RSS
How students and teachers feel about AI in the Jewish classroom
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — ChatGPT. Google AI. Microsoft Azure. Scribe. Dall-E2 – all different names for generative artificial intelligence software that is forcing educators to examine how technology affects students’ lives. Jewish educators and rabbis are going a step further and looking at AI through a Jewish lens and considering its effects on the overall Jewish educational experiences.
“The Torah tells us that we’re made in the image of God, so how could AI or Chat GPT and that sort of realm reflect the divine image?” said Rabbi Erin Binder, a leader of the religious school and youth leader at Rockdale Temple in Cincinnati, Ohio, told JTA. “Because there’s no sense of God or spirituality or relationship or connection in the world of AI.”
This relationship between God and Jewish education is just part of the debate over whether AI belongs in Jewish learning institutions. Educators worry that students will use AI as a shortcut to real problem-solving, or that typing a prompt into a website will undermine the traditional face-to-face learning of the Jewish study hall.
Generative artificial intelligence technology generates answers to questions by culling large sets of data, then creating a response — anything from an essay to a painting to an equation to a line of computer code — by learning from patterns and mimicking human-like responses. It’s become a resource for students who need to complete assignments — sometimes as a helpful research tool, and sometimes as a cheat. For Jewish educators who consider the student-teacher relationship as a key part of studying rabbinic literature, AI poses a disruption to Jewish culture and traditions.
While Rockdale’s Binder has used AI to create summer merchandise logo ideas to place on sunglasses for her students, she does not trust it in a learning setting — especially when it comes to students’ preparing their b’mitvah and d’var Torah speeches. “I don’t know that it has a place in a learning setting for young people,” said Binder. “Because part of what we want them to do is to think creatively and to come to these ideas on their own.”
Student-teacher Noam Lahyna works with first- to third-graders at Adeth Israel Congregation’s religious school in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Noam Lahynai)
She has not yet spoken to her students about the use of AI in the synagogue setting. She trusts her students understand that AI can assist or inspire, but would not fulfill the purpose of their task to teach about the Torah.
This is not the view all students take, however. Maya Jaffee, a teen congregant at Rockdale Temple, sees how AI could be an extension of her Judaic education. The “pursuit of knowledge is what Judaism is all about,” Jaffee, 16, said. She hasn’t used AI yet but hasn’t ruled it out. “I think it would just help me deepen my Jewish identity, deepen in a powerful way,” she said. Jaffee is thinking about using AI to help her include more prayers in her day, as there are limited resources to support her that are not based in Christianity.
When JTA asked ChatGPT to create a prayer schedule, it provided five prayers that could be used throughout the day, including the times to say each prayer and the reason each prayer is said. The AI advised the user that observant Jews may follow different customs and more accurate information would be better found from a religious authority or a local synagogue.
Other students believe that AI will have little impact specific to the Jewish community. Eden Kraus, 15, another teen congregant at Rockdale Temple, heard about AI being used in her synagogue when a teacher was absent and the substitute needed to make a last-minute lesson plan for their students. Kraus was not part of that classroom, but sees the value of AI as a tool for teachers. Otherwise, Kraus, who attends a public school, doesn’t feel any impact at her Jewish education since her religious school does not assign writing or homework.
School administrators across the United States have implemented changes in their classrooms to ensure students use AI with integrity, as well as safely. Rachel Lebwohl, technology director at The Leffell School, a Jewish day school in Hartsdale, New York, said her school created forms and policies for the 2023-24 school year, to set expectations and safety regulations for students using AI.
Students over 13 are asked to sign a Responsible Use Agreement statement that quotes a passage from the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a: “That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” The form says that academic excellence requires students to value their learning as well as their critical and creative thinking abilities. Under those terms, students will not use AI platforms for academic assignments without permission from teachers. It also states that if using AI in the classroom, students will fact-check all information they receive and understand that AIs are prone to errors and misinformation.
Younger students are restricted from AI entirely.
“One thing about Jewish education is that you have a beit midrash kind of concept and you have one-on-one learning. And I think that is human-to-human at its best,” said The Leffell School’s Lebwohl. Beit midrash, or study hall, emphasizes learning classic texts in pairs and group settings. “I would never want to see that become diluted because there is technology out there that looks and feels like it is equivalent,” she said.
However, education professional Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath sees the potential of AI to enhance Jewish education. As senior director of Knowledge, Ideas and Learning at the New York-based Jewish Education Project, she encourages educators to embrace AI. The connection between the two was the focus of last spring’s Jewish Futures Conference, which she runs.
Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath at the Jewish Futures Conference last spring, which focused on AI in Jewish education. (Courtesy)
“I think we’re at a really exciting moment where Jewish education is seeing all the possibilities that AI can offer,” she said. She suggests teachers explore how AIs could help teachers run their classrooms more efficiently.
Vinokor-Meinrath leans into the teaching moments AI can provide. When she asked an AI graphics generator to show her a Jewish woman, it provided her with a stereotypical image of a woman with curly brown hair and a large nose. She considers this a chance to talk about the powers of stereotypes and how current algorithms, often based on real-world biases, see Jewish women, and what could be done to change the way AI perceives and provides images about the Jewish community.
“When we think about how technology is learning the ways of the world and what it means to look Jewish and to be Jewish, what do we have to do to be able to think critically when we use it and not just take what an artificial intelligence says Jewish looks like at face value?” Vinokor-Meinrath said.
Student-teacher Noam Lahynai, 15, has not seen the effects of AI during her work with first- to third-graders at Adeth Israel Congregation’s religious school in Cincinnati, Ohio. Due to their age, they have limited access to the internet. However, Lahynai has told her students about the expectation that they not use online tools such as Google on their Hebrew assignments; this rule extends into using AIs. She sees AI as a tool to enhance current learning and understanding, but not as an exclusive tool for learning. “I think that people should think about it as a tool to help expand understanding,” she said, while remaining aware that “it might not give all the information and everything that they need.”
Lahynai’s students have not used AIs in her class, however she has seen a camp peer relying on AIs to create his b’nai mitzvah speech. Last June, while at camp, Lahynai and other campers noticed that a b’nai mitzvah speech by a fellow camper sounded impersonal. Later when the camper was questioned by peers, he confessed to using AI to create his speech. Camp administrators and staff did not give any form of repercussion to the camper.
Lahynai saw this moment as impersonal and lazy, feeling that the camper had been disrespectful for turning to AI to write his speech. “He didn’t take the time to think about the meaning behind it,” she says. “He kind of like disrespected the whole thing.”
Despite the potential for abuse, Vinokor-Meinrath remains upbeat about the effects the technology will have on the Jewish educational community. “So much of what Jewish education looks like today was designed for a previous generation that we’ve in some ways been able to adapt and update,” she said. “When we think about the Jewish future, we’re really trying to plan for tomorrow’s learners today. And I think AI is a tremendous way to think about tomorrow, today.”
—
The post How students and teachers feel about AI in the Jewish classroom appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Down and Out in Paris and London
The Oxford Circus station in London’s Underground metro. Photo: Pixabay
JNS.org – In my previous column, I wrote about the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Paris at the hands of three boys just one year older than her, who showered her with antisemitic abuse as they carried out an act of violation reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel. This week, my peg is another act of violence—one less horrifying and less traumatic, but which similarly suggests that the writing may be on the wall for the Jews in much of Europe.
Last week, a group of young Jewish boys who attend London’s well-regarded Hasmonean School was assaulted by a gang of antisemitic thugs. The attack occurred at Belsize Park tube station on the London Underground, in a neighborhood with a similar demographic and sensibility to New York’s Upper West Side, insofar as it is home to a large, long-established Jewish population with shops, cafes and synagogues serving that community. According to the mother of one of the Jewish boys, an 11-year-old, the gang “ran ahead of my son and kicked one of his friends to the ground. They were trying to push another kid onto the tracks. They got him as far the yellow line.” When the woman’s son bravely tried to intervene to protect his friends, he was chased down and elbowed in the face, dislodging a tooth. “Get out of the city, Jew!” the gang told him.
Since the attack, her son has had trouble sleeping. “My son is very shaken. He couldn’t sleep last night. He said ‘It’s not fair. Why do they do this to us?’” she disclosed. “We love this country,” she added, “and we participate and we contribute, but now we’re being singled out in exactly the same way as Jews were singled out in 1936 in Berlin. And for the first time in my life. I am terrified of using the tube. What’s going on?”
The woman and her family may not be in London long enough to find out. According to The Jewish Chronicle, they are thinking of “fleeing” Britain—not a verb we’d hoped to encounter again in a Jewish context after the mass murder we experienced during the previous century. But here we are.
