[MUSIC PLAYING]

[DESCRIPTION] Touro Talks intro displaying photos of students and faculty across the university, fading into the Touro University logo.

[TEXT] Touro Talks, Touro University, Autism and Employment: Lessons from the Corporate World, November 15, 2022. Touro Talks is sponsored by Robert and Arlene Rosenberg.

[DESCRIPTION] Sam Levine, Dr. Alan Kadish, Nahum Twersky, Roni Vistuch, Lihi Lapid, Eli Schreiber and Mollie Goldstein appear in a grid Zoom-like format. The Touro University logo is at the bottom right.

[ALAN KADISH] On behalf of Touro University, it's my pleasure to welcome all of you to today's program. Touro Talks and the Jewish Law Institute at the Touro Law Center have once again put together an opportunity for people to make a difference in autism education and advocacy by learning from leading experts. I'd like to thank Nahum Twersky of Touro Talks and Dr. Sam Levine, Director of the Jewish Law Institute at the Touro Law Center, for putting together this program.

Our topic today is one that's important, and also has had a major role at Touro University. Touro has made a commitment to stay involved in disability advocacy by initiating a Disability Rights and Inclusion project. The Law Center puts forth programs directed towards rights, inclusion, and acceptance, focusing in part on autism in the Jewish community and beyond. Our program features leading speakers on campus, as well as in webinars.

Touro's involvement in autism, however, goes beyond discussion. In Henderson, Nevada, Touro has one of the few autism institutes in the area that's primarily directed at individuals under 12. On the East Coast, Touro's partner, the Westchester Institute for Human Development, deals with a variety of developmental disorders, including autism. And Touro continues to gain ground with an inter-school project that includes both research and advocacy involving Touro Law Center and the Health Science schools.

Today's program is part of Touro's 50th anniversary celebration, and it builds upon the success of prior programs, including ones that have interviewed a number of important experts in autism. In my role as President of Touro University and of New York Medical College, I recognize that our 4,000 employees run the gamut with regard to their abilities.

Differences, however, aren't what we view as a negative, but rather, a way to figure out how we can take diverse talent and skill sets and bring them together in ways that allow people who think differently to work together. If you take advantage of differences, everyone can contribute and make the institution better.

Today, in today's program, we're excited to have with us individuals from Shekel team at Mobileye, a team of employees on the autism spectrum working in data annotation and labeling. We're particularly honored to have a special introduction from Lihi Lapid.

Lihi is well known to many of us as an author, photojournalist, and columnist. She's married to the prime minister of Israel, Yair Lapid. Lihi's also president of Shekel, Israel's leading organization for inclusion of individuals with disabilities in the community.

Shekel is a not-for-profit organization that places people with autism and other disabilities into meaningful positions in the workforce. Our panelists for Mobileye today are living examples of what the organization is accomplishing. I'll ask Lihi to provide a few introductory remarks and then introduce our panelists and ask them a couple of questions. Ladies and gentlemen, Lihi Lapid.

[LIHI LAPID] Hi, everybody. It's a great pleasure to be here and to talk. And thank you. Thank you, Dr. Kadish. Hi, everybody. We are in Shekel. We are one of the biggest organizations that is dealing with helping people with disabilities to work, to work around every possibility.

You know, inclusion is a very new thing. Usually when people with special needs became adults, we used to send them somewhere. We don't know where. Because when I grew up as a young girl, I never saw people with special needs around me. I never saw adults with special needs.

And things changed. I'm a mother of a 25-year-old young woman with autism, and she doesn't speak. She has really severe autism. And as many other parents, we gave a lot to them. We teach her a lot. We tried to give her so many skills.

And then when people with special needs become adults, suddenly the variety of the options that are standing for them is so little. Usually, they offer them to pack things or to do monotonous work. But throughout the years, we realized that our kids, even if they have-- even if they can't speak, even if their body is preventing them from doing things, and all kind of disabilities stopping them from expressing themselves, their emotions are the same as all of us.

