they could speak openly about the God they believed in without being criticized, persecuted, or even killed. This freedom was so important to young America that it was put in the very first amendment of The Constitution. In America today, we are still allowed to practice any religion, however, we are not allowed to always openly speak about that religion in our schools, and places of work. This is not the execution of the first amendment as the Founding Fathers had once intended.

James Otis once said, “Taxation without representation, is tyranny.” After living for years without representation in the government of the country that ruled them, the Founding Fathers knew that in their country, everyone needed to have a voice. These men wanted a country in which it was okay to publicly share your opinion on issues that matter to you and have those opinions and values represented by the elected men and women of your county, district, or state. This aspect of the Founding Fathers’ vision is how our government functions to this day. 

Many men and women have continually chosen to sacrifice their time, energy, and even lives for the country that we live in. The freedoms that the Founding Fathers wanted for the new Americans weren’t just given to our country. Soldiers had to battle through harsh weather, diseases, and death that seemed to never end, simply for the right to create their own country. After fighting so long and hard for the freedoms Americans now enjoy, the Founding Fathers would have assumed that Americans today would be appreciative and thankful for this gift. However, many have become so used to these freedoms that they take them for granted, ignoring the work and sacrifice of those who did and are still fighting to keep it that way. Many young Americans have grown up with so much freedom, comfort, and security that they are unable to understand what it would be like to live in a country without those freedoms. This is not the appreciation the Founding Fathers would have expected from a country founded on freedom. 

As Americans, take this opportunity to pause and appreciate the things that you take for granted. Spend time with your family, thank a soldier or a veteran, respect those who protect your freedoms, and be kind. These simple acts can guarantee that no matter what others are doing, you can help ensure that the country we are living in represents the country the Founding Fathers once hoped to create.

RELATED: Contested elections set for Oconto council, Suring and Pulaski school boards

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Contact Kent Tempus at (920) 431-8226 or [email protected] . 

YOUTH ESSAYS

Youth Scholarships

The VFW is dedicated to promoting patriotism and investing in our future generation. If you are a democracy-loving high school student interested in a $35,000 college scholarship or a patriotic middle school student interested in winning $5,000, these scholarships may be for you.

Voice of Democracy

Established in 1947, our  Voice of Democracy  audio-essay program provides high school students with the unique opportunity to express themselves in regards to a democratic and patriotic-themed recorded essay.  Each year, nearly 25,000 ninth through 12th grade students from across the country enter to win their share of more than $1 million in educational scholarships and incentives awarded through the program. 

The national first place winner receives a $35,000 scholarship paid directly to the recipient’s American university, college or vocational/technical school. A complete list of other national scholarships range from $1,000-$21,000, and the first place winner from each VFW Department (state) wins at least a scholarship of $1,000. Before submitting your essay, download the  2024-2025 entry form here  and find your sponsoring  local VFW Post  as applications must be turned in by  midnight, Oct. 31 . 

The 2024-25 theme is:  "Is America Today Our Forefathers' Vision?"

About the 2023-2024 winner ...

Sophia Lin, a high school junior at BASIS Scottsdale in Scottsdale, Arizona, was named the 2023-2024 Voice of Democracy first place winner. Sophia's speech on the theme, "What Are the Greatest Attributes of Our Democracy?" won her a $35,000 college scholarship. Sophia was sponsored by Scottsdale VFW Post 3513.  Watch as Sophia delivered her speech during the VFW's Parade of Winners award  ceremony or  read it here .

Want to catch up on everything that happened this year? You can watch the full  Parade of Winners ceremony  which was streamed live on Facebook, or  see this year's complete list of winners .

Patriot's Pen

Each year, nearly 68,800 students in sixth through eighth grades enter the VFW’s  Patriot’s Pen  youth essay contest for a chance to win their share of nearly $1 million in state and national awards. Each first place state winner receives a minimum of $500 at the national level, and the national first place winner wins $5,000! 

