This 2025–26 school year marks the point at which conversations about artificial intelligence have become an increasingly common part of Jewish educational life. In my technology strategy role at The Jewish Education Project, I have heard people asking questions about what AI makes new, including what it changes, disrupts, or replaces. Yet what really stands out most to me is how clearly this moment is exposing what has long been assumed.

The speed with which educators are turning to AI tools is not only about curiosity or innovation. It also reveals something about the conditions under which Jewish education already operates. When a teacher types a prompt into a general AI platform to generate a lesson, or when a school leader drafts an AI policy without clear guidance from the field, those choices say something important. They show how much of the daily work of deciding what to teach, how to teach it, and how to adapt it has long rested with individual educators and leaders. AI did not create that reality. It simply makes it harder to ignore.

For years, Jewish resource providers have worked to address this by creating and distributing strong educational content. Lesson plans, curricula, source sheets, and toolkits have been thoughtfully designed and widely shared. That work remains valuable—it has expanded access and preserved important voices. But it also shaped an ecosystem optimized for producing resources as finished products, leaving educators to adapt them on their own.

Those patterns point to deeper assumptions that have shaped Jewish educational work for decades. We have often operated as if producing strong content was the primary task, trusting that educators would adapt it to their classrooms and communities. Because AI can now generate content instantly, it disrupts that arrangement. It shifts attention away from the content itself and toward the judgment required to shape it. In doing so, it raises an uncomfortable question: who is responsible for ensuring that Jewish learning remains coherent, grounded, and trustworthy when the tools generating it are widely available and largely unbounded?

In practice, educators need something more flexible. They need resources that align with their actual learning environments, respond to the many needs of their learners, and adjust to their time and resource constraints. AI makes the difference unmistakable. It exposes the gap between treating resources as nouns and experiencing them as verbs. For centuries, the transmission of Jewish knowledge was guided by recognized authorities, scholars and teachers who served as stewards of tradition. The digital age has already begun to reshape that dynamic. Google and Wikipedia changed how people access information; AI accelerates the shift further, generating answers without clear proof or accountability. The question of who holds authority over Jewish knowledge is no longer theoretical.

When that gap goes unaddressed, the effects are practical. Educators will use the tools that help them most quickly, like ChatGPT, even if those tools are not grounded in shared Jewish knowledge or aligned with standards of accuracy. Over time, this can lead to inconsistency in how texts are interpreted, how history is presented, and how sensitive topics are framed. It can also increase the pressure on individual teachers to sort through accuracy and nuance on their own. Without intentional infrastructure, planning for Jewish learning risks drifting toward whichever platform offers the smoothest experience rather than the most thoughtful foundation.

Jewish education has encountered moments like this before. When social media began shaping how young people encounter information and form identity, its influence spread quickly. In many communities, conversations about boundaries, guidance, and shared standards came later. Schools and youth programs often responded on their own, creating policies or holding discussions without a broader framework to guide them. A more coordinated response might have included timely action research, shared guidance and coordinated responsibility across institutions. AI now presents a similar moment, moving faster than our shared systems for responding to it.

An educator preparing a lesson on Zionism, the history of the State of Israel, or Torah interpretation can now generate a polished outline in seconds. Depending on the tool used, that outline may reflect careful scholarship, subtle bias, or outright inaccuracy. To a busy teacher, the difference may not be immediately obvious. The question is not whether educators should experiment with and utilize these tools. Many already are. The question is whether the field will help shape the conditions under which they are used.

At The Jewish Education Project, this question has shaped how we are thinking about the future of The Jewish Educator Portal. Since its inception, The Portal’s purpose has been to share curated, high-quality resources from trusted partners across the field. That purpose is still important today. But as educators increasingly turn to general AI tools, it is not enough to simply host content. We have begun exploring how AI can be integrated into The Portal in ways that allow educators to generate and adapt lessons while drawing from reliable Jewish sources already within the ecosystem. The goal is to help ground their work in trusted content rather than leaving educators to navigate unbounded platforms on their own. This is not about restricting access or limiting innovation. It is about ensuring that openness is paired with reliability, and that educators experimenting with new tools can do so within an ecosystem that supports accuracy and depth.

In recent months, several AI-powered platforms have emerged claiming to serve as Jewish learning companions, chavruta partners, or Jewish educator tools. Their rapid appearance signals real demand. It also reveals something important. A tool may present itself as ‘Jewish’ in theme or interface, but without drawing from structured, reliable Jewish sources, it often remains little more than a general language model with a new label.

Organizations that already steward significant archives of Jewish knowledge have a unique responsibility in this moment. Sefaria offers a compelling example. With its vast, carefully structured corpus of primary Jewish texts, it has been exploring how that foundation can serve as a trusted source layer for AI-enabled learning—not only within its own platform, but in ways that can support others. This posture reflects a shift from building isolated tools toward strengthening shared knowledge infrastructure. When organizations collaborate in this way, they help ensure that experimentation with AI remains anchored in the richness and integrity of Jewish tradition.

Relationship, interpretation, and learning in community should remain at the heart of Jewish education. They are the old – the trusted-tried-and-true methods that have ensured the passing of peoplehood from one generation to the next. AI should not replace those foundations. It does, however, test whether the systems surrounding those methods are strong enough to support them. Technology will continue to advance. The question is whether institutions, platforms, and funders will invest in building the work of research, field guidance, standards of trust, shared environments that serve Jewish learning and protect it from distortion. In that sense, this moment is not primarily about innovation. It is about design.

AI is a mirror, reflecting the assumptions embedded in our systems and the seriousness of our commitments.  If we use it intentionally to strengthen the structures that sustain flexible and learner-centered planning, it can deepen what is already at the heart of our work. If we allow convenience to shape the field by default, it will do that instead. The decisive factor will not be the promise of new tools, but whether we are disciplined enough to design around what we already know matters most. This, of course, will require more than new tools. It will require leaders to rethink how they support educators, not just with content, but with ongoing guidance, shared standards, and collaborative infrastructure.

At The Jewish Education Project, we are putting this into practice by developing AI-powered tools that will transform how educators experience The Jewish Educator Portal, grounded in trusted sources. Shared standards, however, cannot be built alone. We are working to convene a coalition of Jewish educational content partners to do this work together, and we invite others to join us.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)