And Shekel started many years ago, long before I joined them. It's an organization like Dr. Kadish said, not-for-profit. And they talked about inclusion 30 years ago, before everybody talked about it. And they tried to break the walls that closed people with disabilities in work that was much lower than the thing they could do.

We're doing things with art. We are doing-- we are getting people to study with autism and with other disabilities to study theater, to learn and to be musicians. And also, we are going to meet in a while to be part of the high tech that Israel is so proud of.

And in high tech, they can do a lot of things that sometimes are working-- surrounding the people that work in high tech. And we all know now that people, especially with autism, with high function, can sometimes be better than a lot of us in special fields.

So I'm very, very proud as the president of Shekel that' we are so many years making people with disabilities break their own glass ceiling, and realizing that they can be artists and high tech. And I want to be at the day that I think will happen that there will not be any working place that we'll go to that won't have people with disabilities, because we can find the passion in every person and the ability to do things and to change his life through work.

A lot of us are defining ourselves by our work, by the thing we are doing when we wake up in the morning and going to do. And so are people with disabilities. If you give them work that they can change things, that they can achieve things, that they can break the ceiling of themselves, you give them an opportunity to change their life.

So I'm very happy to be in this webinar. I'm very happy that Mobileye, which is very, very famous in Israel-- I hope it's also abroad-- as a high-tech company that is changing and reaching out to the future for us to know that people with disabilities are working in the top top of the high-tech companies.

It's such an honor. And we thank so much Mobileye for doing this project with us, because we can only ask companies to open the door for people with disabilities, but the companies themselves needs to do the work of really inclusion, including in their own company the people with disabilities.

So thank you so much, all of you, for joining here. And I think it's wonderful. Here in Israel, we started the new year. So it's a privilege for me to open the new year with a thank you, all of you, for helping inclusion. [SPEAKING HEBREW]

[ALAN KADISH] Thank you very much for being here today, and thanks for all the work you do. As you mentioned, people on the autism spectrum have a variety of different talents, something we talked about at one of our prior webinars. And finding the right fit for each individual is crucial, but can be extraordinarily rewarding.

So you talked a little bit glowingly about Mobileye. Among other things, Mobileye has involved in developing the technology for self-driving cars and represents in part some of the great advances that have been made in Israel in technology.

So let me introduce the team from Mobileye today. Mollie Goldstein is with us from Mobileye, I guess. She's the team leader of Shekel at Mobileye, a team of 12 employees on the autism spectrum working in data annotation and labeling.

For the past five years, Mollie has committed herself to promoting employment for adults with disabilities, predominantly in the high-tech sector. She earned her MA in not-for-profit management from Hebrew University while specializing in innovation and entrepreneurship. Welcome, Mollie.

With her on the screen is Eli Schreiber, who moved to Israel in 2002 with his family and completed his high school education. For the last five years, Eli has been part of Shekel team at Mobileye, working in data annotation and labeling. His job consists of tagging and labeling data through video clips. Eli has lived in Shekel's residential housing for the last seven years and hopes to continue his professional development in Mobileye.

And finally, Roni Vistuch. Roni is experienced in fundraising, R&D, project implementation, and management of teams locally, offshore, and working with subcontractors. He has over 20 years of experience in design and implementation of real-time applications, image and signal processing, computer vision, and advanced video algorithms. He holds a master of science in electrical engineering from Tel Aviv University.

So it's great to have the Mobileye team with us today. So I want to start with a question for Mollie Goldstein. Please tell us about your background, including your work at Shekel, the origins of the partnership between Shekel and Mobileye, and how the autism employment program has developed over time. Welcome again, Mollie.

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] Thank you. It's good to be here. So a little bit of background about myself. I moved to Israel 10 years ago. And as you just shared, I completed my master's in nonprofit management. I've always had one foot in the high-tech sector, one foot in the nonprofit sector. So while I was getting my MA in nonprofit management, I was working in venture capital in Jerusalem.

