This week, the Ronn Torossian Family Foundation released the Jewish Day School AI Visibility Index 2026, the first systematic study of how generative artificial intelligence (AI) engines describe and recommend American Jewish day schools. Forty-five of the largest and most prominent Jewish day schools in the United States were tested across 40 prompts on five generative AI engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews.
The findings should jolt every head of school, board chair and donor in this field.
Nineteen of the 45 schools studied appear in zero AI engine answers across the entire prompt set, including schools with the longest histories and largest endowments in American Jewish education. Some 43% of the largest, oldest, most prominent day schools in the country are completely silent on the most important educational technology of the century.
The top six-ranked schools in the index are the same six schools doing real AI curriculum work in the classroom: Gideon Hausner, Berman Hebrew Academy, SAR High School, Jewish Leadership Academy, Ida Crown Jewish Academy and Jewish Community Day School. No legacy school cracks the top six on AI prompts. The pattern is unambiguous; schools teaching AI are the schools the engines find. Schools that are not teaching it are not.
The data also surfaces a harder finding. The AI work that is being done is being carried out in the AI engines by the names of individual ed-tech leaders more than by the institutions themselves: Smita Kolhatkar at Hausner, Rabbi Avi Bloom at SAR, Rabbi Tzvi Hametz at Berman, and Rabbi Binyomin Segal at Ida Crown. Their personal footprints—bylines in HaYidion, panels at Prizmah and Yeshiva University’s Azrieli Graduate School AI Playground, named media engagement—are doing more for their schools than their schools are doing for themselves.
That is a strange place to be. It is also a fixable place to be.
But these visibility numbers are downstream of the central question, and that is the reason this information is so vital.
Artificial intelligence is rewriting the world faster than any technology in modern history. It is reshaping medicine, finance, defense, scientific research, journalism, law and education. It is changing what it means to be skilled, to be employable and to think. The pace is accelerating, not slowing. The communities and institutions that move first will set the terms of the next quarter-century. The ones that wait will spend that quarter-century being led by others.
There are roughly 250 Jewish day schools in the United States. Together, they educate nearly 100,000 American Jewish children. The decision to send a child to one of those schools is among the highest-stakes decisions an American Jewish family will ever make—tens of thousands of dollars per year per child, and the formation of a Jewish identity that will, with hard work, luck and effort, last a lifetime.
Artificial intelligence is rewriting the world faster than any technology in modern history.
In 2026, that decision increasingly begins with a parent typing a question into one of those five AI engines. ChatGPT alone has 900 million weekly users. Adobe Digital Insights measured a 693% year-over-year jump in AI referral traffic during the 2025 holiday period. Some 94% of B2B buyers used a generative AI tool during their most recent purchase decision. The behavioral shift is not coming. It is already here.
I write this from Israel, where I live and where the impact of AI is impossible to miss. Our recent study, Claude in Israel: A Study on the Startup Nation, established that Israel is the most AI-intensive country on earth—the Claude capital of the world by usage relative to working-age population, a finding consistent with Anthropic’s own geographic adoption data. We are working extensively across Israel on Claude adoption and on what it means for defense, medicine, business and education. The impacts are not abstract. They are showing up in Israeli workplaces, classrooms and hospitals every week—and across the whole world.
Among the many serious challenges facing the Jewish people right now—surging antisemitism, a generation of young Jews whose primary information environment is hostile to Jewish identity, the long aftermath of Oct. 7, the rebuilding of confidence in Jewish institutions—the AI revolution is not optional. It is the medium through which our children’s careers, our community’s institutions and our continuity will be decided. Every week we wait, our children fall further behind students already being trained to lead in AI from kindergarten.
Within a few years, AI fluency will be the floor—not the ceiling—for nearly every meaningful career. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, financial professionals, scientists, journalists, founders, teachers—all of them will work daily with AI tools, and the people who lead in those fields will be the ones who learned to think with AI rather than against it. Our Jewish children should be among them. They cannot be among them if their schools are not leading the way on AI in the classroom.
The Jewish people have always punched far above our weight in every field that mattered. We did it because we educated our children at the front of the curve, not behind it. The best learning available in 2026 includes AI fluency; AI ethics through a Jewish lens; AI as a tool to deepen Torah study and Hebrew acquisition, and historical inquiry; and the practical experience of building things with AI rather than just consuming it.
But here we have to be honest about the other side of the ledger, because the easy version of this argument is the dishonest one. The same tools that can deepen a Jewish child’s learning can also do the work of thinking out of that child’s life entirely.
We have already watched, over the last 15 years, what happens when children grow up inside an instant-gratification information environment. Attention spans collapse. Patience for difficulty collapses. The discipline to read a long argument or sit with a hard problem, which are the foundational habits of a Jewish education, gets harder to teach with every passing year.