The essay contest encourages young minds to examine America’s history, along with their own experiences in modern American society, by drafting a 300- to 400-word essay, expressing their views based on a patriotic theme chosen by the VFW Commander-in-Chief. Before submitting your essay,  download the 2024-2025 entry form here  and  find your sponsoring  local VFW Post  as applications must be turned in by  midnight, Oct. 31 . 

The 2023-24 theme is:  "My Voice in America's Democracy?"

Bryant Day, an eighth grade student from Ashland, Ohio, was named the 2023-2024 Patriot's Pen first place winner. His essay on the theme, "How Are You Inspired by America?" won the national first place $5,000 award. Bryant was sponsored by VFW Post 9943 and its Auxiliary in Mansfield, Ohio.

Watch as Bryant delivered his winning essay  during the VFW's Parade of Winners streamed live on Facebook, or  read  his essay here.  See the complete list of 2024 national winners .

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Voice of Democracy Audio-Essay Contest

Offered by Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW)

Multiple awards worth

$1,000 - $35,000

Grade level

High School Students

Expected deadline: This scholarship might not currently be accepting applications. Most scholarship programs only accept applications a few months ahead of their annual deadline. We’ve estimated this deadline based on last year’s deadline in order to help you plan out your scholarship applications.

October 2024

Scholarship Overview

Are you a high schooler in the U.S. who is passionate about democracy and wants to put that feeling into (spoken) words? Further, are you planning on attending a postsecondary institution in the U.S.? If so, consider applying for the Voice of Democracy Audio-Essay Contest! Each year, the scholarship awards between $1,000 and $35,000 to multiple applicants who submit a 3-5 minute audio-recorded essay answering the year’s democracy or patriotism-related theme. The scholarship is offered by Veterans of Foreign Wars, an organization dedicated to “ serving our veterans, the military, and our communities.”

If you believe in serving veterans and want to put both your verbal and written skills to the test, we encourage you to apply!

Eligibility information

This scholarship is open to students meeting the below eligibility criteria.

U.S. Citizens, Permanent Residents

No GPA requirement

Political Science

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To apply for this scholarship, students must submit an online application in addition to the below application materials.

3-5 minute audio-recorded essay

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Youth Essay Deadline Quickly Approaching

All essay entries must be received at participating vfw posts by oct. 31.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Time is running out for students wishing to participate in the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Voice of Democracy and Patriot’s Pen  essay competitions. Open to eligible high school and middle school students, all entries must be received at a local participating VFW Post no later than Oct. 31.

Open to eligible sixth through eighth grade students, nearly 68,800 students compete in the Patriot’s Pen essay competition each year to win their slice of nearly $1 million in state and national awards. The top individual VFW Department (state) winners are vying for the top prize of $5,000. This year’s Patriot’s Pen theme asks “How Are You Inspired by America?”

For more information on the VFW’s youth essay competitions and how to enter, visit vfw.org/YouthScholarships .

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Vfw honors national vietnam war veterans day, 'sometimes people just need a hand up', ‘i hope i can ease some of their suffering’, ‘i’ve always been a public servant’, new course spotlights ‘15 things veteran service officers want you to know’.

Taliban leader says women will be stoned to death in public

T he Taliban’s Supreme Leader has vowed to start stoning women to death in public as he declared the fight against Western democracy will continue.

“You say it’s a violation of women’s rights when we stone them to death ,” said Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada in a voice message, aired on state television over the weekend, addressing Western officials.

“But we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public,” he declared in his harshest comments since taking over Kabul in August 2021 .

“These are all against your democracy but we will continue doing it. We both say we defend human rights – we do it as God’s representative and you as the devil’s.”

Afghanistan’s state TV, now under Taliban control, broadcasts voice messages purporting to be from Akhundzada, who has never been seen in public aside from a few old portraits.

He is believed to be based in southern Kandahar, the stronghold of the Taliban.

Despite promising a more moderate government, the Taliban quickly returned to harsh public punishments like public executions and floggings, similar to those from their previous rule in the late 1990s.

