Episode 9: From Cult to Code: Tracing the History of the Aura in Art
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Walter Benjamin, AI, & the Aura of Art: In this episode of The Jewish futurism Lab, host Mike Wirth unpacks Walter Benjamin’s “aura” of art and asks what presence means when every image can be copied, remixed, and generated on demand. Moving from Byzantine icons and ritual objects to photography, social media, NFTs, and AI image models trained on his own work, Mike maps six value eras of art, from cult value and exhibition value to digital manipulation, circulation, synthetic scarcity, and generative value.
Along the way, he explores why a family Hanukkiah, a live performance, or a handmade painting still feel different from a viral post or a blockchain-certified NFT, and how Jewish ritual and textual tradition offer a counter-story to purely market-driven ideas of originality and authenticity.
The episode lands on a haunting, guiding question for our AI age: when you stand in front of an image, an object, or an artwork today, was anyone present when this was made?
Walter Benjamin is not a household name. But he should be.
In 1936, this German philosopher and cultural critic wrote an essay that predicted, with startling precision, almost everything that has happened to art since. He described what it would feel like when images became infinitely copyable. He anticipated the strange hollowness of standing in front of a famous painting you have already seen a thousand times on a screen. He named the feeling you get in front of a great original that no photograph ever quite captures. And he called it, simply, the aura.
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” — Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (214)
You already know what aura is. You have felt it. It is the difference between seeing a photo of the Grand Canyon and standing at its edge. It is why people still cry in front of paintings in museums. It is why a vinyl record from a musician you love feels different from the same album on a streaming service. It is why your grandmother’s ring means something her ring’s photograph does not. Benjamin just gave it a name and asked what happens to it when technology makes everything reproducible.
I have been asking that same question for most of my adult life. The answer, it turns out, is complicated. And beautiful. And a little devastating.
What Benjamin Actually Said
Benjamin’s core argument is simple enough to fit on a Post-it note: every original artwork has a presence tied to the specific place and moment it occupies in history. He called this its “here and now” (Benjamin 214). A painting carries the weight of every hand that ever touched it, every room it ever hung in, every century it survived. That accumulated presence is its aura. And the moment you photograph it, print it, digitize it, or copy it in any way, something essential leaks out. The copy is everywhere. The original is still only here.
I remember reading this in college and thinking it sounded romantic, maybe even a little precious. It took years of making things, and years of watching how people relate to things I made, before I understood he was not being romantic at all. He was being precise.
He was writing at a moment when photography and film were brand new cultural forces, and he watched them doing something no previous technology had managed: not just reproducing art, but changing what people expected from it. The museum poster, the art history textbook, the film still. Suddenly the image of the artwork was more familiar than the artwork itself.
“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” — Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (221)
What makes Benjamin so prescient is that he was not simply mourning this loss. He saw something potentially liberating in it too. If art was no longer locked inside churches and palaces and the reverence of the elite, maybe it could become something more democratic. Maybe it could be politically alive in ways sacred objects never were. I find that tension in his thinking genuinely useful. He does not give you a clean answer because there is not one. He holds the grief and the possibility at the same time, which is, I think, the only honest way to engage with what technology does to culture.
The Six Lives of Aura
What Benjamin could not have predicted was how many more transformations were coming. Aura did not simply wane and disappear. It kept reinventing itself, finding new containers, mutating into new forms of value with each new technology. When I map these transformations out, what strikes me most is not how much has changed but how consistent the underlying human longing remains. Every era destroys one version of presence and immediately starts trying to rebuild it.
“The desire for authenticity, for the unrepeatable, for the original: this is what drives the market’s endless attempts to reconstruct aura under new conditions.” — Jos de Mul, Cyberspace Odyssey
Here is how that history maps across six eras.
Before the camera, art had cult value. It existed in one place, for one community, embedded in ritual (Benjamin 217). You had to travel to it. The gap between you and the object was not an obstacle. It was the point. Think of a Byzantine icon, a cathedral fresco, a Torah scroll passed down through generations. These things were not primarily decorative. They were alive with the weight of where they had been and who had held them.
