Google executive who admitted to being a former anti-Semite leaves the company

A Google executive left the company after posting a manifesto in which he admitted to being previously anti-Semitic – but claimed to no longer hate Jews.

“I wanted to share that today is Amr Awadallah’s last day at Google,” Eyal Manor, Google Cloud vice president of engineering and products, wrote Thursday in an email to staff, which was consulted by CNBC. “Effective immediately, the Cloud DevRel organization will report to Ben Jackson, who will report to Pali Bhat.”

The announcement comes about a month after Awadallah, who joined the company in 2019 and was vice president of developer relations for Google Cloud, posted a 10,000-word manifesto on LinkedIn that began: “I hated the Jewish people, all the Jewish people! and the emphasis here is on the past.

The manifesto, in which Awadallah, an American of Egyptian origin, lists all the Jews he knows and who he believes are good people, was titled “We are one! “

Elsewhere in the manifesto, Awadallah shared his 23andMe results, which showed he was 0.1% Ashkenazi Jew, which he highlighted in bold.

Awadallah also recounts in the manifesto how he was “very careful” of VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum because of his last name. Awadallah added that he came to appreciate her later and even described Rosenblum as his “first” Jewish angel. “

“I didn’t know if he was religious, but knowing him I felt he was an atheist or at least an agnostic,” Awadallah wrote of Rosenblum.

The manifesto angered some of Awadallah’s former colleagues, including Daniel Golding, director of network infrastructure and head of Google’s tech site.

“On the one hand, I am grateful that you no longer hate my children,” he wrote in a LinkedIn comment on Awadallah’s post. “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. This made it almost untenable.

“I don’t know why you would write that under your title and your company affiliation and that frustrates me. You could have just done it as a private person, ”he added.

It is not clear what Golding means by “the previous situation” which had already made it difficult to be a Jewish leader at Google.

But last month Google reassigned Kamau Bobb, the company’s former head of diversity, after a 2007 blog post surfaced in which he wrote that Jews have “an insatiable appetite for war. and murder ”- and an“ insensitivity ”to people’s suffering.

Google representatives did not return multiple requests for comment on how the company screens potential employees for hateful opinions during the hiring process.