The United Nations has strongly criticised the Taliban and has called on the country’s rulers to halt such practices.

In his voice message, Akhundzada said that the women’s rights that the international community had been advocating for were against the Taliban’s harsh interpretation of Islamic Sharia.

“Do women want the rights that Westerners are talking about? They are against Sharia and clerics’ opinions, the clerics who toppled Western democracy,” he said.

“I told the Mujahedin that we tell the Westerners that we fought against you for 20 years and we will fight 20 and even more years against you,” he said, emphasising the need for resilience in opposing women’s rights among Taliban foot soldiers.

“It did not finish [when you left]. It does not mean we would now just sit and drink tea. We will bring Sharia to this land,” he added. “It did finish after we took over Kabul. No, we will now bring Sharia into action.”

Women ‘living in prison’

His remarks have incited outrage among Afghans, with some calling on the international community to increase pressure on the Taliban.

“The money that they receive from the international community as humanitarian aid is just feeding them against women,” Tala, a former civil servant, told The Telegraph from the capital Kabul.

“As a woman, I don’t feel safe and secure in Afghanistan. Each morning starts with a barrage of notices and orders imposing restrictions and stringent rules on women, stripping away even the smallest joys and extinguishing hope for a brighter future,” she added.

“We, the women, are living in prison ,” Tala said, “And the Taliban are making it smaller for us every passing day.”

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The War in Gaza and the Emerging Rift in American Jewish Life

A conversation on whether liberalism and Zionism can continue to coexist for American Jews.

By Peter Beinart and Max Strasser

Produced by Jillian Weinberger

In this interview with the Times Opinion editor Max Strasser, the journalist Peter Beinart explores what he calls the twin pillars of American Jewish life: Zionism and liberalism. Beinart argues that the two are fundamentally in conflict with each other, a longstanding tension that has become even more fraught since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel retaliated in Gaza. In this conversation, Beinart makes the case for liberalism over Zionism and calls on the American Jewish community to see that “Palestinian equality doesn’t need to be a threat to Jewish safety.”

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

“The Opinions” is a collection of audio essays from Times Opinion. To listen to this piece, click the play button below.

Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.

Max Strasser: Peter, hi.

Peter Beinart: Hi.

Max Strasser: Your recent guest essay starts with the idea that there are two pillars of American Jewish life: liberalism and Zionism — progressive politics and support for Israel. Let’s start with the first one.

Tell me about where American Jews have tended to fall politically, at least until now. And in what ways have liberalism and Zionism been really integral to American Jewish identity?

Peter Beinart: Since American Jews came to the United States in large numbers in the early 20th century, they have identified on the left politically. Some of them came with socialist or communist backgrounds from Eastern Europe, and they merged that — certainly under Franklin Roosevelt — into American liberalism.

American Jews have voted for the Democratic Party in every presidential race since the 1930s in large numbers. They’ve been overrepresented in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the L.G.B.T. movement, the labor movement. And so this has been one of the things that I think defines how many American Jews see themselves, as a group of people who have a history of oppression and want to be on the side of other people who are struggling for equality.

Zionism was also a force in American Jewish life from the early 20th century, but it really became dominant after the 1967 war, when American Jews were filled with pride by Israel’s victory and felt that the sense of powerlessness of the Holocaust had in some ways been overcome by Israel’s military success. So starting in the 1970s, you really start to see that Zionism becomes a dominant ethos in American Jewish organizations. And those organizations also claim — most of them — that they are liberal organizations. So liberalism and Zionism sit alongside one another as the dominant creeds in American Jewish life.

Max Strasser: But there’s a tension here, right? American Jews celebrate Jewish participation in the civil rights movement. But Israel, which they have this great loyalty to, has certainly not lived up to the ideals that Martin Luther King promoted — democracy, equality, civil rights. So how did our community hold on to both liberalism and Zionism simultaneously for so long?

