The Event will be held in Hebrew Only
After a summer break, Bereisheet Tech Boston is back!
Join us on October 14 at Pearl Cohen’s Boston office as we kick off a new year of events, community-building, and great content for Boston’s Israeli and Israeli-American tech community.
This evening is an opportunity to reconnect after the summer, meet new members of the community, and start building the connections and conversations that will carry us through the year ahead.
The evening will feature a short conversation with Prof. Anat Perry:
The Artificial-Empathy Paradox: Why human empathy still matters in the age of AI
Large language models now produce empathic responses that people find genuinely moving - until they discover their source. Across nine experiments, Prof. Anat Perry (Hebrew University of Jerusalem; 2026–27 Harvard Berkman-Klein Fellow) finds that identical messages are judged less empathic and less supportive when attributed to AI, and that even the mere suspicion of AI assistance diminishes their value. Her work points to a deeper principle: empathy is not just emotional support, but a costly signal - evidence that another person chose to invest attention and effort in us, and a predictor of future commitment. When that signal can be generated at zero cost, its meaning begins to collapse. Drawing on her research at the intersection of social neuroscience and human-AI interaction, Perry will explore what this paradox means for the technologists building emotionally intelligent systems, and for a society in which more and more of our emotional lives are mediated by machines.
Following the conversation, we’ll leave plenty of time for dinner, networking, and catching up - reconnecting with familiar faces, welcoming new ones, and building the relationships that make this community valuable.
We’re excited to bring everyone back together, hear what people have been working on over the summer, and look ahead to another year of events, connections, and opportunities across the Boston tech ecosystem.
Participation is free, spaces are limited, and registration is required.
Prof. Anat Perry is an associate professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a 2026-2027 Harvard Berkman-Klein Fellow. Her research examines empathy and social processes through the lenses of psychology and neuroscience, with a growing focus on human–AI interactions and what they reveal about human empathy. Perry combines theoretical insight with diverse methodologies (behavioral, eye-tracking, EEG, and field studies) to explore how we understand, feel with, and relate to others.
A special thank you to Pearl Cohen for hosting us. Pearl Cohen is an international law firm working closely with startups, entrepreneurs, investors, and innovation-driven companies across the U.S., Israel, and globally.
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