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Relations with the developers of Google Cloud abruptly left the web giant late last week after sharing a lengthy essay on how he no longer hated “all the Jewish people.”
Egyptian-American Amr Awadallah, who joined Google in 2019, had posted a 10,000-word missive on LinkedIn a month earlier, along with a two-hour YouTube video, stating: “I hated the Jewish people, everything. the Jewish people, and the accent here is in the past tense.
“Yes, I was anti-Semitic, even though I am Semitic, as this term broadly refers to peoples who speak Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, among others.”
The article went on to describe how anti-Semitism was ingrained in him as a child by those around him, and even by the time he arrived in America in 1995, in his mid-twenties to study for a doctorate at Stanford, he “still had a deep resentment towards the Jewish people.”
I had irrational prejudices
“I had irrational prejudices,” wrote Awadallah, now 50. “But here in the United States, I started to see humanity on the other side. I started to see the truth. And I emerged from the matrix of hate that my mind was immersed in for so many years.”
Awadallah, who described himself as “a proud Muslim with a touch of healthy agnosticism,” said he was “cautious” of his doctoral research director Mendel Rosenblum, who then co-founded VMware with Diane Greene. She was then the boss of Google Cloud from 2015 to 2019. Rosenblum and Greene, now married, invested in the startup Cloudera of Awadallah, which just made her a pretty penny by going private four years after going public. Awadallah described Rosenblum as his “first ‘Jewish angel’, he solidified the elimination of prejudices from my heart.”
The post continued with Awadallah recounting the Jewish people he came to admire, from John von Neumann and Albert Einstein to Adam Sandler, and how he realized he was wrong to harbor so much hatred. The cloud industry veteran also gave a few views on Palestine and Israel for good measure, along with rules on dog ownership, DNA testing and more.
Importantly, there was a bare-handed meeting last week, led by Awadallah, in which the Googlers brought up the essay; it was a conference call described as “beyond television about car crashes” by those familiar with what had been discussed, as the veep fought to defend his point of view. By the end of the week, Awadallah had left the company, as CNBC first reported.
“I wanted to share that today is Amr Awadallah’s last day at Google,” Google Cloud’s Eyal Manor product manager wrote in an internal email on Thursday. “Effective immediately, the Cloud DevRel organization will report to Ben Jackson, who will report to Pali Bhat.”
One of the concerns of some Googlers was that the long, rambling article on how he was able to carry so much hate for half his life could be a wake-up call for those who want to work with or within the mega-business. There were also tensions over Awadallah’s leadership style, whose complaints were highlighted by the manifesto.
Daniel Golding, director of network infrastructure at Google, told Awadallah on LinkedIn: “On the one hand, I am thankful that you no longer hate my children. On the other hand, it made my job as one of your colleagues much more difficult. “
“The previous situation made it difficult to be a Jewish leader at Google,” he added without suggesting what the situation was. “It made it almost untenable.”
In a tweet regarding his rapid ejection from the goliath cloud, Awadallah mentionned he was “speechless,” adding, “I’m still in shock. I admire everyone I’ve worked with at Google and truly believed in their mission.”
Google and Awadallah did not respond to our requests for further details and comment. ®
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