Peter Beinart: Yes, the two ideologies, if you think about them, are really quite dissonant with one another. American Jews have tended to support the idea of equal citizenship in a government that is secular and doesn’t prefer any racial or religious group. But Zionism — certainly the political Zionism that has structured the Israeli state since Israel’s creation — is based on the idea that this is a state essentially for Jews, for the safety and representation, above all, of Jews.

I think that American Jews were able to hold those two ideologies together because there were not strong voices pointing out the illiberalism of Zionism in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, but in the last decade or so, I think that’s begun to change.

Max Strasser: I think that’s especially true since Oct. 7. Oct. 7 was, to me, the most seismic event in Israel-Palestine in my lifetime. I don’t know if you feel the same way. It’s really changed the trajectory of the conflict and how we talk about it. Part of that is because of the horror of Hamas’s attack and how that’s shaken people. But it’s also because of the way Israel has responded: As of right now, more than 32,000 Palestinians killed, and Gaza is on the brink of a famine that humanitarian agencies say Israel could prevent. Do you think that’s part of what’s changing the conversation also?

Peter Beinart: I think there were changes that were underway before Oct. 7, but they’ve been accelerated.

For the last decade or so, roughly, you could say the American left has been moving in a more pro-Palestine direction. Interestingly, if you go back decades earlier, Israel was often considered a leftist cause in the United States. But as Israel has moved to the right politically, more people on the left, I think, have started to identify with the Palestinian cause. But it wasn’t necessarily a dominant political issue until Oct. 7.

What Oct. 7 did was put this issue on the front page. The pro-Palestine sentiment that existed among kind of leftist activists all of a sudden went from being one of their concerns to being among their top concerns. That has produced a really unprecedented movement for Palestinian rights and against this war on the left, and that has started to change the culture of many of the institutions in which Jews reside. This leftist pro-Palestine politics has started to change American liberalism in ways that make it harder and more uncomfortable to hold liberalism and Zionism alongside one another.

Max Strasser: What does this shift mean for mainstream Jewish institutions that remain committed to Zionism?

Peter Beinart: I think mainstream American Jewish organizations that see their fundamental goal as protecting Israel are seeing that liberalism and the Democratic Party are becoming less hospitable.

Yes, there are many Democratic politicians, like Joe Biden, who are still very, very pro-Israel. But the Jewish organizations can see that at the grass roots of the Democratic Party, especially among younger people, there’s been a dramatic shift. They can see that pro-Palestine activism is really growing. And so they are responding by making a kind of an alignment with forces on the political right because the pro-Israel consensus remains strong in the Republican Party and because Republicans have their own reason for wanting to try to suppress this leftist pro-Palestine activism. They identify it with a larger agenda, which they call woke, which they see as a threat.

Max Strasser: You write in the essay that this alliance that’s forming between Zionist institutions and Republicans and other forces on the right — it’s an uncomfortable one for a lot of American Jews. Can you talk a little bit about how liberal Zionists are trying to make sense of that and reconcile that tension?

Peter Beinart: Yes, it’s uncomfortable because most American Jews are still voting for the Democratic Party and seeing themselves in some ways as liberals. But the institutions that speak for them are moving into closer alignment with the Republican Party.

For instance, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, probably the most powerful pro-Israel, largely Jewish organization, endorsed a large number of insurrectionists — people who did not support certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory — and that’s very uncomfortable for many American Jews. But for the time being, I think they are able to still hold these two things because there are enough pro-Israel Democrats in politics that they can still support. But I think that in the years to come, there may be fewer of those and that holding these two things will be harder.

Max Strasser: We’ve talked about the uncomfortable alliance that’s happening on the right, but what about on the other side? The Palestine solidarity movement, it’s definitely growing. It’s growing rapidly. It’s growing in the amount of attention that it gets. But how do you think progressive Jews fit in?

Peter Beinart: On the one hand, there are a substantial number of Jews who are in the Palestine solidarity movement now through groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. But that movement, as it’s growing stronger, has also been growing more radical.

