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Hebrew school enrollment across US down by nearly half since 2006, report says
(JTA) — Living in Brooklyn, surrounded by synagogues and Jewish schools, Rachel Weinstein White and her husband hoped to find a place where their children could receive a Jewish education for a few hours each week.
But they knew they didn’t want to enroll at a traditional Hebrew school associated with a local synagogue. For one thing, White wasn’t interested at the time in participating in prayer services, the main offering of most congregations. Plus, her husband is Black and not Jewish, and they were not sure how well he or their children would be welcomed.
So about eight years ago, she started her own program together with a few families, setting up a cooperative and hiring a teacher in an early version of the “learning pods” that would become a pandemic fad.
“It was just this incredible, magical year,” White said. “So many people started hearing about our little class and asked to join that it became necessary to create a second class. … It just kind of grew organically from there.”
Today the school, Fig Tree, enrolls about 350 children across three locations and plans are underway to expand further. In hour-long classes on Sundays and weekday afternoons, children learn about Jewish holidays and history, engage in art and creative play, explore their local Jewish communities and learn basic Hebrew, in a program that culminates in a b’nai mitzvah year. It overlaps significantly with traditional Hebrew schools, but outside the usual setting — a synagogue classroom — that has become a cultural shorthand among American Jews for rote, uninspiring Jewish education.
That dynamic may be why Fig Tree is an outlier in a stark trend revealed in a new report: Enrollment in supplemental Jewish schools — those that students attend in addition to regular schooling in public or secular private schools — is down by nearly half over the last 15 years.
Even as the estimated number of Jewish children in the United States rose by 17% between 2000 and 2020, enrollment in Hebrew schools fell by at least 45% between 2006 and 2020, according to the report by the Jewish Education Project, a nonprofit that promotes educational innovation and supports Jewish educators in a wide array of settings.
The report identifies pockets of growth, mostly in the small number of programs like Fig Tree that operate outside of or adjacent to synagogues, and in schools operated by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement. But overall, according to the report, just 141,000 children attend supplemental Jewish schools in the United States and Canada, down from more than 230,000 in 2006 and 280,000 in 1987.
Some of the decline in Hebrew school enrollment is countered by increasing enrollment in Jewish day schools, where students study Jewish topics for at least part of every day. The number of U.S. children attending Jewish day schools has risen by roughly the same amount, 90,000, that Hebrew school enrollment has fallen since 2006, according to the report, though a significant portion of the increase stems from population growth in Orthodox communities, where the vast majority of students attend day schools.
Miriam Heller Stern, a professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who was tapped to help design the study, said the results suggest that, as with many aspects of religious life today, Hebrew school enrollment cannot be counted on as an act of obligation or tradition.
“There’s this idea that parents send their kids to Hebrew school because they went to Hebrew school and that’s a rite of passage in North America, but that may be a myth,” she said. “People don’t want to push their kids to have to do the same thing they did, necessarily, anymore.”
The report speculates about what has fueled the enrollment decline — from demographic changes to shifts in how American Jews think about countering antisemitism to increased access to Jewish learning online — and also about what has allowed some schools to thrive. It notes that all of the supplemental schools that responded to its census said their schools help children feel connected to the Jewish people.
“We believe that many factors have led to the decline in enrollment of students in supplemental schools in the last decade,” said David Bryfman, the Jewish Education Project’s CEO. “However, it’s also a myth that all supplemental schools don’t work.”
The group is planning a series of online sessions with some of the dozens of researchers and practitioners involved in the report, with one goal the sharing of success stories identified by the survey. Of the six identified in the report, a common theme is urging experiential, community-based learning. Some of the promising models explicitly position themselves as infusing Jewish content into child care, filling a pressing need for American families.
Still, it may be hard to counter the demographic realities of contemporary American Jews: Just a third of U.S. Jews in a 2020 survey said someone in their household was a member of a synagogue. That was the case even for the majority of non-Orthodox Jews who said they identified with a particular denomination, a marker of traditional engagement.