I pivoted a little bit to the mental health sector in Israel, working to help adults with mental illness in Jerusalem to find employment, which I found very difficult due to a lot of stigmas and a lot of fear of the unknown. And I also found it very invigorating, and realized that I'm very passionate about inclusion in general, opening people's mindsets, giving opportunities to people who aren't necessarily the first people on the list to call up because of prejudice and stigma and fear of the unknown.

So from there, I found an opportunity at Shekel, again, to have one foot in each field, working as a counselor for the team of Shekel employees. They're Mobileye employees who all came here through Shekel.

And I worked in that position, mainly providing a more supportive role in terms of behavioral and emotional support to the employees onsite, day to day, together. And currently, I'm happy to share that I accepted a position at Mobileye, and I'm now their team leader internally through Mobileye. A position has been created to lead this team professionally with my help. So that's a bit of my background.

The background of the Shekel team, the development of the Shekel team, they started as a small group of five employees who were put off site in Shekel's-- on Shekel's premises. And they began working in very simple, monotonous tasks. They were given also a counselor to supervise and given computers, and that's how it all began.

The team has more than doubled in size. The team is now 12 employees. About two and a half years ago, almost three years ago, the team was moved to mobilized premises to the floor with the rest of our department, which was a significant change in the inclusion element of having this team really be a part of the department.

The change of moving here has also definitely brought on way more opportunities for the employees. The fact that people know them and see them and know their work, and they're more accessible just physically because they're here has opened opportunities for a lot more varied work opportunities, different levels of challenge for different projects, the ability to see different employees' potentials, and then to accordingly provide them with work.

The team has definitely developed professionally in the last few years, a lot of that also thanks to Roni who we'll hear from soon in terms of really being included in the department, participating in the fun days, and also receiving salary raises for the first time. A few of the team members have been promoted to different teams. They work now externally, not within the Shekel team, but actually in different teams under direct management of other managers.

So we're really in growth right now in terms of the opportunities that we're being given, in terms of everyone's professional development. And that's where the team is today.

[ALAN KADISH] Thank you so much. We'll come back to you with a couple-- some questions in a couple of minutes. But I want to now turn to Eli Schreiber. Perhaps you could tell us about your background, how you learned about autism employment at Mobileye, how you applied, and where you've gone.

[ELI SCHREIBER] Sorry. Say again? Yeah.

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] The questions that we wrote out, you can just--

[ALAN KADISH] So we'll do them one at a time. Just tell us about your background.

[ELI SCHREIBER] My background is I made aliyah about 20 years ago. I have a full high school education. And-- I'm sorry. [INAUDIBLE]

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] How did you find out about Shekel?

[ELI SCHREIBER] How did I find out about Shekel? Thank you. I'm-- it's part of my issues. I found out through Shekel through a social worker in Israel. Thankfully, they're really great here. And it's been wonderful.

[ALAN KADISH] So tell us about what you do on a day-to-day basis? What's your job involved in?

[ELI SCHREIBER] So our job description is kind of literal. We literally look over video clips of, you know, just a guy driving down the street. And we're supposed to label whatever our task is. For example, right now I'm labeling how many bicycles I see on my clips. Or it could be-- it used to be speed limits. I'd have to mark down specifically where on the road the speed limit is.

[ALAN KADISH] And do you get any feedback on how those data are used over time?

[ELI SCHREIBER] Well, I mean, I assume we either give them out to clients or it's put into the algorithm.

[ALAN KADISH] Got it. OK. And so how has it been working at Mobileye in the Shekel team?

[ELI SCHREIBER] It's been pretty nice. I enjoy it a lot. We're all very close to each other, thankfully.

[ALAN KADISH] Excellent. All right. Great. So our third panelist is Roni. Tell us about your background, what you do at Mobileye, and how you got involved with the autism employment program.

[RONI VISTUCH] So hi, everybody. This is Roni Vistuch from Israel. I'm running the Data Annotation and Labeling Department here in Mobileye. Basically, the department is providing all the data annotation that is required for the autonomous vehicles, for all the artificial intelligence, and the network-- neural network that we are building in order to have the autonomous vehicle running on the streets.