When I was a schoolboy in London, I had a history teacher who always told us that no two situations are exactly alike. “Comparisons are odious, boys,” he would repeatedly tell the class. That was an insight I took to heart, and I still believe it to be true. There are structural reasons that explain why the 2020s are different from the 1930s in significant ways. For one thing, European societies are more affluent and better equipped to deal with social conflicts and economic strife than they were a century ago. Laws, too, are more explicit in the protections they offer to minorities, and more punishing of hate crimes and hate speech. Perhaps most importantly, there is a Jewish state barely 80 years old which all Jews can make their home if they so desire.
Therein lies the rub, however. Since 1948, Israel has allowed Jews inside and outside the Jewish state to hold their heads high and to feel as though they are a partner in the system of international relations, rather than a vulnerable, subjugated group at the mercy of the states where we lived as an often hated minority. Israel’s existence is the jewel in the crown of Jewish emancipation, sealing what we believed to be our new status, in which we are treated as equals, and where the antisemitism that plagued our grandparents and great-grandparents has become taboo.
If Israel represents the greatest achievement of the Jewish people in at least 100 years, small wonder that it has become the main target of today’s reconstituted antisemites. And if one thing has been clear since the atrocities by Hamas on Oct. 7, it’s that Israel’s existence is not something that Jews—with the exception of that small minority of anti-Zionists who do the bidding of the antisemites and who echo their ignorance and bigotry—are willing to compromise on. What’s changed is that it is increasingly difficult for Jews to remain in the countries where they live and express their Zionist sympathies at the same time. We are being attacked because of these sympathies on social media, at demonstrations and increasingly in the streets by people with no moral compass, who regard our children as legitimate targets. Hence, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that while the 2020s may not be the 1930s, they certainly feel like the 1930s.
And so the age-old question returns: Should Jews, especially those in Europe, where they confront the pincer movement of burgeoning Muslim populations and a resurgent far-left in thrall to the Palestinian cause, stay where they are, or should they up sticks and move to Israel? Should we be thinking, given the surge in antisemitism of the past few months, of giving up on America as well? I used to have a clear view of all this. Aliyah is the noblest of Zionist goals and should be encouraged, but I always resisted the notion that every Jew should live in Israel—firstly, because a strong Israel needs vocal, confident Diaspora communities that can advocate for it in the corridors of power; and secondly, because moving to Israel should ideally be a positive act motivated by love, not a negative act propelled by fear.
My view these days isn’t as clear as it was. I still believe that a strong Israel needs a strong Diaspora, and I think it’s far too early to give up on the United States—a country where Jews have flourished as they never did elsewhere in the Diaspora. Yet the situation in Europe increasingly reminds me of the observation of the Russian Zionist Leo Pinsker in “Autoemancipation,” a doom-laden essay he wrote in 1882, during another dark period of Jewish history: “We should not persuade ourselves that humanity and enlightenment will ever be radical remedies for the malady of our people.” The antisemitism we are dealing with now presents itself as “enlightened,” based on boundless sympathy for an Arab nation allegedly dispossessed by Jewish colonists. When our children are victimized by it, this antisemitism ceases to be a merely intellectual challenge, and becomes a matter of life and death. As Jews and as human beings, we are obliged to choose life—which, in the final analysis, when nuance disappears and terror stalks us, means Israel.
The post Down and Out in Paris and London first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Hamas Says No Major Changes to Ceasefire Proposal After ‘Vague Wording’ Amendments by US
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., June 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz/File Photo
i24 News – A senior official from the terrorist organization Hamas called the changes made by the US to the ceasefire proposal “vague” on Saturday night, speaking to the Arab World Press.
The official said that the US promises to end the war are without a clear Israeli commitment to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and agree to a permanent ceasefire.
US President Joe Biden made “vague wording” changes to the proposal on the table, although it amounted to an insufficient change in stance, he said.
“The slight amendments revolve around the very nature of the Israeli constellation, and offer nothing new to bridge the chasm between what is proposed and what is acceptable to us,” he said.
“We will not deviate from our three national conditions, the most important of which is the end of the war and the complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip,” he added.
Another Hamas official said that the amendments were minor and applied to only two clauses.
US President Joe Biden made the amendments to bridge gaps amid an impasse between Israel and Hamas over a hostage deal mediated by Qatar and Egypt.
Hamas’s demands for a permanent ceasefire have been met with Israeli leaders vowing that the war would not end until the 120 hostages still held in Gaza are released and the replacement of Hamas in control of the Palestinian enclave.