The waning of synagogue affiliation is borne out in the Jewish Education Project’s report, which found that more than 700 supplemental schools shuttered between 2006 and 2020 — most outright, though as many as 200 have survived in a new form after merging.
Temple Solel, a small Reform congregation in Fort Mill, South Carolina, shut down its Hebrew school in recent years. The volunteer-run program had up to eight students at a time, according to Russ Cobe, a lay leader.
“We sort of hit a point where we weren’t able to sustain it,” Cobe said. “We only had a couple of people teaching and students from a wide range of ages and they wouldn’t show up every week. Also, our wheelhouse seems to be retirement age and above. We don’t have a lot of young families.”
Hebrew school mergers offer one possible approach to countering the enrollment decline. Two synagogues, one Reform and one Conservative, located half a mile apart in Oak Park, Michigan, established a joint school about seven years ago and called it Yachad, which means “together” in Hebrew.
“One day a week we meet at the Conservative congregation and one day a week we meet at the Reform congregation, so we are keeping our kids involved in both,” said Gail Greenberg, Yachad’s director. “My goal is to make it at the highest common denominator. For example, all of our food is kosher so anyone who wants to eat here can.”
The arrangement appears to be working. Last year, about 90 students were enrolled, and this year, enrollment is at 128, including 26 new kindergarteners, with even larger numbers expected in the future.
Another set of programs has grown dramatically in recent years: those affiliated with the Chabad movement, which tend to operate even when small and cost less than synagogue programs. Since 2006, the study says Chabad’s market share in terms of enrollment has grown from 4% to 10%, and in terms of the number of schools from 13% to 21%.
Those figures might represent an undercount, according to Zalman Loewenthal, director of CKids, the Chabad network of children’s programs. While the study says there are some 300 Chabad programs in the United States, Loewenthal said he is aware of at least 500 and perhaps as many as 600 — a number driven up in the last decade amid a push by Chabad to launch more Hebrew schools. His count is based on the number of customers purchasing the curriculum offered by his organization, which is also new in the last decade and in his view has contributed to improved quality among Chabad Hebrew schools.
In general, non-traditional approaches to Jewish education may be attractive at a time when American families have packed schedules and competing needs, according to Stern.
“People want to be able to have bite-sized pieces just like you sign up for a six-weeks art class, they might want a six-weeks Jewish class,” she said. “In this atmosphere, some communities are finding ways to be more modular and more flexible, and meet people’s needs in different ways.”
Stern also said, referring to six programs highlighted in the study as success stories, that the future calls for programs to offer an “immersive” experience, meaning that children become part of a community.
“They are getting something beyond just knowledge,” Stern said. “They’re also getting connection and belonging, which provides the foundation for something bigger in their lives.”
Stern said she thought the report pointed to gaps in the way American Jewish communities allocate their resources.
“Supplementary education really was abandoned as a communal priority,” she said. “Individual communities had to find ways to fund it on their own. And I think that is part of why we’re seeing a decline.”
Bryfman said he’s optimistic, both about the power of supplemental schools and the potential for them to generate new support from Jewish donors.
The Jewish Education Project had sought outside funding to pay for its study and failed, he said. But now that the numbers are clear, he is beginning to see interest from philanthropies.
“I don’t want to count the dollars before they’re granted,” Bryfman said. “But the study is already beginning to have the desired effect of bringing more resources to the field.”
Fig Tree isn’t set up to benefit in a possible future of increased charitable investments in Jewish education. That’s because the school is set up as a business — an expression of confidence in its growth and to insulate itself from the vagaries of philanthropy.
“It’s a very unusual model for the Jewish education and I would argue a self-sustaining one,” White said. “We don’t have to rely on fundraising… and we’re not beholden to some of the other requirements that a nonprofit would necessitate, which allows us to be nimble.”
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2025’s Jewish highlights — from ‘Marty Supreme’ to Max Fried’s menschy move
Jews have been in the spotlight in the past years for all kinds of reasons, many of them less-than-fun: Gaza, war, hostages, protests. But looking back, we wanted to boil it down into highlights. Or at least things that were just really, really Jewish. Basically, everything we thought was worth making note of in the last year, whether for its merits, its lack thereof, or just for its pure oddity.