Smartphones did this. TikTok did this. AI, used badly, will accelerate it. A student who hands every essay to a chatbot has not learned to write. A student who asks AI to summarize Rashi has not learned to wrestle with Rashi. Jewish learning is built on struggle, and a generation that outsources the struggle will not have learned to wrestle. They will have learned to ask. The technology is dangerous if taught carelessly. Schools that adopt AI without discipline will produce lazier learners, not better ones.
The Jewish answer is not abstinence. The Jewish answer is discipline—taught seriously, the way we teach everything else that matters. Written policies. Faculty trained to recognize when students are overusing the tool. Protected non-AI moments inside the curriculum where reading on paper, writing by hand and chevruta without screens stay non-negotiable. AI taught the way we teach Talmud: with rigor, with structure, with rules and with a teacher in the room who knows the difference between a student doing the work and a student outsourcing it.
There are admirable exceptions already modeling this. Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto, Calif., runs an AI Tinkery, a dedicated student-facing space for AI exploration through a Jewish ethical lens. Jewish Community Day School outside Boston has built in-house chatbots for Jewish text study, programmed to insert gibberish into responses so students who copy-and-paste get caught. Berman Hebrew Academy in Maryland has a director of STEM education and innovation, modeling AI use across faculty—what its director calls “the human sandwich,” with human judgment on either side of every AI use. Jewish Leadership Academy in Miami was designed for AI-assisted hybrid learning and uses AI to translate classrooms for multilingual students. Ida Crown Jewish Academy near Chicago and SAR High School in New York have named ed-tech leaders driving classroom AI integration with the same insistence: AI as a multiplier of teacher creativity, not a replacement for student thinking.
Six American Jewish day schools are doing this in a country of roughly 250. The other 244 either have not started or have started so quietly that no one outside the school knows. That is not acceptable—not now, not given everything else our community is up against.
The visibility numbers are a symptom. The disease is that we are not teaching this. Schools showing up in AI answers are the schools doing the work in the classroom. Schools missing from AI answers are the schools that, by every available signal, are not yet doing the work in the classroom. The first problem we have to solve is not getting our schools found inside ChatGPT. The first problem we have to solve is making sure there is something there to find—a real curriculum, real faculty fluency, real classroom practice, taught with the discipline a Jewish education demands.
Why does this matter so much, and so urgently? Because AI is not just another tool. It is becoming the cognitive infrastructure of modern life—the medium through which an entire generation will research, decide, communicate, work and form opinions, including opinions about their own Jewish identity. A child without AI fluency in 2030 will be a child shut out of nearly every meaningful career path, dependent on others to navigate the world for them. A child with AI fluency but no discipline around it will be a child who never learned to think.
There is also the moral dimension, which only Jewish education can answer well.
AI raises some of the most serious ethical and theological questions of our time—about authorship, truth, human agency, what it means to be created in the image of God, what the limits of imitation should be, and how to use enormous power responsibly. The Jewish tradition has uniquely deep resources for thinking about these questions. Our children should not encounter AI for the first time on TikTok or in their first jobs. They should encounter it inside a Jewish education that helps them think about it through the lens of a 3,000-year tradition of moral inquiry, which includes the tradition of knowing when to put a tool down.
And there is Israel. The Startup Nation has become the AI Nation, and Israeli children—secular and religious alike—are being trained in AI from very young ages. The Jewish Diaspora cannot afford a generational gap with the homeland on the most important technology of the century. Our children need to be able to engage Israeli peers as equals, in the medium Israelis are already mastering.
Why does this matter to the broader Jewish community, beyond the schools themselves? Because Jewish day schools are the engine of Jewish continuity in America.
Day-school graduates are dramatically more likely to remain engaged Jewishly across every measure that matters—affiliation, marriage within the community, raising Jewish children, philanthropic engagement. The pipeline of those graduates depends on those schools delivering an education that prepares children for the world they will actually live in.
We do not get to be late to this. The Jewish people invented the school. We invented the question. The medium that now answers the question is AI, and we have a generation of children inside it whose Jewish education and Jewish future depend on us being inside it, too—and on us actively teaching them how to use it well, and when not to use it at all.
Every head of school reading this should ask one question this week: What are we teaching our students about AI, and who is teaching them? Every board chair should ask whether the school is investing in AI literacy at the level the moment requires—and whether it is also protecting the slow, screen-free learning that AI now threatens. Every major donor in Jewish education should ask whether the schools they fund are actually teaching AI, with discipline, in the classroom—not just talking about teaching it.
AI is the present, not the future. Our schools either lead it or get left behind by it. Our community has too many pressures bearing down on it right now to accept being left behind in any of them. We do not have the luxury of waiting. Our children do not have the luxury of waiting.
Ronn Torossian is an Israeli-American philanthropist, AI expert and investor, and chairman of 5W. The full “Jewish Day School AI Visibility Index 2026” is available by request to the author at: ronn@5wpr.com.
