The Jewish world cannot afford to leave AI education to Silicon Valley - opinion

As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms modern life, a crucial question arises for the Jewish world: who is developing the AI that will shape the future of Jewish identity and education?

While Israel is renowned as a "Start-Up Nation," its technological prowess must extend beyond commercial success to securing Jewish continuity and strengthening the bond between Israel and the Diaspora. Global Jewish education faces significant challenges, including high tuition costs and a shortage of qualified teachers. Simultaneously, many young Jews lack access to structured Jewish learning.

“

Who is building the AI that will shape the soul of the Jewish world?

These young people interact with AI daily. Without a Jewishly-shaped alternative, they may learn about their identity, Israel, and ethics from commercial AI tools optimized for efficiency or potentially biased data. The authors argue that generic AI, often built to prioritize skills and screen time, fails to capture the essence of Jewish education, which values relationships, identity, belonging, and participation in a historical conversation.

To address this, the JEDAI (Jewish Education AI) initiative is being created. It is envisioned as a shared, nonprofit technological grid governed by educators, designed to be accessible to any Jewish school, camp, or community. JEDAI aims to leverage proven AI personalization engines, like Israel's I-Teach platform, which has already shown success in Israeli schools, to provide values-aligned AI infrastructure for Jewish learning globally.

“

Our students are apprenticing into a people, a language, and a covenant. If we simply import generic AI, we risk importing pedagogies that privilege automated efficiency over the slow, vital work of dialogue, chavruta, and human formation.