RSS
10 years and 318 million words later, Sefaria brings Torah study into the digital age

(JTA) — When I spoke earlier this week with Sara Wolkenfeld, chief learning officer at Sefaria, she referred to a “story in the Talmud” about Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah. I wasn’t familiar with Elazar or the story, so I clicked over to Sefaria, the digital library of Jewish texts that this year is celebrating its 10th anniversary.
With one search I found a helpful list of sources featuring Elazar posted by a London-based rabbi. Elazar’s digital paper trail included stories about him in the Passover Haggadah, the Mishnah (a Jewish legal text compiled around the year 200 C.E.) and various tractates of the Talmud, the compendium of rabbinic law and lore that, when printed and bound, fills over 70 dense volumes.
I quickly searched another term Wolkenfeld had mentioned, and there was the story (Berakhot 28a:1-4), in its original context and English translation: When Elazar took over the study hall, they added 400 benches (some say 700). A commentary I was able to access with another click told me why: “to accommodate the crowds that sought admission,” according to Abraham Cohen, an editor of the Soncino translation of the Talmud, published in Great Britain in the early 20th century.
One more click, under “Topics,” brought me to another page of sources explaining that Elazar “was among the scholars in Yavneh at the time of Rabban Gamliel. When the Sanhedrin temporarily deposed Rabban Gamliel, they installed R. Elazar as his replacement.”
If you don’t often try to find a needle of information in a haystack of Jewish text, you may not appreciate how difficult this would have been, especially for an amateur like me, without a tool like Sefaria. Founded by Google alum Brett Lockspeiser and journalist Joshua Foer to provide what its current CEO, Daniel Septimus, calls “free and unfettered access to the Jewish canon to learners the world over,” Sefaria has become an essential tool in schools, yeshivas, university classrooms, rabbis’ studies and the homes of anyone interested in accessing the massive, ever-growing corpus of Jewish text. (Septimus is a member of the board of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent company.)
Its offerings of more than 3,300 texts add up to some 318 million words (75 million in translation). Sefaria offers 20 different Torah translations in English and other languages, including the brand-new, “gender-sensitive” revision of the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh. According to Wolkenfeld, the number of unique monthly users is closing in on 700,000, in 239 countries and territories. This year’s budget was $6.6 million.
Sefaria’s success has both powered and been powered by a growing democratization of Jewish learning. The page-a-day study of the Talmud, known as Daf Yomi, was once the domain of mostly haredi Orthodox men. Since the start of the latest seven-and-a-half year cycle in 2020, it has been taken up by women’s groups, queer Jews and men and women across the denominations. Hadran, a women’s Daf Yomi project, uses Sefaria in their learning. 70 Faces Media and its My Jewish Learning site have daily Daf Yomi emails that include links to Sefaria.
Sefaria wasn’t the first institution to digitize Jewish text (Bar Ilan University’s Judaic Digital Library has been available, on various platforms, for decades) but no other project went so far in making the materials free and shareable.
“Sefaria demonstrates the power of new open-source tools,” Heidi Lerner, a librarian at Stanford University Libraries, wrote in 2020. “For the first time, a platform has been developed that will greatly widen the availability of Jewish religious texts in the public domain and make accessible and expand the centuries of ongoing scholarly conversations and discourse about these works.”
Sefaria is marking the 10-year anniversary of its database with a “Global Community Torah” project. Users can help create a digital Torah letter by letter and receive a series of emails about the weekly Torah portion. Wolkenfeld, who before coming to Sefaria in 2013 was the director of education at Princeton University’s Hillel, told me the emails are “designed to be a series of scaffolded links so that you can get inside the text.”
Wolkenfeld, who is also a Rabbinic Fellow at the David Hartman Center, studied Talmud and Jewish law at several institutions of Jewish learning in Israel and America, including Midreshet Lindenbaum, Drisha, Nishmat and Beit Morasha.
Ahead of this weekend’s celebration of Simchat Torah, the holiday marking the completion of one Torah-reading cycle and the start of a new one, we spoke about the future of Torah study in the digital age, how Sefaria is expanding the canon and the impact Jewish learning is having outside the classroom.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
You walk into the Sefaria office in 2013. What was happening at the time?
There was no office. There’s never been an office. There was me and our co-founders, and the 1917 JPS. And maybe we had the Talmud in the original, maybe Maimonides in the original. The site was already up when I was hired, a prototype kind of thing. There was a real spirit of volunteerism, we got people to experiment with the site and translate texts and do all kinds of things. And when I went out into the world and told people what I was doing a lot of people were excited and a lot of people thought we were crazy and that we would never kind of make any headway. And I think it’s been fun to see those same people use Sefaria on a regular basis. I also hear from people who say “Oh, I was dreaming about something like Sefaria for years before it happened.”