You may notice reading that there seem to be a few doubles in these categories. But, you see, the “best Jewish movie” is not necessarily the “most Jewish movie.” That’s because there has been a glut of loudly Jewish content that’s awfully hard to ignore, screaming for our attention. That doesn’t mean it’s good, but it’s notable.
So read on for the Jewish things you should remember — whether you want to or not — from 2025.
Best Jewish movie
It’s apparently a Safdie family tradition to induce anxiety in movie-going Jews on Christmas. (Uncut Gems arrived Dec. 25, 2019.) Josh Safdie’s film, about salesman-hustler-table-tennis dynamo Marty Mauser, accumulates Yiddishkeit as it goes, including a brief cameo by a Forward delivery truck. Timothée Chalamet dons thick-rim glasses and hangs a Magen David over his chest as he jousts with a Holocaust survivor opponent (there were a few ping-pong champs who did, in fact, survive Auschwitz). A character in the tradition of Sammy Glick and Duddy Kravitz, Marty is as magnetic as he is entitled. While the film’s concerns are universal, it is perhaps primarily a portrait of the New Jew, not of the Nordau school, but the American one, who regarded success as something he’s owed.
Most Jewish movie
These days, there is such a glut of Holocaust content that each new book, movie or show has to find a unique niche. Nuremberg did so by focusing on the relationship between Hermann Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man, and the psychiatrist assigned to analyze him before the eponymous trials, a man who hoped to find some genetic or mental component for evil that he can diagnose.
But the movie is so intent on being informative that it neglects to actually develop its characters and give real insight into Goering’s mind and motivations, or anyone else’s. Though it purports to be a movie about the banality of evil, it was actually just banal. It culminates in the shocking realization that evil has no genetic component, and most of its reveals carry just as little weight. Its most impactful moment is actually a piece of another film: the archival footage shown during the actual trial, which the movie excerpts.
Most Jewish movie that isn’t actually Jewish
Sentimental Value
In Joachim Trier’s film, which won the Grand Prix prize at Cannes, aging filmmaker Gustav Borg pursues reconciliation with his daughters by trying to cast them in his next film, which is a dramatization of his life. He wants the younger sister Nora, a theater actress who battles crippling anxiety, to play his mother who died by suicide; he’s cast the preteen son of Agnes, the elder sister, as a younger version of himself.
The Norwegian family depicted in this film isn’t Jewish. But Trier introduces all the classic beats of Jewish cultural concern: inherited trauma, the artist’s struggle, and the allure/disappointment of goyish blondes (this one played distractingly by Elle Fanning).
(Bonus points for Jewish musical-comedy darling Catherine Cohen’s bit part as Fanning’s phone-addicted manager.)
Most Jewish TV
The second season of Netflix’s Hot Rabbi hit rom-com, once again dominated Jewish conversations — and the streamer’s most-watched list. But much like its huge first season, the second left something to be desired in terms of its representation of Jews, who once again seemed to be incredibly limited by their religious identity and beliefs, and yet simultaneously eager to cast them off given the right opportunity. Stereotypes — like Jews being bad at sports or good at complaining — do a lot of the work of making the show Jewish. The effect is that Nobody Wants This doesn’t feel Jewish so much as it screams at the audience “this is a Jewish show!”
The show’s approach to Jewishness is perhaps best captured by the fact that menorahs, inexplicably, constantly appear in the background, even though it’s not Hanukkah at any point in either season. But without a hanukkiah on display — and, sometimes, lit — how would we know it’s Jewish?
Best Jewish TV
Long Story Short
The animated show from the creator of the surrealist show Bojack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, managed to avoid the pitfalls that so often plague very Jewish media — namely heavy-handedness around Israel, or antisemitism, or leaning on clumsy exposition to define Jewish practices for a gentile audience. Instead, the show just lets its Jewish family be, while also showcasing a wide range of Jewish diversity; the family includes a Black Jewish convert, both a ba’al teshuva son and another son who struggles to connect with his Jewishness, and a queer couple. Each character feels deeply familiar to anyone who spends time in Jewish community, but the show doesn’t try to make the jokes easy to read to non-Jews. Maybe that means some of them fly over the heads of anyone not in the tribe, but that means it’s pitch-perfect for those of us looking for a deeper, subtler representation of Jewish life.
