{"id":497625,"date":"2026-06-17T17:01:26","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T17:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/497625\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T17:01:26","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T17:01:26","slug":"ai-educational-chatbot-draws-on-jewish-historical-figures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/497625\/","title":{"rendered":"AI educational chatbot draws on Jewish historical figures"},"content":{"rendered":"

I asked AI<\/a> Sigmund Freud to interpret my dream this morning. All I got was some dancing dots, as if a) the great man had fallen asleep or b) my dream had broken his virtual brain.<\/p>\n

Freud is one of nine historical Jewish figures featured in \u201cAsk Jewish Lives,\u201d a new AI feature based on the biographies published in the Yale University Press \u201cJewish Lives\u201d series. The free website also allows you to \u201cchat\u201d with Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Baruch Spinoza, Theodor Herzl, Hadassah<\/a> founder Henrietta Szold, the Talmud sage Akiva, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, and the prophet Elijah.<\/p>\n

Jewish Lives says the site is designed to \u201cenrich reader exploration of the Jewish experience.\u201d They\u2019ve created lesson plans to help educators use Ask Jewish Lives in high school and university classrooms.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to extend the life of the books, to use AI to explore Jewish history and biography in a new way,\u201d Rebecca Keys, managing director of Jewish Lives, told me.<\/p>\n

Keys explained that the answers are based only on the various biographies, with various \u201cguardrails\u201d put in place to keep the chatbot from hallucinating.<\/p>\n

\"SIGMUNDSIGMUND FREUD and Henrietta Szold are among the nine historical figures featured in ”Ask Jewish Lives.” (credit: Dov Abramson Studio)AI bot shares Einstein’s, Szold’s thoughts on Zionism<\/p>\n

I played around with it for a bit and found it to be a useful research tool if you are looking for some fast, coherent and footnoted answers to questions about the subjects. Because it has become the topic du jour, I asked \u201cSzold\u201d and \u201cEinstein<\/a>\u201d about their conceptions of Zionism. Where did they fall on the spectrum between supporting Israel as a nation-state of the Jews, and Israel as a Jewish homeland sharing territory and governance with its Palestinian neighbors?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I knew that both Szold and Einstein, products of the first half of the 20th century, held complicated views on these questions, and wanted to see how the bot handled them. \u201cSzold\u201d spoke about her support of a \u201csingle, shared land where Jews and Arabs might live together in harmony,\u201d and how she and colleagues like Judah Magnes resisted \u201cseeking a political majority purely for the sake of political dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, \u201cEinstein\u201d told me \u201cthat for me, being a nation has never meant the necessity of establishing a nation-state… I have always feared that a narrow, nationalistic focus on a particular piece of land would result in the rise of a blind chauvinism, robbing Judaism of its moral core and leading to violence and the moral undermining of our cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

Footnotes took me to excerpts from Francine Klagsbrun\u2019s biography of Szold and Steven Gimbel\u2019s biography of Einstein. Both answers reflected a period, pre-statehood, when the global Jewish community hadn\u2019t reached consensus on what kind of Jewish \u201chomeland\u201d would be practical and acceptable.<\/p>\n

When I put the question to Brandeis<\/a>, who in addition to serving as the first-ever Jewish Supreme Court justice was also the president of the Zionist Organization of America, the answer I got was closer to describing the shape Israel took at its birth in 1948.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope was for a whole, unified territory that would become a secular, majority-Jewish democracy,\u201d \u201cBrandeis\u201d said, drawing on Jeffrey Rosen\u2019s biography. \u201cIn this commonwealth, the equal civil, political, and religious rights of the Arab minority would be scrupulously and constitutionally respected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eighty-five years after his death, that remains the aspiration for a lot of liberal and even not-so-liberal Zionists, who think Israel can remain a Jewish, democratic state if it doesn\u2019t end up permanently controlling the lives of millions of non-citizen Arabs.<\/p>\n

Beyond such heady debates, the site reminded me of the old parlor game asking which historical figures, living or dead, you might invite to a dinner party. I always hated that game. What would we talk about? Would Szold or Brandeis really enjoy coming to my house and getting drilled about their views on Zionism? On the other hand, how do you make small talk with Akiva or Elijah?<\/p>\n

But a bot doesn\u2019t blush, so I did try a personal approach with Szold. I asked her about her relationship with Louis Ginzburg, the legendary Talmud scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She fell head-over-heels in love with Ginzburg, 13 years her junior, when she was the first woman to enroll at the Conservative movement flagship and he needed an amanuensis to translate his class notes and edit his writing. On October 20, 1908, however, \u201cmy world fell apart,\u201d she explained, when Ginzburg announced his engagement to another woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid he break my heart? Yes, he broke it utterly,\u201d she told me. (The site only includes text. No speech or talking avatars, and the first-person responses are often paraphrases of each book\u2019s content.)<\/p>\n

But the heart\u2019s loss was Zionism\u2019s gain. \u201cIt was only when I stopped blaming myself and recognized how he had used my labor that the seeds of my renewal began to grow,\u201d said \u201cSzold.\u201d \u201cI emerged from that dark valley a different woman – independent, assertive, and no longer willing to be the self-effacing assistant to brilliant men.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dream of mine that stumped Freud wasn\u2019t particularly troubling or lurid: I was holding up a busload of people because I couldn\u2019t manage to pack my suitcase. And to be fair the father of psychoanalysis eventually gave me an answer when I worded the question differently. Rather than trying to interpret my dream on the spot, he explained how he might go about it were I his patient, which struck me as sound medical practice.<\/p>\n

AI platform more flexible than Wikipedia, historian says<\/p>\n

Keys isn\u2019t worried that the AI tool will supplant or sully the scholarship represented by the Jewish Lives library. \u201cIt was really important to us from the beginning that this was a collaboration with our authors,\u201d she said. \u201cWe want people to read their work.\u201d She shared a statement from Derek Penslar, the Harvard historian and author of Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader. \u201cThe platform is user-friendly and far more substantive and flexible than a Wikipedia entry or other,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Still, publishers are frantic that AI large language models are gorging on their output to train the machines and siphon their readers. And won\u2019t AI efforts like \u201cAsk Jewish Lives\u201d tempt even serious researchers to cut corners, or to export their own thinking to a machine? (Asking for a friend.)<\/p>\n

I put the question to Akiva, whose Jewish Lives biography was written by the mysticism scholar Daniel Matt. What followed was a moving sermon on the difference between \u201cknowing\u201d and \u201cbeing\u201d and the sanctity of intellectual labor.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you create a machine that can write, calculate, and decide, you have built a vessel,\u201d \u201cAkiva\u201d warned me. \u201cBut do not confuse the vessel with the spring.\u201d<\/p>\n

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I asked AI Sigmund Freud to interpret my dream this morning. All I got was some dancing dots,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497626,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,760,343,344,113065,85,46,61833,229064,229063,125,229062,22869,204514],"class_list":["post-497625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-albert-einstein","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-freud","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-jews","tag-louis-brandeis","tag-spinoza","tag-technology","tag-theodore-herzl","tag-zionism","tag-zionist-organization-of-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}