I'm an R&D expert, a veteran with expertise, more than 20 years in computer vision and computer-- and video algorithm on real-time embedded platforms, going all the way from video conferencing, Homeland Security, entertainment applications, and now Mobileye advanced driving assistance systems and the holy grail of the autonomous vehicle.

I started Mobileye, my role about four years ago. Prior to this, I was in intel for a couple of years. I was relocated to California as well. And I was doing some other R&D management teams, including startups in Israel and corporates around the world.

And the way I got into this opportunity, the feedbacks and the credit goes all the way to the other management that set up these amazing initiatives. When you think about an R&D manager, we have engineers, we have technical people, and there is a lot of tasks going on, right?

And what I have found out that, as Mollie said, four years ago there was a small team there in Shekel premises that were doing such kind of work. And I said to myself, hey, maybe we can bring them here. Let me look about those people. Those are individual.

Let's look at each and every one's capabilities, because I'm well familiar with the fact that each and every one has other-- his own capabilities. And we all have tasks that we are very good in, and there are tasks that we are very bad in. You can ask my wife about it. I have tasks that I'm very bad about it.

So it really is the individual, not about his disability. And when I brought here the team, I was amazed by the fact that some of them are doing the task great, and we just need to put the right person on the right task. And this is where I pushed the gas pedal and said to the management, let's bring more people. Let's tune up the task. And that will help us bring and build the autonomous vehicles.

So this is where I came into this one, quite I wasn't intend to do this, but this is how we turn out to be. And now I'm probably the great advocate for those people. And I'm telling everybody, those people can help you build up. There is a lot of task going on in the high tech industry that can help bring perfect your product.

[ALAN KADISH] That's great. Thank you so much. So I have a couple of follow up questions. Let's start with Mollie.

Can you tell us about a couple of lessons you've learned about employing workers with autism? Maybe some things that have worked and perhaps some things that didn't work so well that you would tell the rest of us to avoid.

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] Definitely. I think the first lesson that I learned working with employees with autism-- maybe on the first day already I learned this lesson-- is that you cannot generalize. Every single person's autism means a different thing entirely. I don't know if I was fully aware of what that meant until I started supervising a team of 12 employees who were all very different, one from the other.

And with that not being able to generalize, like Roni was saying, seeing the strengths of one person versus the strengths of another person. And trying to take advantage of the strengths and channel them in a certain way, and avoid other situations that might not be setting someone up for success. So that was definitely, on the interpersonal level, a huge lesson that I immediately kind of learned from this role.

I think in my work internally within Mobileye and also with other organizations that I've worked with in the past, I've definitely also learned the lesson of the importance of managers feeling that they have enough information and enough capability to manage people with autism. It's usually a fear. If you turn to a manager and you say to them, would you like to employ someone? They happen to be on the autism spectrum. Usually, there will be some sort of hesitation there, and that's OK.

I think that was also part of my learning process, was that you don't need to judge that and say, oh, they must be a bad person. They don't want to do this. But instead, to read between the lines and to understand that that manager is saying, I don't know what that means. I don't know how that's going to make my life more difficult. I don't know what the benefits are. Can you please help me so that I can do this in a way that's successful?

It usually comes also from a place of not wanting to hurt someone, not wanting to be insensitive, and really not from a bad place. I think that was also a learning thing of a lot of the hesitations of employing people in general with disabilities is this fear that something might happen, and that's a legitimate fear.

And therefore, there is a requirement for a middleman, which was my previous position, which was really to try and serve both sides to make sure that everyone feels comfortable. I think that was a very big lesson for me.

[ALAN KADISH] Do you have a training program for supervisors to teach them how to work with autism employees?

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] Not yet. Not yet, and that is something that, as we transition some of our team leaders-- our team members into other teams, it is something that is part of my job, is that communication and preparation. It's very individualized right now, meaning we're working only with two other managers currently. But yeah, I think that in the future, yeah.

Hopefully, we will get to something like that, that all managers would be trained not only in autism, but just in general and diversity, how to manage a diverse team with people with different needs and different abilities, because that's where the world is headed. And there's a lot more benefit to a team like that.