I think it’s been radicalized by Israel’s move to the right and now by this destruction of Gaza, which is making people so, so upset. And so what we’re seeing in the Palestine solidarity movement is that the language of equal coexistence, which was stronger a couple of decades ago, has receded a bit in Palestine discourse. That’s not to say that the movement is saying, “The Jews need to be kicked out of Israel.” We’re not hearing that. But there’s not a vision that’s being articulated that actually explains where Israeli Jews really fit into a vision of Palestine liberation.

I think that puts the Jews in this movement in a slightly awkward place. They want to oppose the war. They want to support Palestine liberation, as I do myself. And yet I urge in this essay that they should be willing to speak out in defense of a vision of coexistence that explains where Israeli Jews fit into this vision of Palestinian liberation.

Max Strasser: I’m going to take advantage of the fact that you mentioned your own views here, and I want to ask you a question. You wrote this landmark piece in 2010 in The New York Review of Books about the failure of the American Jewish establishment, and a decade later, you wrote a piece for The Times called “ I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State .” What has your experience been like, making that ideological migration?

Peter Beinart: Yeah, I guess you could say the essay in some ways is a little bit autobiographical because I, for most of my adult life, identified myself as a liberal and also as a political Zionist, someone who supports a Jewish state. And over time, I felt like I was forced to reconsider that because there seemed no prospect of Palestinians getting their own state alongside Israel but also because the notion of group supremacy — of Jewish supremacy — started to become more and more uncomfortable to me as I noticed how similar it was to the voices in America who were talking about maintaining a demographic majority and seemed to have a vision of first- and second-class citizens.

It was really through reading and listening to Palestinians who had for a long time been making these deeper critiques that I began to move toward the idea that I should try to square my support for equality under the law in America with the vision of equality under the law in Israel-Palestine.

It hasn’t always been an easy or comfortable journey. At times it’s been quite a painful one. But I felt like, as a writer, I had to go with where my mind and my heart were taking me if I was going to be able to write with any integrity. And although it has ruptured some relationships for me, as it has for other American Jews who’ve gone on my path, it’s also led to a new set of relationships that I couldn’t quite have imagined. And those are very gratifying to me.

Max Strasser: In your essay you quote Adam Shatz of The London Review of Books talking about this double homelessness of anti-Zionist and post-Zionist Jews and how that’s a really uncomfortable place to be a lot of the time. There’s a lot of discomfort all around here, isn’t there?

Peter Beinart: Yeah, there is. And I can’t — you know, everyone has to figure that out for themselves. For me, at a personal level, what I try to remember is that I see the Jewish community as a kind of imagined extended family. And so you have responsibilities to maintain connections to that extended family, just like to your immediate family, even if you have very, very deep disagreements.

And it’s important to try to find the points of commonality. And I also think it’s really important that while American Jews need to listen very carefully to Palestinians — and I have learned, myself, so deeply from reading Palestinians — it’s also important for us to remember that Palestinians are not a monolith. And that even though Israel is oppressing Palestinians, it doesn’t mean that Jews don’t have the right to have our own opinions and our own moral visions and that we have something to contribute to this discourse that I hope would bring the liberation of both peoples.

Max Strasser: Speaking of the Jewish community broadly — the extended family, as you described it — what do you hope that the community prioritizes in the future?

Peter Beinart: I hope that in the future, more people will look at the tensions and come to see that there is a real danger if we make an exception for Israel from our general liberal principles.

The danger is that if we say, “Yes, we believe in equality under the law everywhere, but we need to make an exception for Israel because we’re a small people who have been persecuted and we can’t afford it,” then it makes it easier for other people to say they want those same exceptions, whether it’s in India, whether it’s in Hungary, whether it’s in the United States.

And then we are, it seems to me, able to really be on the side of a global struggle for equality under the law against the forces of ethnonationalism and supremacy that are powerful everywhere.

