I had the pleasure of contributing both an interview and original artwork to the cover and interior of the AI Issue of AJS Perspectives, published by the Association for Jewish Studies. The issue explores how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape Jewish scholarship, pedagogy, and creative practice, and it was meaningful to participate in that conversation from both a visual and conceptual standpoint.
I especially enjoyed working again with Doug Rosenberg, whose editorial vision I deeply admire and with whom I have collaborated in the past. Doug thoughtfully framed the issue by placing two distinct but complementary approaches into dialogue. He focused on Julie Wietz’s use of the Golem as a performative and robotic avatar alongside my own work around Sar Torah, a model of generative knowledge that treats Torah as a living, evolving system rather than a static archive.
Julie and I have also worked together previously, and seeing our practices paired in this context was especially rewarding. Her embodied, mythic approach and my systems-based, generative approach ask similar questions from different angles: how Jewish imagination, ethics, and inherited narratives shape our relationship to emerging technologies.
I also greatly enjoyed working with the editorial team to develop artwork that could serve as a cohesive visual theme for the issue. That collaboration gave me the opportunity to show my Jewish futurism work in action, not as speculation, but as a visual language actively engaging with contemporary Jewish scholarship. It felt meaningful to bring this work into conversation with this part of the Jewish academic world, where ideas, tradition, and future-facing inquiry meet.
Overall, the experience reaffirmed for me that discussions about AI within Jewish Studies are ultimately about people, values, and responsibility. They ask how we carry tradition forward, how knowledge is generated and shared, and how creativity remains a sacred act even as our tools continue to evolve.