[ALAN KADISH] Eli, what have you learned from your time at Mobileye? Some lessons that have helped you feel more comfortable, do your job better, and feel more productive? Tell us about that.

[ELI SCHREIBER] Well, it's going to have to definitely be, I've gotten a better work ethic here, thankfully. It used to be pretty bad, but I've-- actually, a lot of it is thanks to Mollie. I've learned to be-- to do better-- to do better with myself in life. And of co-- yeah. And--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] [INAUDIBLE] work ethic things that--

[ELI SCHREIBER] You know, actually getting up in the morning, feeling the motivation to do stuff to actually get work done. And of course, I've also learned-- well, that's pretty much it [INAUDIBLE].

[ALAN KADISH] So do you feel-- do you feel like working has made you feel happier, feel empowered, feel better? I mean, you talked about developing a work ethic, and that's great. These days, that's not necessarily always a positive term. So do you feel like having done that has enriched your life.

[ELI SCHREIBER] A bit more. Yeah. Sorry.

[ALAN KADISH] OK.

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] Like maybe about work-- I don't know-- the routine of having work or something like that, what it does for you.

[ELI SCHREIBER] Yes, that. I've also learned communication is a great skill. It's always a problem that we have. People with autism tend to not be able to talk to each other or to people who don't have autism, I guess. We're very good at communicating to each, other, thankfully.

[LAUGHS]

[ELI SCHREIBER] What else do I want to say? Shoot.

[ALAN KADISH] That's OK. We'll come back to you in a moment, Eli. And Roni, how about some lessons from you?

[RONI VISTUCH] Yes. So my lesson learned that basically, if you want to succeed, you want to have the right task to the right person. And it's like a general statement that is-- but when it comes to an engineer or to a technical person, you just look at the resume. You look at the experiences. You know what he can do, what he cannot do, what he's going to be. You can expect what he's going to be good at and what he will have-- he won't be able to perform.

But here in this case, I think what's helped me out is having a person like Mollie and other people that can look on the other side and say, hey, this team or this person can do this kind of work, and he's going to succeed in this one. And this is kind of where the magic happened, when you put up the right people to the right task. So having this kind of person within the team, having the team on board was my lesson learned, right?

Another thing is when we brought in the team, the COVID hit us, and we all went home and worked virtually. But once the team was on board and people were interacting with, all those fears of those kind of people really went down, because you see them in the corridor.

You can have a talk with them. You see they are exactly like us. They have their own wills. They have their own passion. And they are tested. They are outperformed, right?

And this is where we were able to bring more people, and we're able to get those people and work with other people as well. So those are my two lessons learned from my experience.

[ALAN KADISH] So if I could-- see if I understood one of your lessons a little bit, would you say that compared to other employees, that it's easier or harder for remote work for people with autism? Or is it not generalizable?

[RONI VISTUCH] So when the COVID hit, it was quite hard to work remotely for everybody, and specifically for those people as well. And there were some people that were struggling, working from home. You have to have some discipline. You have to have the infrastructures and the good internet connection, and the ability to work out all the technical stuff in order to connect to the office.

Some were doing fine. Some were struggling with it. So it's really depending on the people. So there are people that are still working from home, and we are still working from home part of the time. And some were really having-- difficult to do this.

[ALAN KADISH] Mollie, perhaps you could answer the same question. Did you find that it was harder or easier to engage with people with autism for remote work? And where does it stand now in terms of how many people are working remotely in the Shekel program versus the company as a whole?

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] So when I began, half of the team was working remotely already and half of the team was working in the office. There definitely are struggles in terms of communication, which, that happens in the office as well.

I think, as Roni said, we kind of sorted it out in a way that enabled the people who were more able to work independently, to sort their own problems, to be responsive, those are the people that continue to work from home. For people who either were unable to sort certain things out on their own or people who-- the stress level of being alone and not being able to work was too much and that impacted it, there are people who are currently working here.