Most Jewish play
The latest play from writer and actress Liba Vaynberg, imagines how six of the Biblical matriarchs — Miriam, Sara, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah and Tziporrah — would have lived today. Set over the course of decades, the girls start the play as 13-year olds and end it in the late stages of adulthood. Each girl’s path is a smart imitation of their matriarch’s actual story, transposed into the modern day. Sara struggles with infertility. Miriam becomes a rabbi, believing that studying Torah will help her lead a good life and avoid misfortune. Leah’s mandrake root is substituted by weed edibles. With humor and an impressive amount of Jewish references that only those steeped in biblical expertise might catch, the play asks: Why is life full of sacrifices, especially ones that seem unjustified? Vaynberg is not interested in giving a solid answer, but still provides a satisfying ending, assuring that life, no matter what it brings, is meant to be lived in full.
Best Jewish play
Slam Frank
Ragebait maestro Andrew Fox’s opus, which reimagines Anne Frank as Anna Franco, a pansexual Latinx immigrant from the “barrios of Frankfurt,” is a piece with many moving parts: a social media campaign that shames the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum for not including chanclas in their mountains of shoes and, yes, also a “real musical,” despite the doubts of many online who assumed it was pure trolling. In fact, it’s a lucid commentary on the state of woke, where identity boxes serve as proxies for character development, and stops just short of being a full referendum on inclusion.
The piece, riffing on nearly every virtue-signalled mega-musical of the last two decades, is at its most knotty when it takes on Jewishness; Fox knows being Jewish doesn’t map neatly to the fashionable formulas of white privilege and oppressor-oppressed. In the end, it is the reimagined attic residents’ existence as Jews that unravels the simple binaries of progressive politics.
Most Jewish book
Sam Sussman’s novel takes the author’s own nebulous biography as its subject — and the suspicion that Bob Dylan may be his father. If this wasn’t Jewish enough, the initial meeting of his mother and the future-Nobel Laureate took place in the studio of painter Norman Raeben, whose father was Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich (aka Sholem Aleichem). The book generated a lot of interest as a work of a promising debut from a young novelist.
Another extremely Jewish book
Kaplan’s Plot
A rollicking story that toggles between a Ukrainian mobster scraping by and a modern-day tech worker digging through family history, essayist and memoirist Jason Diamond’s first novel digs into Jewish Chicago. Really, as any good Jewish story spanning generations, the book is an examination of the impact of inherited trauma, but it’s not too heavy; it crackles with fast-paced Yiddishisms and the propulsive plot of a thriller. Jewishness isn’t the book’s subject as much as it is its entire ethos.
Funniest Jewish newsletter
One of the brightest and least-talked-about trends in the Jewish world right now is the second wave of Substack newsletters introducing new perspectives on Jewish life. (Read about the first wave here.) Bagel Emoji, a semiregular dispatch from a semi-anonymous, gay semi-Orthodox Jew who lives in Los Angeles, delivers feverish, meandering riffs on niche trends like AI content in Jewish print publications and the notorious odor of a particular kosher grocer to say something deeper about frum life. Bagel’s general sass — thinly masking affection, I think — makes each entry essential reading.
Spiciest Jewish newsletter
Picture a newsletter about Israel discourse so hot it must be handled with gloves. That’s NonZionism, a regular rant from an Israel-based writer who goes by the pen-name Mascil Bina. Skewering the excesses and hollowness of both pro-Israel and anti-Israel ideology, the author’s perspective offers a third position: That Israel is “something that wasn’t inevitable, but cannot now be undone.” His takes are unsparing, and unexpected — one week, it’s the case for Bibi Netanyahu; the next, it’s a withering critique of hasbara titled “Zionism turns your brain to mush.” Just recommending it feels risky.