After 10 years, what are your measures of success?
At the beginning Sefaria was especially attractive for people who were already studying Jewish texts on a regular basis. Now we know that fully a third of our North American users don’t have a regular practice of studying Jewish texts, and two-thirds say that they require scaffolding — translation and contextual information — in order to engage with these texts, and Sefaria supplies that.
The interface of the Steinsaltz Talmud on Sefaria includes line-by-line translation, along with links to commentaries and references to a range of Jewish sources, which appear in a separate vertical. (JTA illustration)
We also know that over half of our North American users are younger than 45 years old. We’re reaching so many young people. We had a recent user analysis completed by Rosov Consulting telling us that engagement with Sefaria enhances a sense of connection to the Jewish people and a sense of confidence to engage in Jewish practice. That was the dream at the beginning.
Anecdotally, so many people have heard of Sefaria. I spent yesterday in a local pluralistic Jewish day school and gave out Sefaria stickers and you would have thought it was like getting swag from a rock concert. All of the kids know Sefaria, all the kids use Sefaria. Wherever I am, rabbis, educators, students come up to me and say, “I can’t imagine my life without Sefaria.” Rabbinical students say they are so glad they don’t have to go through rabbinical school without it. Elementary school and high school teacher students talk about how much they use it in their studies.
Why? What were you offering that didn’t exist?
We were offering free and open access, first and foremost. When I started at Sefaria, I had been on college campuses pretty continuously for a long time. I always had access [to Jewish texts and databases] through whatever institution but otherwise, it’s expensive. So free and open access is important, translations are really important and part of access is the idea that anyone who wants to can contribute to the text of our tradition. That was really the value proposition of Sefaria.
Does anyone complain in the other direction: that searching a database isn’t a substitute for the traditional way of learning Talmud — that you have to sit in the library and turn the pages and know your way around the layout of a traditional page of Talmud?
I think the Bar Ilan [Digital Library] kind of absorbed a lot of that criticism for us.
In the sense that an Orthodox university was among the first in making Jewish text available in digital form.
Yes. But I think there’s a live conversation, not a criticism or complaint, about the ways in which technology is changing what people need to know and how they’re going to know it. And people have the sense that what we’re seeing right now is probably just a drop in the bucket. What will learning look like in five years, in 10 years? The rate of change feels so fast. But Sefaria is here for that. Our mission is to bring Torah into the digital age. And we’re building the infrastructure and building the tools to allow people to do the best possible learning, given the technological tools available.
I’m told students at the Modern Orthodox Yeshiva University have their laptops open when they learn Torah, but how deep is your use in the right-wing, haredi Orthodox world, which, I know, tends to discourage the use of the internet in the first place.
Sefaria doesn’t currently have an offline platform. But we know there are people who download texts and use them so, yes, I think there’s quite a bit of downstream use by people who wouldn’t necessarily log on to Sefaria but they’re using our data in other forms. That’s also a measure of success. We want to empower as many different people as possible to create whatever they feel they need with Torah.
Our database, our code is open-source, and to the extent possible, we negotiate free and open licenses. We’re releasing data into the commons and there’s around 200 powered-by-Sefaria projects.
Do you have specific examples of people who piggyback onto the site and then create something new?
We have a “Powered by Sefaria” contest, and the first winner was Shaun Regenbaum, who co-founded the GT Jewish Digital Humanities Lab at Georgia Tech and has been working on a Talmud ChatGPT app drawing on our API [application programming interface]. Someone from a new website called Mishnah.org sent us a note saying that they created a free service that allows people to create digital Mishnah charts for shloshim and yahrtzeits [for mourners looking for the appropriate Jewish texts to study on those days] and they use our API for the Hebrew and English text. The Orthodox Union’s All Daf web app uses the English text from Sefaria.
Who are your target and potential audiences, and how much knowledge do you presume they need to have to enter the site?
We think a lot about both enhancing learning for the people who are already learning or would be learning anyway, as well as people who might not have the background, the skills or just the access. And we are actively working to build more and more pathways into the texts so that people without that background can come and be a part of the conversation. When it comes to kids, I say that tech savviness and not text savviness is the best predictor of success on the site. We anticipate that Sefaria will be able to reach people who just have a question, they just have an idea, they’re just curious whether there’s Jewish wisdom on a question or a subject that they’re interested in.