There's definitely certain people on the team that much prefer to work from home. They prefer the quiet. They prefer having their headphones on all day and listening to their music. They prefer their space.

I think the biggest challenge is really the transitions, meaning when people were working from home five days a week and we brought them back into the office part time, that was a challenge. And there have been a few times that we've also done the opposite, where we say, today everyone is working from home. And those days usually also come with challenge.

So when people are in their routine of, this day I'm in the office, this day I'm from home, we have a well-running machine. And if there's all of the sudden a snow day and everyone needs to work from home, usually that comes with a lot of technical issues, a lot of miscommunications, misunderstandings, people getting lost in the mix of it. So when things are routine, it's pretty comfortable when people are working from home.

In terms of our team versus the rest of the team-- the rest of the teams, our department works two days a week from home, three days a week from the office, and so our team does the same thing. Again, there's people that work here five days a week because they prefer, but they have the same options.

[ALAN KADISH] Great. That's very helpful. What percentage-- just out of curiosity, in Mobileye in general, what percentage of employees are working remotely right now?

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] That's probably a Roni question.

[LAUGHS] [INAUDIBLE]

[RONI VISTUCH] So most of the people are still working-- I mean, once again, we are having two days from home, three days from the office. Some other teams have maybe others-- maybe are having more days from the office. It's really depending on your role. People that are working in the labs should report to the office. They probably can do little to no work from home.

But other people that can do-- algorithm guides and maybe coders and software engineers can work from home. But everybody has the option to still working from home.

And it seems to be that this is here to stay. I mean, although the COVID seems to be declining or even gone, people are still working from home. This is becoming a standard industry nowadays.

[ALAN KADISH] Eli, do you like working in groups or do you like working alone better?

[ELI SCHREIBER] So I prefer working in the office, mostly because I like hearing things around me. When I work in quiet, I tend to get distracted incredibly, so here is the best.

[ALAN KADISH] So that helps to be in the office. That's great.

[ELI SCHREIBER] Yes.

[ALAN KADISH] All right. Good. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Sam Levine. We have several questions from the audience today. And I'll let Sam ask some of those questions, talk to you about the answers. And I just want to personally thank the three of you for joining us today. It's fantastic to have you here, and it's tremendous what you're doing. So thanks for being here and thanks for making this incredible leap forward.

[SAM LEVINE] Thank you, Dr. Kadish. And in my capacity as Professor of Law and Director of the Jewish Law Institute at Touro Law Center, I want to take this opportunity to thank you, Dr. Kadish, publicly, for all of your support, your leadership in the university, your support of the law school, and your support of these programs, the Touro Talks and other programs dedicated to exploring disability rights and inclusion, and in particular, the issue of employment, which is so crucial.

I had the opportunity this summer to visit Israel and to visit the Mobileye offices and to meet you out there. And I was so impressed, because we often hear about the disproportionate unemployment and underemployment for individuals on the autism spectrum.

And corporations have autism employment programs. It's become kind of popular as a PR matter, if nothing else, unfortunately, to have programs and to promote the idea of employing individuals on the autism spectrum.

But what I saw at Mobileye is that it's actually being done and being implemented in a particularly effective way. And that's why we're so thrilled to have you on this program, to help share your experiences, to help provide these lessons for others who are interested, both to gain employment and to provide that employment.

And on that note, a number of the questions that we've received prior to today's session and during the session itself from the audience had to do with those challenges to employment. And I wonder if you might have more thoughts.

Eli, you described how you heard about Shekel model. You described about how you began this particular program at Mobileye, and Roni supporting the program and your involvement. Do you have broader thoughts about how an individual on the autism spectrum, with various supports, perhaps, of their families, of social workers, might go about finding employment, reaching that challenge of getting a job, which they are often so competent at doing?

[RONI VISTUCH] Yes, let me start. I think that nowadays, there is-- we are very open to other job opportunities, right? When I was studying in the 2000s, there were engineers. They were people there. Each and every one had its own occupation.