Best Jewish music moment
Streisand and Dylan duet
Streisand announced an album of duets, The Secret Of Life: Partners, Volume Two, with the likes of Hozier, Paul McCartney, Mariah Carey, Ariana Grande and — finally — Bob Dylan, resolving decades of a great musical will-they-won’t-they.
“The track opens with the sound of harmonica, a sound often associated with Dylan,” wrote the Forward’s Seth Rogovoy. “But this harmonica sounds nothing like Dylan’s style, and it is definitely not Dylan playing.” He is singing though, and Barb comes in by the fourth line. Unfortunately, they have yet to duet on “Lay Lady Lay,” a song Dylan purportedly wrote with Barb in mind.
Best “Good for the Jews” moment
Britney Spears admiring the beards of Chabadniks playing chess
The Instagram post was rizz recognizing rizz.
Best Jewish Food Moment
Manischewitz launches food truck
Since 1888, the Manischewitz Company has been a Jewish household staple. But now, it’s taking its signature products on the road. The Manischewitz Deli on Wheels, an orange truck that serves rugelach, hot dogs, vegetarian egg rolls, and matzo ball soup, launched this March as part of the brand’s plan to market to younger audiences. Last year, the company launched a frozen food line that emphasized convenience, a quality they are also trying to capture in their truck. Manischewitz has a city-wide license and plans to take the truck all over New York and New Jersey. Its creative branding and warm servings of classic Jewish comfort food are a welcome addition to the already bustling food-truck scene.
Most Jewish Food Moment
New York City sets a new record for the world’s biggest Shabbat dinner
On Nov. 20, more than 2,500 Jews — 2,761 to be exact — sat down at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan and broke the record for the world’s biggest Shabbat dinner. The previous record had been set by Berlin in 2015 with a dinner of 2,322 people. The Forward’s Hannah Feuer was in attendance to get all the details — and do her best to eat all the food served over the multi-course meal. The event included 811 pounds of kugel, 402 challahs, and 22,500 hors d’oeuvres and, in an AI generated video, Albert Einstein, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Golda Meir and the Hebrew patriarch Abraham offered commentary on the dinner. For entertainment, a woman in a leotard, suspended by wires from the ceiling, played “If I Were a Rich Man” on the violin and the Jewish a capella group Six13 sang “We Are the Champions” to celebrate the victorious occasion.
Biggest Jewish sports disaster
A bicycle blowup
Canadian-Israeli billionaire Sylvan Adams had a hobby — competitive cycling — and a dream: using the sport to bolster Israel’s image abroad. That dream crashed hard into reality this summer at the Spanish Vuelta, where Adams’ team — called Israel-Premier Tech, and featuring zero Israeli or Jewish riders — turned out thousands of anti-Israel protesters.
Several of the race’s stages were altered or cancelled, including the final, which was halted several miles short of the finish line. By the Vuelta’s conclusion, some of the other riders were openly campaigning for Israel-Premier Tech’s exclusion and the team had removed “Israel” from its jerseys. The team’s demise became official this month when it was announced that retired Spanish footballer Andres Iniesta had bought IPT and, er, rechristened it.
Best Jewish sports performance
Avdija delivers
Deni Avdija was not supposed to be this good. Yet in his sixth season, the Portland Trail Blazers’ forward has been producing like an All-Star — he’s averaging 26 points, 7 rebounds, 6 assists per game as of this writing, with borderline elite efficiency — and with any justice, he’ll soon become one.
Most heartwarming Jewish sports moment
A very Jewish draft
It’s gotta be the back-to-back selections of Jewish Brooklyn Nets rookies Ben Saraf and Danny Wolf at June’s NBA Draft. Some draft prognosticators were expecting Wolf, a dynamic seven-footer who led Michigan to the Sweet 16, to be picked early in the first round — before Saraf, a spindly Israeli point guard. Instead, when Nets took Saraf with the 26th pick, the Wolf ganze mishpoche was still twiddling their thumbs. Moments later, though, Commissioner Adam Silver called Wolf’s name, sending older brother Jake Wolf into full-blown sobs — and into the unofficial sports meme hall of fame.
