{"id":86548,"date":"2025-08-16T06:06:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T06:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/86548\/"},"modified":"2025-08-16T06:06:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T06:06:11","slug":"how-ai-and-fiddler-on-the-roof-played-essential-roles-in-this-chinese-immigrants-journey-to-judaism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/86548\/","title":{"rendered":"How AI and ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ played essential roles in this Chinese immigrant’s journey to Judaism"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Liangda Hu first tried doing Daf Yomi<\/a>, the practice of studying a page of Talmud per day, he struggled to read it. Hu found the language of English Talmud translations uniquely archaic and, as someone who speaks English as a second language, difficult to understand.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So he turned to artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

Now, Hu uses ChatGPT to translate his daily Talmud study into his native Mandarin. \u201cI think it\u2019s quite reliable when it comes to translation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The technology is not perfect, Hu pointed out. To be safe, he often cross-references ChatGPT\u2019s answers when asking about customs, like how to prepare for a particular fast day. But overall, Hu said, \u201cUsing AI has really sped me up for Talmud and Torah learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI is not the first technology to help Hu along his journey from his hometown in China toward becoming a Jew in his adopted home of Brownstone Brooklyn, where the 38-year-old immigrant has gone by the name Leo. Along the way, a broadcast of \u201cFiddler on the Roof\u201d and a Facebook connection with his first Jewish friend played pivotal roles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But ChatGPT, which just relaunched last week with an even more powerful model, is perhaps changing the frontiers of Jewish life even more quickly than the technology innovations that preceded it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI provides a lot of new entry ways into Torah that didn\u2019t exist before,\u201d said David Zvi Kalman, host of \u201cBelief in the Future,\u201d a podcast about technology and religion. \u201cAI allows for all kinds of translations that are not priorities for mainstream translators \u2014 like obscure texts, or translations between languages that are less common.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hu had no idea as a child in Tianjin, China, that he would ever be engaging with a Jewish language, or becoming one of the first \u2014 if not the first \u2014 daily Talmud students to work from a machine translation into Mandarin. Growing up just a decade removed from the Cultural Revolution, during which religion was essentially banned, would have made\u00a0a future as a Jew in New York City feel like a farfetched possibility \u2014\u00a0if he could even have imagined it.<\/p>\n

But that was before Hu saw \u201cFiddler on the Roof.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was quite fascinating,\u201d said Hu, who today lives in Prospect Heights while pursuing an MBA at Monroe College. He first watched the Academy Award-winning musical \u2014 a staple of the Ashkenazi Jewish cultural canon \u2014 while studying acting at a theater school in China.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat deeply fascinates me is how this family finds balance between tradition and an ever-changing reality,\u201d Hu said, adding that he was also moved by \u201cthe way that Tevye expresses his relationship with God.\u201d<\/p>\n

The musical had a profound effect on Hu, who moved to New York in 2021 to attend a musical theater program at the Manhattan School of Music. Now, he is pursuing two simultaneous goals: to run his own theater company, and to officially convert to Judaism.<\/p>\n

In coming to New York, Hu left behind a country in which Jews constitute just 0.0002% of the population<\/a>, and where connections to Judaism can be few and far between.<\/p>\n

Tianjin happens to have a notable Jewish history: The city\u2019s Jewish population peaked at around 3,500 in 1935, amid waves of immigration by Jews escaping Russian pogroms and, later, the Nazis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When passage opened after the war, virtually all of those migrants left, and today, \u201cthere is no longer a Jewish community in Tianjin,\u201d Hu said. The city\u2019s Art Deco synagogue, built in 1939, has since been turned into a restaurant<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But for Hu, \u201cFiddler on the Roof\u201d was something of a gateway to an increasingly Jewish life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Raised in a non-religious family by atheist parents, Hu had long been interested in the idea of a higher being. He began practicing as a Catholic at one point \u2014\u00a0Hu said he enjoyed feeling \u201cguidance\u201d in his daily life from Catholicism, at a time when there was \u201cno chance [for him] to really get in touch with Judaism\u201d \u2014\u00a0but said he felt \u201ca bit of distance from Catholicism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before moving to New York, Hu had done some reading about Jewish customs and culture. After the move, he was surrounded by it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first friend he made in New York happened to be a Jewish man he\u2019d met on Facebook. When his friend\u2019s father died, Hu joined him to sit shiva. \u201cIt was such a profound experience,\u201d he said. Despite not understanding the words of the Hebrew and Aramaic prayers, Hu said the experience \u201cfelt so warm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, Hu is a regular attendee of Prospect Heights Shul, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Brooklyn. He is learning to cook traditional Jewish dishes \u2014\u00a0last week\u2019s cholent turned out \u201cnot bad,\u201d he said \u2014\u00a0and has begun altering certain favorite Chinese recipes in order to make them kosher, like swapping out dried shrimp for dried anchovies.<\/p>\n

Hu said that every Friday night, he finds himself thinking about the Shabbat scene from \u201cFiddler on the Roof,\u201d in which one home after another lights their candles. \u201cThat sudden shift in atmosphere \u2014 from busyness to warmth \u2014\u00a0is something I experience every Shabbat,\u201d Hu said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Prospect Heights Shul\u2019s head rabbi, Jonathan Leener, is overseeing Hu\u2019s Modern Orthodox conversion, which is expected to be complete next spring.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s just a staple,\u201d Leener said of his student. \u201cI take pride that I\u2019m the first person into shul on Shabbat morning. And now I have to compete with him because he beats me there often \u2014 which is a signal that he\u2019s a convert, because he doesn\u2019t understand Jewish time,\u201d he joked. (A bonus of having a musical theater background: Leener added that Hu has a \u201cbeautiful voice,\u201d according to those who sit near him.)<\/p>\n

Like the hundreds of converts Leener has worked with since he started doing conversions in 2016, Hu has been attending sessions with the rabbi every other Monday evening, as well as additional, in-depth classes on practical elements like lighting Shabbat candles, doing havdalah, saying kiddush and making one\u2019s kitchen kosher.<\/p>\n

Hu said he\u2019s noticed similarities between Talmud and Chinese canonical works, like the Sayings of Confucius: \u201cIt\u2019s not, \u2018This is what you should do, this is what you should do.\u2019 It\u2019s, \u2018This is a debate, actually, and also a record of those sages.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

His interactions with both Chinese and Jewish culture inspired him to write a full-length play last year, titled \u201cTwo Mr. Mas in New York,\u201d about a Chinese father and son who immigrate to the United States, and rent an apartment from their Jewish downstairs neighbors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a story that embodies Hu\u2019s own journey \u2014\u00a0and offers a note of relief to Kalman, who says the \u201cchief limitation\u201d of studying Torah using AI is the risk of losing the communal aspect of Jewish life.<\/p>\n

\u201cTorah study isn\u2019t just about the knowledge itself. A lot of Talmud is pretty disconnected from the modern world. So if you\u2019re just reading it for information, you\u2019re not going to get so much,\u201d Kalman said. \u201cIt\u2019s often the experience of learning it in community that makes it valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\tJewish stories matter, and so does your support.\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Liangda Hu first tried doing Daf Yomi, the practice of studying a page of Talmud per day,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,690,2229,74],"class_list":["post-86548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-culture","tag-religion","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}