I think about this constantly in my work with Jewish material culture. A Hanukkiah that has been in a family for four generations is not the same object as an identical one bought last year. It carries a history in its scratches and its dents and its smell. That is cult value. And I want to be clear about something that often gets lost in discussions of Benjamin: cult value has not disappeared from contemporary practice. Studio artists working in slow, material-intensive disciplines, oil painting, ceramics, hand-pulled printmaking, still generate genuine aura through the ritual of making. The visible trace of time, the irreproducible encounter with an original surface: these conditions still produce something real. I have stood in front of works that stopped me cold in ways I could not explain, and I believe that experience is not nostalgia. It is recognition.
Photography gave us exhibition value. Art could now travel to you, flattened and portable (Benjamin 225). More people than ever could access it, which was genuinely democratic and genuinely good. But the form of that access had changed fundamentally. The Mona Lisa on a postcard belongs to no place and no moment. It has been liberated from its context and, in that liberation, hollowed out a little. I do not say this with contempt for the postcard. I own plenty of them. I say it because the hollowing is real, and pretending otherwise does not serve anyone.
“The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” — Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (221)
The market fought back almost immediately: signed editions, numbered prints, certificates of authenticity. I find this reflex fascinating and a little poignant. The demand for aura did not disappear when the technology changed. It went underground and started looking for new containers. That pattern repeats in every era that follows, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.
The digital age brought manipulation value. Theorist Lev Manovich argued in 1998 that the database had replaced narrative as the dominant logic of new media culture (Manovich, “Database”). In a database, nothing has a fixed place or hierarchy. Everything is a node, waiting to be queried, remixed, and recombined. Art became raw material. Its worth shifted from what it was to how generative it could be.
“The database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list.” — Lev Manovich, “Database as a Symbolic Form”
Hip-hop producers understood this intuitively before any theorist named it. Joseph Schloss establishes in Making Beats that producers sample not because it is convenient but because it is aesthetically beautiful, governed by a strict ethics of creativity and reverence for the source (Schloss 60–61). I find this argument genuinely moving. A Madlib record is built from hundreds of samples, each one carrying the aura of its source: a 1972 soul session, a Brazilian jazz recording, a forgotten film score, all folded into something new. The manipulation is also an act of love. He knew what he was taking. He was accountable to it.
“Sampling itself is an embodiment of this active process of engaging with history.” — Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (qtd. in DiCola and McLeod 74)
That accountability is everything. It is what separates sampling from mere recombination, and it becomes the critical distinction when we get to AI.
Social media created circulation value. In the age of Instagram, TikTok, and viral sharing, what an artwork is worth is inseparable from how far and fast it moves (Eryani). I remember when this shift started to feel real to me, not as a theoretical idea but as something I was actually living. Works I made that circulated widely took on a kind of social weight I had not anticipated. Works I made that did not circulate felt invisible regardless of how much they meant to me. That asymmetry disturbed me. It still does.
“In the digital age, the aura of an artwork is no longer tied to its physical uniqueness but to its cultural resonance and the collective experience it generates.” — Rulla Eryani, “Aura Reimagined”
A work now risks losing significance not by being too widely reproduced but by not being reproduced widely enough. Obscurity, not ubiquity, is the threat. Benjamin would have found this deeply strange. I find it both funny and genuinely disorienting.
NFTs tried to engineer scarcity value. When digital technology made reproduction totally free and infinite, the market did not accept the loss of aura gracefully. It built a financial instrument to simulate it. A blockchain certificate acted as a surrogate original, a unique claim of ownership over an infinitely copyable file (Jin). I watched this happen in real time and felt something like recognition mixed with exhaustion. Of course the market did this. It always does.
“NFTs don’t reinvent the aura — they show us what it always was: a structure of power, hierarchy, and exclusivity dressed in spiritual language.” — Laurie Rojas, Caesura Magazine
What NFTs revealed, more nakedly than anything in recent art history, is that the desire for aura was never purely spiritual. It was always also about property, exclusivity, and the economics of being the one person who owns the real thing. The container was synthetic. The longing was genuine. I think that distinction matters enormously.