Menschiest Jewish athlete
Max Fried
The Yankees ace called reigning Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal to tell him he deserved to start the All-Star game in his stead. “It’s a very professional thing to do, and you got a ton of respect for guys that do stuff like that,” Skubal later told reporters. What we were thinking: This kid must have great parents!
The post 2025’s Jewish highlights — from ‘Marty Supreme’ to Max Fried’s menschy move appeared first on The Forward.
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An Israeli media mainstay is crumbling. Will liberal democracy go with it?
The Israeli government has taken another alarming step in its efforts to crack down on the press by moving toward shutting down Army Radio, which reaches some 900,000 listeners a day.
A unanimous Monday cabinet vote to close the station is being sold as a matter of logic, efficiency and principle. Why, after all, should a military institution operate what has long functioned as a national news outlet? Why should soldiers be involved in journalism? Why should the army run a radio station that frequently criticizes the government and the defense establishment itself?
On the surface, those questions sound persuasive. In most democracies, such a setup would indeed raise eyebrows. Militaries are meant to fight wars; broadcasting current affairs, as Army Radio has since 1950, does not clearly serve that purpose. The independence of the press is a foundational democratic norm; there are good reasons to question whether a military-run outlet can uphold it. Strip away the Israeli context, and the case for closing Army Radio could sound like common sense.
But Israel is not an abstract political theory exercise. It is a specific country with a specific history, and Army Radio is a specific institution that plays a role no other outlet can fully replace. Its shuttering would be devastating. And the move to shut it down cannot be understood in isolation. It fits neatly into the broader campaign led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to weaken, intimidate or take over every independent institution capable of producing criticism, accountability, or resistance.
Army Radio is not just another broadcaster. It is one of only two national radio stations in Israel that produces comprehensive news coverage.
The other is Reshet Bet of Kan, the public broadcaster that itself has been under constant attack by this government, facing unceasing efforts to strip its funding. Eliminate Army Radio, and Israel’s radio news landscape will be reduced to a single vulnerable station — precisely the outcome critics of the government’s media policy have warned about for years.
Historically, Army Radio has been a cornerstone of Israel’s free press ecosystem. It has trained generations of journalists who later shaped the country’s media culture — some while serving as soldiers, others as civilian staff who stayed on for decades. Its newsroom culture helped normalize the idea that journalism’s role is not to flatter power, but to scrutinize it.
That tradition emerged because the IDF, uniquely among militaries, is a “people’s army,” rooted in near-universal conscription and embedded in society rather than standing apart from it. Israelis have long understood that a station staffed in part by conscripts from across the country — religious and secular, right and left, center and periphery — is not a mouthpiece in the classic sense. On the contrary, Army Radio often earned its reputation by irritating ministers, generals, and prime ministers alike.
That approach earned it broad public trust — the same kind of trust that once established the IDF’s legitimacy. Incredibly, the government is also trying to undermine that trust through constant feuding with the military brass, and a concerted effort to deflect all blame for the Oct. 7 meltdown on the military. (Both government and military certainly failed on that day.)
The effort to close Army Radio mirrors the government’s campaigns against the judiciary and the police, among many other targets. Each time, the strategy is the same: identify a real or arguable flaw in an institution that exercises independence from total government control, exaggerate it, and then use it to justify dismantling or weakening that institution.
Netanyahu’s goal — similar to the successful project led by President Vladimir Putin in Russia, and to ongoing efforts in Hungary and Turkey — is to transform Israel into a country with something close to an elected dictatorship. His arguments are never openly authoritarian, but rather procedural, managerial, technocratic — and therefore harder to resist.
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi’s broader project to restructure, weaken, and politicize Israel’s media landscape, framed as deregulation and modernization, consistently moves in one direction: reducing independent oversight, centralizing power and increasing political leverage over broadcasters. Where takeover is possible, pressure is applied. Where it is not, closure becomes the solution. Army Radio, inconveniently independent and symbolically beloved, cannot be easily captured, pressured through advertisers, or quietly restructured. So it must be eliminated.