The post Hamas Says No Major Changes to Ceasefire Proposal After ‘Vague Wording’ Amendments by US first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Sacred Spies?
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – How far away is theory from practice? “In theory,” a new system should work. But it doesn’t always, does it? How many job applicants ticked all the boxes “theoretically,” but when it came to the bottom line they didn’t get the job done?
And how many famous people were better theorists than practitioners?
The great Greek philosopher Aristotle taught not only philosophy but virtue and ethics. The story is told that he was once discovered in a rather compromised moral position by his students. When they asked him how he, the great Aristotle, could engage in such an immoral practice, he had a clever answer: “Now I am not Aristotle.”
A similar tale is told of one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell. He, too, expounded on ethics and morality. And like Aristotle, he was also discovered in a similarly morally embarrassing situation.
When challenged, his rather brilliant answer was: “So what if I teach ethics? People teach mathematics, and they’re not triangles!”
This idea is relevant to this week’s Torah portion, Shelach, which contains the famous story of Moses sending a dozen spies on a reconnaissance mission to the Land of Israel. The mission goes sour. It was meant to be an intelligence-gathering exercise to see the best way of conquering Canaan. But it resulted in 10 of the 12 spies returning with an utterly negative report of a land teeming with giants and frightening warriors who, they claimed, would eat us alive. “We cannot ascend,” was their hopeless conclusion.
The people wept and had second thoughts about the Promised Land, and God said, indeed, you will not enter the land. In fact, for every day of the spies’ disastrous journey, the Israelites would languish a year in the wilderness. Hence, the 40-year delay in entering Israel. The day of their weeping was Tisha B’Av, which became a day of “weeping for generations” when both our Holy Temples were destroyed on that same day and many other calamities befell our people throughout history.
And the question resounds: How was it possible that these spies, all righteous noblemen, handpicked personally by Moses for the job, should so lose the plot? How did they go so wrong, so off-course from the Divine vision?
Naturally, there are many commentaries with a variety of explanations. To me personally, the most satisfying one I’ve found comes from a more mystical source.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, in his work Likkutei Torah, explains it thus: The error of the spies was less blatant than it seems. Their rationale was, in fact, a “holy” one. They actually meant well. The Israelites had been beneficiaries of the mighty miracles of God during their sojourn in the wilderness thus far. God had been providing for them supernaturally with manna from heaven every day, water that flowed from the “Well of Miriam,” Clouds of Glory that smoothed the roads and even dry cleaned their clothes. In the wilderness, the people were enjoying a taste of heaven itself. All their material needs were taken care of miraculously. With no material distractions, they were able to live a life of spiritual bliss, of refined existence and could devote themselves fully to Torah, prayer and spiritual experiences.
But the spies knew that as soon as the Israelites entered the Promised Land, the manna would cease to fall and they would have to till the land, plow, plant, knead, bake and make a living by the sweat of their brow. No more bread from heaven, but bread from the earth. Furthermore, they would have to battle the Canaanite nations for the land. What chance would they then have to devote themselves to idyllic, spiritual pursuits?
So, the spies preferred to remain in the wilderness rather than enter the land. Why be compelled to resort to natural and material means of surviving and living a wholly physical way of life when they could enjoy spiritual ecstasy and paradise undisturbed? Why get involved in the “rat race”?
But, of course, as “holy” and spiritual as their motivation may have been, the spies were dead wrong.
The journey in the wilderness was meant to be but a stepping stone to the ultimate purpose of the Exodus from Egypt: entering the Promised Land and making it a Holy Land. God has plenty of angels in heaven who exist in a pure, spiritual state. The whole purpose of creation was to have mortal human beings, with all their faults and frailties, to make the physical world a more spiritual place. To bring heaven down to earth.
While their argument was rooted in piety, for the spies to opt out of the very purpose of creation was to miss the whole point. What are we here for? To sit in the lotus position and meditate, or to get out there and change the world? Yes, the spies were “holy,” but theirs was an escapist holiness.
The Torah is not only a book of wisdom; it is also a book of action. Torah means instruction. It teaches us how to live our lives, meaningfully and productively in the pursuit of God’s intended desire to make our world a better, more Godly place. This we do not only by study and prayer, the “theoretical” part of Torah but by acts of goodness and kindness, by mitzvot performed physically in the reality of the material world. Theory alone leaves us looking like Aristotle with his pants down.
Yes, it is a cliché but a well-worn truth: Torah is a “way of life.”
The post Sacred Spies? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.