AI generation has brought us to generative value. This is the strangest and most unsettled territory of all, and I say that as someone who is inside it. AI does not reproduce existing works. It generates entirely new ones, trained on millions of images, producing outputs that look like art, circulate like art, and affect people the way art does, but which were made by no one in particular, in no specific moment, with no hand, no resistance, no decision under pressure.
“AI systems trained on cultural databases continue the database logic of new media, generating new narratives and images from accumulated cultural archives.” — Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli, Artificial Aesthetics
I have fine-tuned my own image models on my own work. I fed them my visual language, my aesthetic history, my accumulated decisions as an artist, and watched them generate images that look, in some meaningful way, like me. I want to be honest about how strange that experience is. The outputs are genuinely useful. I use them for ideation, for unlocking directions I might not have found otherwise, for seeing my own sensibility reflected back at unexpected angles. But I have never used AI output in a final work. Something stops me every time. I have spent a lot of time trying to name what that something is, and I think Benjamin finally gives me the language: the generated image carries the shape of my aura but not its weight. The model learned from objects I made in specific moments. It was not there when I made them.
This is also where collage becomes a useful and genuinely complicated contrast. Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Romare Bearden built entire practices on the deliberate rupture of aura in source materials. And yet their works carry unmistakable aura of their own. The cut is a decision. The placement is a decision. The tension between fragments is authored, lived, physically enacted in a specific moment by a specific person. AI image generation looks like collage from the outside but the difference is exactly what Benjamin would have identified: there is no hand, no moment, no resistance.
“A work of art produced by a human hand communicates something of the artist’s presence, their struggle with materials, their decision-making under pressure — none of which a machine can replicate.” — Eva Cetinic and James She, Leonardo (Cetinic)
A collage artist ruptures aura intentionally and then reconstructs something from the rupture. An AI model has no relationship to rupture because it was never present to the wholeness of what it borrowed from. Collage and hip-hop sampling both taught me that context can be destroyed and meaning can still be made. AI is asking me whether that is still true when the displacement is total and no one was accountable to the source. I genuinely do not know the answer yet.
Why This Matters Now
Here is the thing about Benjamin’s argument that keeps bringing me back to it after all these years: the desire for aura never disappears. Every technological shift triggers an almost immediate cultural attempt to reconstruct what was just lost. Signed prints, authentication certificates, blockchain tokens, the slow craft revival, the vinyl resurgence, the return to film photography among young artists. These are not nostalgic accidents. They are symptoms of a persistent human need for the irreplaceable encounter, for the object or experience that cannot be anywhere else because it is only here.
I see this in my students. I see it in collectors. I see it in myself every time I walk into a room with an object that stops me. The need is real. What changes is only the form it takes and how honestly we reckon with whether the form is delivering what we actually hunger for.
“The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.” — Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (221)
The question Benjamin leaves us with, and the one I find most urgent right now, is not whether aura survives. It clearly does, in some form, in every era. The question is what conditions make genuine aura possible and what conditions produce only its simulation. The handmade object, the live performance, the face-to-face encounter: these still generate something real. The blockchain certificate, the AI output, the viral image: these generate something that rhymes with aura but plays by different rules. Knowing the difference, and caring about the difference, might be the most important thing an artist, a designer, or a thoughtful consumer of culture can do right now.
Walter Benjamin died in 1940, at the Spanish border, fleeing the Nazis, carrying a manuscript no one has ever found. He did not live to see television, the internet, the smartphone, or the AI image generator. But he understood the essential dynamic that drives all of them: every new technology promises to bring art closer to everyone, and every new technology changes what art is in the process of doing so. The question he asked in 1936 is the same one I keep asking.
Was anyone present when this was made?
This essay is part of an ongoing exploration of Jewish Futurism, design thinking, and the cultural stakes of emerging technology.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 214–240.
Cetinic, Eva, and James She. “The ‘Aura’ of Artworks in the Era of Artificial Intelligence.” Leonardo, vol. 58, no. 4, MIT Press, 2025, pp. 352–360.
Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. St. Martin’s Press, 2005.
de Mul, Jos. Cyberspace Odyssey: Towards a Virtual Ontology and Anthropology. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.
DiCola, Peter, and Kembrew McLeod. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling. Duke University Press, 2011.
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Alex grew up in an antisemitic city and turned that experience into an artistic mission. We explore the weird parallels between cutting and pasting found images and prompting AI, what makes art original, and how we’re both in conversation with Jewish creative lineage from Moritz Daniel Oppenheim to today.
This conversation goes deep on legacy: What are we leaving behind for our descendants? What does Jewish creativity look like when it refuses to disappear? And why is Alex a practitioner of Jewish futurism, even if he works with analog and digital hand tools instead of code ?
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Join me as I unpack why limits aren’t the enemy of creativity. They’re what make creativity sustainable and accountable.
Episode 1: Welcome to The Jewish futurism Lab: Torah, Tech, Tomorrow
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In this first episode, I’m introducing The Jewish futurism Lab and what this podcast is here to build: a space where Torah learning, creative practice, and emerging technology meet. I’ll share a quick bit about who I am, what Jewish futurism is, and why I’m drawn to Jewish futurism, then lay out what you can expect in future episodes, essays, and projects connected to my work at mikewirthart.com. We’ll start with the foundation, what Jewish futurism is, why it matters right now, and how we can imagine bold, ethical Jewish futures without losing our roots.
During my semester long sabbatical, I set out to experiment with new ways to tell Jewish stories, and I kept coming back to the immersive feeling of games. While I stayed focused on my main objective, completing my book Hiddur Olam: Bereshit – Genesis and telling new Jewish stories through art and writing, this Hanukkah, I also felt a pull to expand this idea of immersive storytelling into video games, where players could step inside the work rather than only view or read it. Framing the game projects as interactive midrash let me treat code, mechanics, and level design as another layer of commentary on the same questions that animate the book: how to re engage with foundational Jewish narratives, how to honor tradition while playing with form, and how to imagine Jewish futures that feel both grounded and newly alive in digital space.
Vibe coding and my AI toolbox
For all of these projects, I leaned heavily on what I think of as vibe coding. By vibe coding, I mean describing in natural language how I want something to feel, look, or behave, then using AI coding tools to generate or refactor code until the game’s behavior matches that feeling. I used ChatGPT, Gemini, and GitHub’s coding assistants as a rotating team, asking for everything from small bug fixes and refactors to full systems like player controllers or state machines. I have 20 years of front-end and back-end web development coding experience. Having been a part of a wave of student designer-artist-coders in NY in the late 90s and early 00s making websites by day and net-art by night, vibe coding is great method to make code sketches of ideas or experiments. In this project, I would move the same block of code from one model to another when I got stuck, wanted new insight, or when I wanted to shift from quick procedural hacks into a more object oriented structure. Each of the the different LLM code “voices” helped me see new paths through the same problem. These tools gave me a sense of freedom to soar with code, where in the past I would have been creeping along, slowly teaching myself new methods and getting bogged down in syntax rather than in the Jewish and ludic questions that actually interested me.
Research questions that guided me
A cluster of questions ran through everything I made:
How can I evolve dreidel gameplay beyond a single spin and four letters?
With only four sides, can a dreidel still function as a rich, reusable dice object in a larger game system?
Can the dreidel be used more effectively to tell the story of Hanukkah, not just reference it visually?
What are better ways to tell the story of Hanukkah using the immersiveness of games?
How can I tell new digital Jewish stories that feel both grounded in tradition and native to contemporary game culture?
Is this creative act, moving ritual objects into speculative, interactive worlds, an example of Jewish futurism in practice?
How will Jewish people play dreidel in the future?
Each experiment became a different argument or provisional answer to these questions.
So, over 8 nights, I played with various game and interaction experiments. Here are my best of the best, in no particular order.