And nowadays, I'm looking at what I do, what other people do. There were no such kind of things that this was not-- I couldn't learn from it. It was an on-job training. And due to the fact that the technology is running so fast, there is a lot of opportunities going on. And we need to look into how we can engage people with disabilities, inclusion, and diversity into those jobs, because those jobs are just coming up.

So think about the work that we are doing here in Mobileye, right? The data annotation, data labeling. This is crucial for the autonomous vehicle. Looking for those specific traffic signs and traffic lights that the autonomous vehicle is unable to detect, we have to have human in the loop in order to capture those scenes and teach out the autonomous vehicle to run through them.

So those kind of jobs, we couldn't have even dreamed about them on 2000 when I learned my-- when I started my education, right? So those kind of things, data analyst and all the things that are dealing with data, we need to have people-- human in the loop that can help out, that can bring up those algorithms into life.

So I think this is something that we need to look into. This is the opportunity for those kind of people. And we need to encourage and to look into those kind of opportunities.

[SAM LEVINE] And I think that point is so well taken. What I observed at Mobileye is that Eli and his colleagues are valued at the company. They're an important, and from what I could tell as an outsider, an integral part of the company itself. Mollie and Eli, do you have further thoughts on gainful employment, on methods of ways that individuals might find those jobs?

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] I think that one huge factor here is the amount of support. I think that someone who's looking independently for a job-- speaking specifically about in Israel-- I don't know what it's like in the US-- but it's really crucial to have the support of some organization or a social worker to help figure these things out, because it really is difficult enough to find a job, and even more so if you have some sort of name or something added to it, meaning the word autism.

I think that one of my strong beliefs also in terms of how to find employment, is really that it has to also benefit the employer. Meaning a lot of people hear about our program in Mobileye and say, oh, I have a cousin, I have a son. They'd love to work at Mobileye because it's a great place to work.

And it is, and they're right. And it still has to be someone that's appropriate to work here. And so I think that before even starting that search, you have to look within yourself and say, what are things that I can do? What are things that I'm good at? And what are things that I can contribute to a workplace?

And starting from that point, you kind of are already at an advantage to turn to jobs that really could benefit from employing you. I think that's also a strong belief here, is that this isn't a charity project. This isn't-- we're doing this to feel good about giving back to the community.

These are employees who are paid for the work that they do. And there's a standard of work that needs to be done, and there's a base level of knowledge that needs to be had to work here.

And so yeah, to turn to places that you can be appropriate to fit and that you can say how you'll be able to contribute to I think is a good step in looking for employment. But it is. It's difficult.

[ELI SCHREIBER] Yeah.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

[SAM LEVINE] Abso-- so Eli, your thoughts maybe on that point that Mollie was making in particular. It's great to do good and to do well. And I refer to it sometimes as a win-win when a company is hiring someone to do the job, when a company is hiring someone who's autistic to do a job that they are well equipped to do. And what are your experiences with that, Eli? What are your thoughts on that?

[ELI SCHREIBER] Well, I don't really have a lot of experiences on it. Well, Shekel was my first real job, I'd like to say.

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] What makes you qualified for this job?

[ELI SCHREIBER] What makes me qualified? The fact that I am capable of using a computer. I know a lot of people who are not capable of using computers.

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] And you know English.

[ELI SCHREIBER] And I know English, thankfully. So I'm capable of reading what's needed.

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] Right.

[SAM LEVINE] And along those lines, some of the questions from the audience had to do with trying to identify those skills. How is it that we as a community or individuals or their families or social workers can identify some of these specific skills, some of the strengths that we refer to that individuals on the autism spectrum may have, and some of the contributions they can make to different job settings?

[ELI SCHREIBER] Well, we kind of-- we identify how we--

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] How can you identify that someone has a talent to work in a specific position?

[ELI SCHREIBER] I feel like a lot of-- well, pretty much all my friends, they talk about it. They know their strengths. They just ask them.

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] I think also to add on to that, it's not always clear immediately what someone's strength is. I think sometimes people with autism-- it's like Eli said, difficult to communicate. They're not going to necessarily be the person that comes in and says, this is what I can do. This is what I'm good at.