We have a new project called the Digital Torah Encyclopedia — the name is probably a placeholder — and we want to make it easier and easier for people to navigate Jewish wisdom topically. Currently, if you search for a book about Shabbat in the Jewish canon, you will most likely come across Tractate Shabbat [in the Talmud] which is a horrible way to learn about Shabbat if you don’t know anything about Shabbat. So we are building these pages that provide both a little bit of an introduction to whatever the topic is, and then scaffold the learning experience for numerous related texts. This is a way to draw people inside the original texts themselves and give them the tools they need to explore those texts firsthand.
There’s a story in the Talmud about when Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah took charge of the Beit Midrash [study hall] and they added 400 benches to welcome more people. We see ourselves as adding millions and millions of seats to the Beit Midrash worldwide.
The classical Jewish canon is overwhelmingly male. I know over the last couple of years you’ve added diverse voices, like essays on the weekly Torah portion by the contemporary Israeli scholar Michal Tikochinsky. Tell me a little bit about the other modern sources you’re adding, by women like Tikochinsky and other under-represented groups.
Let’s face it, a lot of people are going to feel more drawn in and feel more welcomed if they can read a voice that sounds like it came from 2023 rather than 1917. I picked 1917 because that’s when the original JPS translation [of the Hebrew Bible] was published and it’s hard to feel embraced by the Bible when you read that text. And similarly with diverse voices. We think it’s important that people living in 2023, in whatever community they’re in, feel that somebody is speaking to them from within their milieu, their understanding of the world.
Left to right: Daniel Septimus, CEO of Sefaria, with its co-founders, Brett Lockspeiser and Joshua Foer, in 2017. (Courtesy Sefaria)
So we are working towards more modern texts and more diverse texts. We recently announced the addition of quite a large number of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ works [the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and Modern Orthodox theologian died in 2020]. They speak to a very broad audience. We’ve also done a lot of work around adding women’s Torah to the site. We have our Word-by-Word project, which is designed to support 20 women in writing works of Torah over the course of three years, and I work on that in partnership with Dr. Erica Brown [the vice provost for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University]. There were 20 slots, and there were 121 applicants.
Besides bringing more and more content being online, what’s changed over the past 10 years as a result of Sefaria being in the world?
The content is a huge game changer. Before I worked for Sefaria, I worked at Princeton University. I remember googling to get English translations of the Talmud and carefully typing out a translation of yet another source.
But perhaps the most important thing that Sefaria offers is the interconnectivity. An analogous technological breakthrough to the digital revolution is the printing press. That made a huge difference, but the printed page has limited real estate. So if you think about a Mikraot Gedolot [a printed collection of classic rabbinic commentaries on the Bible] there’s a limit to how many commentaries you can include. And Sefaria doesn’t have that limit.
And what’s more, Sefaria can show you related texts, so that texts that have never ever been printed side by side are now in conversation with one another. That’s tremendously important to changing the ways that we think about the Jewish canon and just extends what our brains can do with these sources, because you can put older sources in conversation with newer sources and modern voices in conversation with older voices.
What’s the impact of that culturally? Do you see evidence of an impact outside the classroom?
We all benefit in different ways. I would give myself as an example, as a very East Coast, Ashkenazi Jew. I have a very rich Torah education that was somewhat limited in terms of the sources I was exposed to. My Modern Orthodox high school in New Jersey did not teach us Kabbalistic [Jewish mystical] sources. It did not emphasize Sephardic sources. It wasn’t a thing. And so I think it expands my horizons. It expands my understanding of the Jewish people and who we are.
There are also people who learned X number of sources, and all those sources were boring and not exciting to them. And suddenly they’re on Sefaria and they see well, there’s a totally different thing nobody ever told me about. I was in a fifth-grade classroom once, and a student clicked and found a modern article, and she said, “Oh, you mean people are still writing about the subject?” Those moments of discovery are hugely important.
They can also be threatening to some people too, I imagine.
There are definitely people who would rather, for themselves as learners or for their students or their colleagues, stay only with a few familiar sources. I don’t think that that is a problem specific to Sefaria. And the great thing about the internet is you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.
—
The post 10 years and 318 million words later, Sefaria brings Torah study into the digital age appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
US Clamps Sanctions on Israel-bashing UN Rights Monitor Albanese

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
The Trump administration has imposed sweeping sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, citing the UN official’s lengthy record of singling out Israel for condemnation.