So I would hope that more American Jews, as uncomfortable as it is, would look at these contradictions and also find ways of overcoming this deep-seated fear that we have of Palestinians. Often a fear that’s, I think, enhanced by the fact that there isn’t much engagement between Jewish institutions and Palestinians. I hope we see that Palestinian equality doesn’t need to be a threat to Jewish safety, that in the long term, actually, that Jews may be more safe living alongside Palestinians who are free and equal than Palestinians who are subjugated.

Max Strasser: Peter, thanks for doing this.

Peter Beinart: My pleasure.

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Efim Shapiro. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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The End of Foreign-Language Education

Thanks to AI, people may no longer feel the need to learn a second language.

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

A few days ago, I watched a video of myself talking in perfect Chinese. I’ve been studying the language on and off for only a few years, and I’m far from fluent. But there I was, pronouncing each character flawlessly in the correct tone, just as a native speaker would. Gone were my grammar mistakes and awkward pauses, replaced by a smooth and slightly alien-sounding voice. “My favorite food is sushi,” I said— wo zui xihuan de shiwu shi shousi —with no hint of excitement or joy.

I’d created the video using software from a Los Angeles–based artificial-intelligence start-up called HeyGen. It allows users to generate deepfake videos of real people “saying” almost anything based on a single picture of their face and a script, which is paired with a synthetic voice and can be translated into more than 40 languages. By merely uploading a selfie taken on my iPhone, I was able to glimpse a level of Mandarin fluency that may elude me for the rest of my life.

HeyGen’s visuals are flawed—the way it animates selfies almost reminded me of the animatronics in Disney’s It’s a Small World ride—but its language technology is good enough to make me question whether learning Mandarin is a wasted effort. Neural networks, the machine-learning systems that power generative-AI programs such as ChatGPT, have rapidly improved the quality of automatic translation over the past several years, making even older tools like Google Translate far more accurate.

At the same time, the number of students studying foreign languages in the U.S. and other countries is shrinking. Total enrollment in language courses other than English at American colleges decreased 29.3 percent from 2009 to 2021, according to the latest data from the Modern Language Association, better known as the MLA. In Australia, only 8.6 percent of high-school seniors were studying a foreign language in 2021—a historic low. In South Korea and New Zealand , universities are closing their French, German, and Italian departments. One recent study from the education company EF Education First found that English proficiency is decreasing among young people in some places.

Many factors could help explain the downward trend, including pandemic-related school disruptions, growing isolationism, and funding cuts to humanities programs. But whether the cause of the shift is political, cultural, or some mix of things, it’s clear that people are turning away from language learning just as automatic translation becomes ubiquitous across the internet.

Read: High-school English needed a makeover before ChatGPT

Within a few years, AI translation may become so commonplace and frictionless that billions of people take for granted the fact that the emails they receive, videos they watch, and albums they listen to were originally produced in a language other than their native one. Something enormous will be lost in exchange for that convenience. Studies have suggested that language shapes the way people interpret reality. Learning a different way to speak, read, and write helps people discover new ways to see the world—experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think. No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.

AI language tools are now in social-media apps, messaging platforms, and streaming sites. Spotify is experimenting with using a voice-generation tool from the ChatGPT maker OpenAI to translate podcasts in the host’s own voice, while Samsung is touting that its new Galaxy S24 smartphone can translate phone calls as they’re occurring . Roblox, meanwhile, claimed last month that its AI translation tool is so fast and accurate , its English-speaking users might not realize that their conversation partner “is actually in Korea.” The technology—which works especially well for “ high-resource languages ” such as English and Chinese, and less so for languages such as Swahili and Urdu—is being used in much more high-stakes situations as well, such as translating the testimony of asylum seekers and firsthand accounts from conflict zones. Musicians are already using it to translate songs , and at least one couple credited it with helping them to fall in love.