Public opposition to the move has been broad and intense, cutting across ideological lines. For many Israelis, Army Radio is not merely a broadcaster; it is part of the country’s civic fabric. Closing it feels less like reform and more like provocation — another deliberate escalation in an ongoing culture war designed to pit Israelis against one another.
That, too, is a feature, not a bug.
This government thrives on confrontation with institutions that command public trust. By attacking them, it forces citizens to choose sides, reframes resistance as elitism or sabotage, and mobilizes its base through grievance and the seductive argument that a government elected by a majority is always legitimate in its actions.
Army Radio, anomalous as it is, stands in the way of Netanyahu’s Putinization dreams. Its existence contradicts the idea that media must either align with power or be marginalized. It reminds Israelis that criticism from within the system is not treason but patriotism. And that is precisely what makes it intolerable to an increasingly illiberal government.
None of this requires romanticizing Army Radio or denying that its structure is unusual. Yes, a military-run news station is an oddity. Yes, in another country, reform might be justified. But democracies are not built by eliminating every anomaly. They are sustained by preserving institutions that work, even when they defy neat theoretical categories.
Israel does not need fewer trusted voices right now. It does not need another symbolic demolition of a shared civic institution. And it certainly does not need to hand its already embattled media landscape another blow on behalf of a government that does Israel devastating harm.
The post An Israeli media mainstay is crumbling. Will liberal democracy go with it? appeared first on The Forward.
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How the next generation of rabbis is preparing for the age of A.I.
Denise Blumenfeld’s AI learning tool doesn’t have all the answers — or at least it’s not so eager to give them away. Instead, Blumenfeld, a second-year student at the Orthodox women’s seminary Yeshivat Maharat, has customized ChatGPT to answer her with questions with a question.
I watched recently as Blumenfeld fed a paragraph of Talmud into the module, aptly named Socrates Havruta (its surname is Hebrew for study partner). Its response tested her reading comprehension: Based on the first line of the text, what is the basic obligation around candlelighting? Blumenfeld typed in an answer, which Socrates affirmed before asking another.
She knew ChatGPT could simply summarize the text, but would that really help her learn it? On the other hand, responding to questions could help someone figure things out on their own. And to keep herself honest, she’d set a rule: “I always try to read the authentic source first,” she told me.
Blumenfeld is part of the first generation of rabbinical students who are training with artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini at their disposal — and hoping to avoid those tools becoming a crutch. But the beit midrash, or study hall, is just one of many contact points they have with an invention that may be changing not only what it means to be a student or a rabbi, but also what it means to be Jewish.
To get a sense of how AI is helping shape the next generation of the rabbinate, I interviewed students from five U.S.-based rabbinical schools about how use and think about AI in relation to their work. Their attitudes ranged from guarded enthusiasm to flat rejection. But their comments — and the boundaries they had each set around their personal use — revealed the deep influence AI is already having on their professional and religious outlook.
This was true even for students who did not use generative AI at all. Adrian Marcos, a student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, listed moral reasons he avoided it, among them its exploitation of stolen data, its environmental impact, and the digital literacy crisis it was accelerating. Yet Marcos admitted that the burden of explanation fell on AI’s detractors, not its enthusiasts.
“A lot of people are very into AI, and as a rabbi, whether or not you end up in a pulpit, you have to converse with those people,” said Marcos, a second-year student at the Conservative seminary. “And as the technology evolves, the conversations around it are also going to evolve.”
Hacking the sermon
ChatGPT can seemingly draw on the entire digitized Jewish canon, translate it from Hebrew if necessary, and draft new content about it. For students pursuing the rabbinate because of their passion for seeking and sharing knowledge themselves, the question was whether a tool that lightened the load was really helping.
Aiden Englander, a fourth-year at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary, engages ChatGPT for on-call intellectual companionship. Upon finding an interesting commentary on the week’s Torah portion, he’ll ask ChatGPT for secular variations on the idea. It might spit out Nietzsche, he said, or a recent news story.