In a post on X, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions under a February executive order targeting those who “prompt International Criminal Court (ICC) action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.” He accused Albanese of waging “political and economic warfare” against both nations and asserted that “such efforts will no longer be tolerated.”
“Today I am imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt [International Criminal Court] action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives,” Rubio announced on X/Twitter.
“Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated,” declared the Trump administration’s top foreign affairs official. “We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense.”
Rubio concluded: “The United States will continue to take whatever actions we deem necessary to respond to lawfare and protect our sovereignty and that of our allies.”
The decision to impose sanctions on Albanese marks an escalation in the ongoing feud between the White House and the United Nations over Israel. The Trump administration has repeatedly accused the UN and Albanese of unfairly targeting Israel and mischaracterizing the Jewish state’s conduct in Gaza.
Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has held the position of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories since 2022. The position authorizes her to monitor and report on alleged “human rights violations” by Israel against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Last week, Albanese issued a scathing report accusing companies of helping Israel maintain a so-called “genocide economy.” She called on the companies to cut off economic ties with Israel and warned that they might be guilty of “complicity” in the so-called “genocide” in Gaza.
Critics of Albanese have long accused her of exhibiting an excessive anti-Israel bias, calling into question her fairness and neutrality.
Albanese has an extensive history of using her role at the UN to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize Hamas’ attacks on the Jewish state.
In the months following the Palestinian terrorist group’s atrocities across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Albanese accused the Jewish state of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinian people in revenge for the attacks and circulated a widely derided and heavily disputed report alleging that 186,000 people had been killed in the Gaza war as a result of Israeli actions.
The action comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington, where he has received a warm reception from the Trump administration. Netanyahu has been meeting with US officials to discuss next steps in the ongoing Gaza military operation.
Gideon Sa’ar, Minister of Foreign Affairs for Israel, commended the Rubio announcement with his own post on X/Twitter, exclaiming: “A clear message. Time for the UN to pay attention!”
The post US Clamps Sanctions on Israel-bashing UN Rights Monitor Albanese first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Hardball: Trump Administration Reports Harvard to Accreditor Over Antisemitism Allegations

US President Donald Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. Photo: Kevin Lamarque via Reuters Connect.
The Trump administration escalated its showdown against Harvard University on Wednesday, reporting the institution to its accreditor for alleged civil rights violations resulting from its weak response to reports of antisemitic bullying, discrimination, and harassment following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre across southern Israel.
The US Department of Education (DOE) announced the action on Wednesday. Citing Harvard’s admitted failure to treat antisemitism as seriously as it treated others forms of hatred in the past, the DOE called on the New England Commission of Higher Education to review and, potentially, revoke its accreditation — a designation which qualifies Harvard for federal funding and attests to the quality of the educational services its provides.
“Accrediting bodies play a significant role in preserving academic integrity and a campus culture conducive to truth seeking and learning,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Part of that is ensuring students are safe on campus and abiding by federal laws that guarantee educational opportunities to all students. By allowing anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination to persist unchecked on its campus, Harvard University has failed in its obligation to students, educators, and American taxpayers.”
The DOE, McMahon added, “expects the New England Commission of Higher Education to enforce its policies and practices, and to keep the Department fully informed of its efforts to ensure that Harvard is in compliance with federal law and accreditor standards.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism has acknowledged that the university administration’s handling of campus antisemitism fell well below its obligations under both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its own nondiscrimination policies.
In a 300-plus-page report, the task force compiled a comprehensive record of antisemitic incidents on Harvard’s campus in recent years — from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee’s endorsement of the Oct. 7 terrorist atrocities to an anti-Zionist faculty group’s sharing an antisemitic cartoon depicting Jews as murderers of people of color. The report identified Harvard’s past refusal to afford Jews the same protections against discrimination enjoyed by other minority groups as a key source of its problem.
Coming several weeks after President Donald Trump ordered the freeze of $2.26 billion in federal research grants and contracts for Harvard, the task force report found it was “clear” that antisemitism and anti-Israel bias have been fomented, practiced, and tolerated not only at Harvard but also within academia more widely.”
The university is now suing the federal government over the funding halt.
President Trump has spoken scathingly of Harvard, calling it, for example, an “Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institute … with students being accepted from all over the world that want to rip our Country apart” in an April post to his Truth Social platform.
In recent weeks, however, both Trump and McMahon had commended Harvard’s constructive response in negotiations over reforms the administration has asked it to implement as a precondition for restoring federal funds. The requested reforms include hiring more conservative faculty, shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] programs, and slashing the size of administrative offices tangential to the university’s central educational mission.