One of the most telling use cases comes from a start-up called Jumpspeak, which makes a language-learning app similar to Duolingo and Babbel. Instead of hiring actual bilingual actors, Jumpspeak appears to have used AI-generated “people” reading AI-translated scripts in at least four ads on Instagram and Facebook. At least some of the personas shown in the ads appear to be default characters available on HeyGen’s platform. “I struggled to learn languages my whole life. Then I learned Spanish in six months, I got a job opportunity in France, and I learned French. I learned Mandarin before visiting China,” a synthetic avatar says in one of the ads, while switching between all three languages. Even a language-learning app is surrendering to the allure of AI, at least in its marketing.

Alexandru Voica, a communications professional who works for another video-generating AI service, told me he came across Jumpspeak’s ads while looking for a program to teach his children Romanian, the language spoken by their grandparents. He argued that the ads demonstrated how deepfakes and automated-translation software could be used to mislead or deceive people. “I'm worried that some in the industry are currently in a race to the bottom on AI safety,” he told me in an email. (The ads were taken down after I started reporting this story, but it’s not clear if Meta or Jumpspeak removed them; neither company returned requests for comment. HeyGen also did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its product being used in Jumpspeak’s marketing.)

The world is already seeing how all of this can go wrong. Earlier this month, a far-right conspiracy theorist shared several AI-generated clips on X of Adolf Hitler giving a 1939 speech in English instead of the original German. The videos, which were purportedly produced using software from a company called ElevenLabs, featured a re-creation of Hitler’s own voice. It was a strange experience, hearing Hitler speak in English, and some people left comments suggesting that they found him easy to empathize with: “It sounds like these people cared about their country above all else,” one X user reportedly wrote in response to the videos. ElevenLabs did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ( The Atlantic uses ElevenLabs’ AI voice generator to narrate some articles.)

Read: The last frontier of machine translation

Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, told me that part of the problem with machine-translation programs is that they’re often falsely perceived as being neutral, rather than “bringing their own perspective upon how to move text from one language to another.” The truth is that there is no single right or correct way to transpose a sentence from French to Russian or any other language—it’s an art rather than a science. “Students will ask, ‘How do you say this in Spanish?’ and I’ll say, ‘You just don’t say it the same way in Spanish; the way you would approach it is different,’” Deborah Cohn, a Spanish- and Portuguese-language professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has written about the importance of language learning for bolstering U.S. national security , told me.

I recently came across a beautiful and particularly illustrative example of this fact in an article written by a translator in China named Anne. “Building a ladder between widely different languages, such as Chinese and English, is sometimes as difficult as a doctor building a bridge in a patient's heart,” she wrote. The metaphor initially struck me as slightly odd, but thankfully I wasn’t relying on ChatGPT to translate Anne’s words from their original Mandarin. I was reading a human translation by a professor named Jeffrey Ding, who helpfully noted that Anne may have been referring to a type of heart surgery that has recently become common in China. It's a small detail, but understanding that context brought me much closer to the true meaning of what Anne was trying to say.

Read: The college essay is dead

But most students will likely never achieve anything close to the fluency required to tell whether a translation rings close enough to the original or not. If professors accept that automated technology will far outpace the technical skills of the average Russian or Arabic major, their focus would ideally shift from grammar drills to developing cultural competency , or understanding the beliefs and practices of people from different backgrounds. Instead of cutting language courses in response to AI, schools should “stress more than ever the intercultural components of language learning that tremendously benefit the students taking these classes,” Jen William, the head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University and a member of the executive committee of the Association of Language Departments, told me.

Paula Krebs, the executive director of the MLA, referenced a beloved 1991 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to make a similar point. In “Darmok,” the crew aboard the starship Enterprise struggles to communicate with aliens living on a planet called El-Adrel IV. They have access to a “universal translator” that allows them to understand the basic syntax and semantics of what the Tamarians are saying, but the greater meaning of their utterances remains a mystery.

It later becomes clear that their language revolves around allegories rooted in the Tamarians’ unique history and practices. Even though Captain Picard was translating all the words they were saying, he “couldn’t understand the metaphors of their culture,” Krebs told me. More than 30 years later, something like a universal translator is now being developed on Earth. But it similarly doesn’t have the power to bridge cultural divides the way that humans can.