About | Books | Publications | Writing

About

I teach at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the Department of American Culture and the Digital Studies Institute. I'm broadly interested in the history, politics, and philosophy of the sciences; in studies of imperialism, racial capitalism, and white supremacy; and in radical social movements (among other things). I received my PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 2014. My work in the sciences explored the relationship between biology and cognition, including the idea of biological computation.

My first book Artificial Whiteness, about white supremacy and artificial intelligence, was published in 2020. My second book L'Shleimut: A Jewish Radical Tradition Against Capitalist Science and Medicine will appear in 2026.

Books

L'Shleimut: A Jewish Radical Tradition Against Capitalist Science and Medicine

Wayne State University Press

Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence

Columbia University Press

Translations: Japanese (Sayusha Press), Portuguese (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo)

Interviews about the book:

• Black Agenda Report
• DigiLabour

Publications

• Yarden Katz and Justin Podur. The Genocide in Palestine Is Powered by Zionism, Not “AI.” MR Online, May 1, 2025.

• Yarden Katz. "Resisting Eugenics and Racial Capitalism: Passover and the Tradition of Shifra and Puah." MR Online, 2023.

• Yarden Katz. "Intelligence Under Racial Capitalism: From Eugenics to Standardized Testing and Online Learning." Monthly Review, 2022.

• Yarden Katz and Walter Fontana. "Probabilistic Inference with Polymerizing Biochemical Circuits." Entropy, 2022. (pdf)

• Yarden Katz, "Entrepreneurial Science." Political Concepts, 2020.

• Yarden Katz and Ulrich Matter. "Metrics of Inequality: The Concentration of Resources in the U.S. Biomedical Elite." Science as Culture, 2019. (data)

• Yarden Katz. "Manufacturing an Artificial Intelligence Revolution." SSRN, 2017.

• Yarden Katz and Michael Springer. "Probabilistic adaptation in changing microbial environments." PeerJ, 2016.

• Katz Y, Wang ET, Silterra J, Schwartz S, Wong B, Thorvaldsdottir H, Robinson JT, Mesirov JP, Airoldi EM, Burge CB. "Quantitative visualization of alternative exon expression from RNA-seq data." Bioinformatics, (2015).

• Katz Y, Li F, Lambert NJ, Sokol ES, Tam W, Cheng AW, Airoldi EM, Lengner CJ, Gupta PB, Yu Z, Jaenisch R, Burge CB. "Musashi proteins are post-transcriptional regulators of the epithelial-luminal cell state." eLife, 2014.

• Katz Y, Wang ET, Airoldi EM, Burge CB. "Analysis and design of RNA sequencing experiments for identifying isoform regulation." Nature Methods, 2010.

Writing

On Palestine and Israeli settler-colonialism

• Are Israelis Jews? Returning to Jewish minority life. Mondoweiss, November 9, 2023.

• How Google advances the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Mondoweiss, December 8, 2021.

• How Microsoft is invested in Israeli settler-colonialism. Mondoweiss, March 15, 2021.
• You stole the home of a people and you’re not even willing to say 'sorry'. Mondoweiss, August 9, 2019.
• 'I watched the terrifying way in which we Judaize the land': an eyewitness account of the Sur Baher home demolitions by Yuval Abraham (translation from Hebrew). Mondoweiss, August 2, 2019.
• The State of Israel on the Nature of Poetry. Mondoweiss, August 8, 2017.
• Beyond apartheid: Fragments from the West Bank. Mondoweiss, April 17, 2017.
• Harvard biotechnology conference whitewashes Israeli occupation. Mondoweiss, May 2, 2016.
• Inside the labyrinth: a daytrip to East Jerusalem. Mondoweiss, June 30, 2015.
  • Spanish translation: Dentro del laberinto: una excursión por Jerusalén Este
• Israel's information iron dome. Mondoweiss, August 27, 2014.

On science and technology

• Higher Ed, Inc. The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 7, 2018.
• Elite universities are selling themselves - and look who's buying. The Guardian, March 30, 2018.
• White Supremacist Statues Must Fall. Even When They Are of Famous Scientists. The Guardian, September 19, 2017.
• Harvard biotechnology conference whitewashes Israeli occupation. Mondoweiss, May 2, 2016.
• Who Owns Molecular Biology? Boston Review, October 28, 2015. (pdf)
• Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong. The Atlantic, November 1, 2012. (single page)
  • Polish translation: Co poszło źle w sztucznej inteligencji? Rozmowa z Noamem Chomskym, Przegląd Filozoficzny - Nowa Seria (2013). Translated by Natalia Karczewska.
  • Italian translation: L'Intelligenza Artificiale: dove ha sbagliato, ZNet Italy (2013). Translated by Giuseppe Volpe.