Knowing ChatGPT can make such a connection unlocks a different level of rhetorical ambition — serving as a kind of academic force-multiplier — but it forecloses the possibility of, well, sorting out his concept without it. It also raises the question of what makes a sermon “better,” and whether literature you’ve only learned about via ChatGPT summary is any less suitable for a sermon than a volume you’re still working through on the page.
Englander’s calculus was straightforward. “When you’re able to quote a book that someone is familiar with, they’ll remember it more,” he said.
Though an avid user, he harbors doubts about AI’s reliability. “It will just completely make up a Gemara,” he said, and in his view its knowledge is especially shallow in matters of Jewish law. Yet what ChatGPT can do is what makes Englander, who is 24, most cautious. In a creative pinch, he’ll ask it to bullet-point some possible themes to explore from that week’s Torah portion to write a sermon about. But that’s a muscle he’s conscious about developing, so he tries to desist.
Yet a theological question about AI use persists underneath the utilitarian concerns. Is a ChatGPT-generated d’var torah a bad idea because it’s likely to spew cliches or degrade one’s writing ability — or because the very notion of a computer recommendation defeats the purpose of the exercise, which is to bring human experience to bear upon the Torah and vice versa? Major Jewish denominations have been as quiet on the religious questions around AI as rabbinical schools have been on the practical ones, leaving students to work out both problems on their own.
“An LLM doesn’t have autobiography — it’s not having a faith experience,” said Dani Pattiz, a second-year student at Hebrew Union College. “It can come up with these brilliant syntheses of other people’s ideas. But at the end of the day, it can’t genuinely glorify God, or speak to people’s souls in an authentic way.”
A changing pulpit
As they navigated their own use of AI, rabbinical students were pondering how it would reshape the lives of their future congregants, and in turn, their own work.
On a recent trip to Washington, Micah Glickman, a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, the flagship Reform seminary, visited a synagogue where a number of congregants had been laid off in DOGE’s federal job cuts. AI’s impact on employment, he realized, could be exponentially greater. If that were the case, it was not merely that more people would be facing financial and emotional vulnerability. It was also that a universal source of human fulfillment might have an expiration date.
“It seems like the promise of this technology is to basically do anything that a person can do, and do it better than that person can,” Glickman said in an interview. “And I wonder how that will affect a congregation of people who maybe derive a sense of meaning and purpose from their accomplishments in life.”
It would fall on rabbis and other faith leaders, Glickman said, to shepherd their communities through this change. “There’s some impending spiritual crisis that we’re on the verge of,” he said. He was helping organize a symposium at HUC to consider these and other AI-related issues — seeking a spiritual solution, he said, to a spiritual problem.
Meanwhile, he was already encountering ChatGPT-written bar mitzvah speeches from the students he tutors. That put him in the position of his HUC professors: Should he discourage kids from using it, or — conceding to inevitability — try to steer them towards using AI responsibly?
It was a theme across interviews: The future rabbis I spoke to were more worried about how the generation after them would learn than they were about their own trajectories. Today’s students, after all, largely passed their studies prior to rabbinical school without ChatGPT; they were wary of atrophy only because they knew they had muscles to begin with.
Even Blumenfeld, the Maharat student, was not sure she would recommend her Socrates bot to younger students. “Because I had experience learning and teaching before AI, I know what the result I’m looking for is, and know how to ask the right thing,” she said, whereas kids at that age hadn’t yet developed those skills. “As teachers,” she added, “we need to learn how to teach.”
They also need to teach how to learn, and why to learn. YU’s Englander recalled a thought experiment shared decades ago by the university’s former president Rabbi Norman Lamm: If you could implant a microchip into your brain that gave you complete knowledge of the Torah, would you ever have to learn? Lamm’s opinion was that learning in fact had primacy over knowledge — that the toil of studying the Torah was not just a means to an end, but a form of worship in and of itself.
“This might be a little bit more of a mystical notion, but from the standpoint of accessing Hashem, it’s only accomplished through learning the text and struggling with it, not being told what the text says by a third party,“ Englander said. The reason he could generally detect when ChatGPT was hallucinating the Talmud, he added, was because he had put in the hours studying it himself.
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