The administration has since changed its tone in the wake of a report by The Harvard Crimson that interim Harvard President Alan Garber has said “behind closed doors” that he has no intention of doing anything that would make Harvard more palatable to conservatives.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism issued Harvard a formal “notice of violation” of civil rights law. Charging that Harvard willfully exposed Jewish students to a flood of racist and antisemitic abuse both in and outside of the classroom, it threatened to strip whatever remains of Harvard’s federal funding.
“Failure to institute adequate changes immediately will result in the loss of all federal financial resources and continue to affect Harvard’s relationship with the federal government,” wrote the federal officials comprising the multiagency Task Force. “Harvard may of course continue to operate free of federal privileges, and perhaps such an opportunity will spur a commitment to excellence that will help Harvard thrive once again.”
In Wednesday’s announcement, US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Harvard’s conduct “forfeits the legitimacy that accreditation is designed to uphold.”
“HHS and Department of Education will actively hold Harvard accountable through sustained oversight until it restores public trust and ensures a campus free of discrimination,” he said.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Hardball: Trump Administration Reports Harvard to Accreditor Over Antisemitism Allegations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
IDF Strikes Hezbollah Sites in South Lebanon as Terror Group Pushes to Rebuild Amid US Disarmament Talks

IDF operating in southern Lebanon. Photo: IDF Spokesperson
Israeli forces uncovered and destroyed Hezbollah weapons caches in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, as a new report indicated that despite ongoing U.S.-led efforts to secure a disarmament deal, the Iran-backed group is making repeated, largely concealed attempts to rebuild its military presence in the area.
Troops carried out several operations targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon on Wednesday morning, destroying weapons depots, explosives and multibarrel launchers concealed in forested terrain, the IDF said, in violation of the November ceasefire, which requires Hezbollah to withdraw its forces 20 miles from the Israeli border.
A new report released this week by the Alma Research and Education Center found that Hezbollah is focused on rebuilding in three areas: operational deployment, weapons acquisition, and financial recovery.
“Hezbollah didn’t give up its resistance narrative and motivation,” Alma’s director, Lt. Col. (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, told The Algemeiner.
“It wants to rebuild its capabilities and infrastructures, whether it’s the villages that will be used as human shields or the military infrastructure in South Lebanon and in Lebanon in general.”
According to Zehavi, Hezbollah is attempting to return Radwan fighters to positions south of the Litani River as part of a wider plan to restore its elite forces to operational readiness. The IDF on Monday killed Radwan commander Ali Abd al-Hassan Haidar in a targeted strike. The action came hours after US Special Envoy for Syria Thomas Barrack met with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri in Beirut to discuss a long-term deal that would include an Israeli withdrawal and complete disarmament of Hezbollah.
Barrack described the Lebanese response to the proposal as positive. Later, he issued a blunt warning to Hezbollah in response to a vow by the terror group’s leader, Naim Qassem, not to lay down its arms. “If they mess with us anywhere in the world, they will have a serious problem with us,” Barrack said in an interview with Lebanese news network LBCI. “They don’t want that.”
Zehavi said it was premature to predict the outcome of the diplomatic efforts. She warned that the challenge of disarming Hezbollah remains enormous and emphasized that the Lebanese Armed Forces have not demonstrated the capability or willingness to confront the group.
“It’s too soon to be optimistic or pessimistic,” she said, noting that no firm commitments have emerged from the Beirut talks.
Hezbollah’s efforts to smuggle and manufacture weapons have been complicated by both Israeli strikes and the regional realignment over recent months. While Israeli strikes have disrupted many supply routes, according to Zehavi, Syrian authorities have intercepted far more Hezbollah-bound weapons than the Lebanese Army, which claims to have uncovered 500 arms caches but has provided no evidence.
The financial front marks the third aspect of Hezbollah’s rebuilding effort. Last week, the group halted cash payments to Shiite civilians whose homes were damaged in the war, citing liquidity problems. Zehavi attributed the shortfall to disruptions in Iran’s funding networks — an outcome of the 12-day war against the regime in Tehran — and said the constraints would likely hamper Hezbollah’s ability to compensate its base and sustain operations.
“I hope they will continue to have problems with the cash flow, that way it will be very difficult for them to recover,” she said.
The post IDF Strikes Hezbollah Sites in South Lebanon as Terror Group Pushes to Rebuild Amid US Disarmament Talks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.