The Crisis in Jewish Education Is Not About Screens

Jewish school head Adam Eilath’s essential new essay in Mosaic opens with a striking contrast: Jewish students on the island of Djerba in Tunisia murmur sacred texts over well-worn books until the words settle into memory, while students at an American day school read Torah from a projected screen because navigating a physical Bible takes too long. The contrast anchors a sweeping indictment of digital tools—Sefaria above all—and AI-driven models like Alpha Schools. Eilath’s argument is that screens are displacing the slow, difficult, relational work on which Jewish learning depends.

Much of what Eilath describes is real. The cognitive science on screen reading is robust. His invocation of Christine Rosen’s argument about the “extinction of experience” is apt. And his classroom observation—that students who struggle through physical books feel unfinished and want to keep learning, while those who breeze through digital materials feel falsely complete—rings true to anyone who has taught. I have spent almost two decades in the college classroom, and I see it constantly: The students who do the deepest work are the ones who have been asked to sit with difficulty rather than skim past it. Deep engagement requires effort, and effort must be demanded by the people and institutions doing the teaching.

Eilath is also right to worry about the attention economy. We live in an era when the most sophisticated engineering talent on the planet is deployed to capture and monetize human attention. The Jews who murmur texts in Djerba are not just learning differently than American students scrolling through source sheets; they are forming different kinds of minds. Attention is a moral capacity, and the technologies that erode it do not leave the soul untouched.

And there is something deeper still. Jews have been called the People of the Book for a reason. For over two millennia, the physical encounter with sacred texts—the turning of pages, the annotation of margins, the passing of volumes from generation to generation—has been central to Jewish survival. When the Temple fell, the rabbis built a portable homeland out of books. When Jews were expelled from one country after another, they carried their libraries with them. The book was not merely a delivery mechanism for content. It was a technology of continuity. To read from the same Talmud your grandfather studied was to participate in a chain of transmission that stretched back centuries. Even today, I have books from my grandparents with their notes and markings that I use and review often.

Eilath understands this history, and his anxiety about its erosion is not misplaced. But his essay has a conspicuous blind spot. He treats the institutional failures of American Jewish education as if they were primarily technological problems. They are not. They are failures of will, expectation, and communal priority that long predate the smartphone. And if we do not name them honestly, we will lose the very continuity Eilath cherishes.

Consider his own example. Fifth-graders received Hebrew Bibles and never opened them. Teachers cited thin pages, slow navigation, short class periods. Eilath frames this as evidence that screens eroded the habits needed for book-based learning. But read the scene again. The teachers had forty-five minutes a day. The students lacked basic textual navigation skills. The institutional response was not to demand more time or build competencies earlier but to project the text on a wall. The screen did not cause that capitulation. The institution chose it.

This pattern is widespread, and its roots predate the digital age by decades. Long before Sefaria launched in 2011, American Jewish supplementary schools met two or three hours a week and struggled to teach the aleph-bet. Day schools faced relentless pressure to expand STEM offerings at the expense of Judaic studies. Federation budgets funded galas and building campaigns while Jewish education scraped by. School boards cut Hebrew hours to add coding electives. And parents—let us be honest—fought for AP credits and college placement while accepting Jewish illiteracy as a fait accompli. The shallow, coverage-oriented model Eilath rightly criticizes was the norm well before anyone handed a student a tablet.

I see the results of this failure every semester. So many Jewish college students arrive in my classroom knowing little to nothing about their faith, their values, their history. They cannot articulate what being Jewish means beyond a vague attachment to family, festivals and food. They may be strong Zionists and love Israel but have limited vocabulary to explain why Israel matters, no framework to defend Jewish particularity, no textual foundation to draw upon when challenged. When antisemitism surges on campus, they are speechless—not because they lack conviction, but because no one ever gave them the knowledge to convert conviction into argument based in history and knowledge of their faith. Support for Israel among young American Jews has slipped not because they examined the evidence and changed their minds, but because they were never equipped to engage the evidence in the first place and lacked an authentic connection to their religious precepts. They are cultural consumers of Jewishness, not transmitters of it. And that is how a chain of continuity that survived millennia comes to an end; not with persecution, but with shallowness.

They are cultural consumers of Jewishness, not transmitters of it.

The irony is sharpest in progressive Jewish communities, the very spaces that talk most about tikkun olam and social justice. These are often the congregations and schools that have most aggressively hollowed out textual education in favor of contemporary relevance. But relevance unmoored from text is rootless. Students learn to repair the world without ever learning what the world looked like to the prophets who first issued the call. They invoke Jewish values without knowing where those values come from or how to ground them in anything more durable than sentiment. The result is a Judaism of slogans and emptiness—easy to shout at a rally, impossible to defend in a seminar.

What Eilath witnessed in Djerba is not a pre-digital paradise. It is a community that has maintained institutional seriousness about transmission. Students spend hours each day in study. The rabbi teaches directly. Memorization is a daily practice embedded in communal life. That is not a function of avoiding screens. It is a function of a community that decided Jewish literacy is non-negotiable and organized its institutions accordingly.

Eilath is too quick to indict Sefaria as a vector of decline. His sharpest criticism—that the platform’s AI-curated source sheets perform interpretive labor that should belong to the student—is well taken and reasonable. But Sefaria is a tool, and tools are governed by the purposes institutions set for them. A chavruta studying Rashi on Sefaria with intellectual seriousness is doing something more rigorous than a student completing a “mindfulness exercise inspired by Jewish values” with a physical book. The medium matters less than the demand placed on the learner.

The conservative instinct here should be precise. Eilath is at his strongest defending the formative value of difficulty: the idea that struggle is not an obstacle to learning but its essential mechanism. He is right that Jewish education depends on return, on incompletion driving a student back to the text. The attention economy makes that return harder. These are real challenges.

But the honest reckoning requires admitting that most American Jewish institutions were not producing what the Mishnah calls a “plastered cistern that loses not a drop” before the iPhone arrived. The crisis of shallow Jewish learning is institutional: how much we demand, how much time we dedicate, whether we truly believe the material is worth mastering. Blaming Sefaria for Jewish illiteracy is like blaming the GPS for the fact that Americans stopped reading maps. The deeper question is why we stopped expecting the skill at all.

Blaming Sefaria for Jewish illiteracy is like blaming the GPS for the fact that Americans stopped reading maps.

The book sustained Jewish continuity because communities insisted that children sit with it for hours, that mastery of its contents was a prerequisite for communal respect. The book alone did not do that work. The community’s commitment to the book did. If we want to produce Jews who carry Torah in their bones, as the students of Djerba do, we need institutions willing to demand that commitment, and not institutions that blame technology for their own unwillingness to insist on rigor.

That means day schools that protect Judaic studies from curricular erosion. It means supplementary schools that expect real achievement rather than mere attendance. It means federations that fund education like the emergency it is. It means rabbis and educators willing to be unpopular by insisting that mastery requires sacrifice. And it means parents who stop treating Jewish literacy as optional.

A generation that cannot read its own texts cannot transmit what it does not know.

The page does wait, as Eilath beautifully writes. But it will not wait forever. A generation that cannot read its own texts cannot transmit what it does not know. The question is not whether screens are changing Jewish education. The question is whether we still believe Jewish education is worth fighting for and whether our institutions and supporters have the courage to act like it.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.