A Google executive has left the company after publishing a manifesto in which he admitted to previously being 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 product, wrote Thursday in an email to staff, which was viewed by CNBC. “Effective immediately, the Cloud DevRel organization will report into Ben Jackson, who will report into Pali Bhat.”
The announcement comes about a month after Awadallah, who joined the company in 2019 and was the vice president of developer relations for Google Cloud, published a 10,000-word manifesto on LinkedIn that began, “I hated the Jewish people, all the Jewish people! and emphasis here is on the past tense.”
The manifesto, in which Awadallah, an Egyptian American, lists all the Jews he knows who he said are good people, was titled “We Are One!”
Elsewhere in the manifesto, Awadallah shared his 23andMe results, which showed he was 0.1 percent Ashkenazi Jewish, which he emphasized in boldface font.
Awadallah also recounts in the manifesto how he was “very cautious” of VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum because of his last name. Awadallah added that he later came to appreciate him and even described Rosenblum as his “first ‘Jewish angel.’”
“I wasn’t sure if he was religious, but as I got to know him, I felt that he was atheist or at least agnostic,” Awadallah wrote about Rosenblum.
The manifesto rankled some of Awadallah’s former colleagues, including Daniel Golding, a Google director of network infrastructure and tech site lead.
“On one hand, I’m grateful that you not longer hate my children,” he wrote in a LinkedIn comment on Awadallah’s post. “On the other, this has made my job as one of your colleagues much harder. The previous situation has made being a Jewish leader at Google tough. This has made it almost untenable.”
“I’m unsure why you would write this under your title and company affiliation and it frustrates me. You could simply have done this as a private person,” he added.
It’s unclear what Golding means by “the previous situation” that had already made it difficult to be a Jewish leader at Google.
But last month, Google reassigned Kamau Bobb, the company’s former diversity chief, after a 2007 blog post surfaced in which he wrote that Jews have “an insatiable appetite for war and killing” — and an “insensitivity” to people’s suffering.
Representatives for Google have not returned multiple requests for comment on how or whether the company vets potential employees for hateful views during the hiring process.