They might not have been given as many opportunities, so they might not know also a lot of their strengths. They don't know that they're super fast, or that they're super particular, or that they're super whatever it is. They might not know because they've never been given an opportunity.

So Shekel, for example, starts the employment process here with a six-month trial period. Six months might sound like a very long time [LAUGHS] for some people, except that that is what they've decided is the amount of time that someone with autism needs to get over the stress, and the anxiety, and the learning new things, and the transitions, and the changes, and the communication, and getting used to the day-to-day, getting to work on time, taking the bus to get here. And only after all of those things are worked through will we be able to see if this person can actually do the work or not. It might be completely different on day 1 and on day 600, for example.

And we've seen a lot of development with employees, but they might need a little bit more time. And so it might not be that you can identify someone in a crowd and say, oh, that person's really good at this. Let's take them and invest in them.

But there might be ways that you can do it in a comfortable way in terms of taking someone and saying, let's do a trial period, a training program, something like that. And through that time invested, see if someone can be a good fit.

[SAM LEVINE] Great. One of the barriers to entry when it comes to autism employment is often said to be the interview process where autistic individuals-- hate to say it, but are sometimes too honest, too open. And the interview process is often kind of a game-- and I see you're nodding your head, Eli-- where autistic individuals sometimes don't want to play that game. So what are your thoughts on trying to work through that match, to try to match the employee and to identify, as we said, and to be able to implement and to hire the person when the interview poses that barrier?

[ELI SCHREIBER] Hmm. You're definitely right. People-- people like us, we definitely like being very straightforward where we don't like lying. That is a definite fact. Also, we have other similar communication issues. At an interview, people want the interviewee to look them in the eye, right? But I have trouble with that. A lot of-- almost all of us have trouble with that. So-- where's my train of thought?

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] What happens in a situation like that if you go to an interview, you don't look them in the eyes?

[ELI SCHREIBER] I feel like they wouldn't want to hire us. Why would they? We're-- they might feel like we're not team players, which is a huge-- which would be a big problem in high tech. I don't know what we could do. Mollie?

[MOLLIE GOLDSTEIN] I can say from my experience that I've done-- with a few different HR managers that I know personally who have turned to me to hire people with autism, I've done prep for them, preparation, which is taking the things that Eli said and saying what to expect in an interview with someone with autism. They may not look you in the eyes. They may seem uncomfortable. They may not be able to think on the spot, and to prepare the interviewer for what might be.

Again, this kind of ties into the training program for managers as well. There needs to be prep done on the side of neurotypical workers in order to create an environment that is inclusive for people with autism. It's not only the job of someone with autism to adapt to be a good employee, but the space also needs to create an environment that can support them. So it has to come from both sides.

[RONI VISTUCH] I'd like to jump in and-- jump in and relate to this topic. So this is yet another advantage of the fact that we have a person like Mollie or someone within the team that is familiar with the work and can help us bring up the right people, because she-- or people like her in the organization that know the jobs and know the people can basically do the match, right? If I was sitting in front of those people, I was troubled by the fact that they were unable to interact.

But Mollie and people like those are looking through this, and they are able to say, all right. We have a job to do. Those people will able to do it, although they are not communicating in a way that we are-- that we are used to. So this is yet another advantage of having those kind of people in the organization.

And I think that nowadays, the organization are starting to realize that if they want to really hire people with disabilities, they need to have these kind of people within the organization, not only to find those people, but also, as Mollie said, help out other managers that are in interaction with people with disabilities.

[SAM LEVINE] Absolutely. Very well said. And the time has flown by. We are nearing the end of the hour. So I just want to take this opportunity once again to thank Mollie, Eli, and Roni, to thank Lihi Lapid, to thank Dr. Kadish, thank Nahum Twersky for organizing the event. Dr. Kadish and the final word.

[ALAN KADISH] It's been fascinating hearing everyone's experience, and I'm thrilled that the program's working well. And it's great to have met all of you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[TEXT] Touro Talks, Touro University, touro.edu/tourotalks

[MUSIC FADES]