Dreidel Run: Neon Grid
Best for dreidel kinetics
With Dreidel Run, I leaned into the question of how to evolve dreidel gameplay at a purely kinetic level. Here, I made the case that the dreidel can succeed as a contemporary and arguably futuristic game mechanic when it is allowed to be fast, flashy, and even a little mindless, while still anchored in
Hanukkah imagery like gelt and glowing colors. Using the Temple Run game mechanics, the experiment argues that not every Jewish game needs an explicit narrative lesson, and that embodied fun, quick reflexes, and the pleasure of catching coins and dodging hazards can themselves be a form of connection, a way of feeling Hanukkah as energy and rhythm rather than only as a story told in words.
Dreidel x Katamari mashup
Best for dreidel physics
In the dreidel and Katamari Damacy inspired mashup, I took seriously the question of whether a small, four sided object could scale up into a world building tool. The design argues that as the spinning dreidel absorbs gelt and grows, it enacts a kind of visual and mechanical midrash on Hanukkah’s themes of accumulation,
excess, and the tension between material things and spiritual light. By exaggerating the physics, I could show how a simple ritual object might literally reshape its environment, and in doing so, I tested how far dreidel based mechanics can stretch before they stop feeling like dreidel play and become something new. Another fun way to play with the dreidel kinetics.
Dreidel Physics Sandbox
Best Holiday Stress Reliever
The smaller dreidel physics sandbox experiments addressed the quieter research question of how players might encounter Jewish content without a fixed goal at all. The spinning battle top game transforms the dreidel into a tornado like object tasked to destroy Seleucid idols of the Temple. It’s instant gameplay makes the argument that
open ended, low stakes experimentation can be a valid form of digital Jewish learning, where the “lesson” is not amoral but a felt sense of spin, friction, wobble, and collapse. In the second experiment I used the Marble Madness type game play, making the dreidel become
a tiny lab for thinking about stability and risk, which echoes Hanukkah’s precariousness, and invites players to linger, tinker, and waste time in a way that is still charged with symbolic possibility. These were worthwhile explorations of the exciting and kinetic nature of the dreidel game.
Dreidel Catan prototype
Most conceptual
In my Catan style prototype, I explored whether a four sided dreidel could act as a meaningful dice object inside a complex resource and territory game that could help tell the story of Hanukkah in terms of the Maccabees, Hellenized Jews, and Seleucids as groups competing for resources and domination in Jerusalem. The design argues that it can, because each side of the dreidel already carries narrative weight, and that weight can be elevated when paired with a card, tableau and board game system like Catan. Resource bonuses, penalties, or events that shape a shared board.
By letting the dreidel drive the different outcomes for each player I was curious to replace the dice with two dreidels. Pushing the game narrative of dreidel from a closed loop into a network of context specific effects.While buggy and complicated, this was one way that Hanukkah themes of scarcity, risk, and negotiation might live inside a modern strategy game.
Hanukkah Quest 1: The Temple of Gloom
Best for Hanukkah story
Hanukkah Quest 1: The Temple of Gloom tackles the question of how to better tell the story of Hanukkah with the immersiveness of a game. Here, I argue that interactive midrash is possible when puzzles, jokes, and spatial navigation all serve as commentary on the holiday’s themes, such as hiddenness,
illumination, desecration, and rededication. Instead of retelling the miracle in a linear script, the game invites players to stumble through a gloomy, playful temple and slowly piece together meaning from their own actions, which models a Jewish way of learning that is iterative, interpretive, and grounded in wandering and return.
Jewish futurist wisdom
These experiments do not just gesture toward Jewish futurism, they enact it and point toward where it might go next. They show that Jewish futurism means keeping ritual objects and stories in play, while re staging them inside interactive systems where players can touch, bend, and argue with them in real time, like a digital beit midrash that anyone can enter. By dropping the dreidel and Hanukkah into arcade runners, resource economies, absurd physics toys, and point and click temples, the work suggests that the future of Jewish storytelling may live in responsive systems rather than fixed scripts, and in shared worlds that generate many valid readings instead of a single correct answer. Your vibe coding practice, using AI to rapidly prototype and reconfigure these systems around a felt sense of Jewish meaning and play, is a clear example of Jewish futurism in practice, and it opens hopeful paths forward: networked Jewish game spaces, collaborative “midrash servers,” classroom rituals that unfold as playable worlds, and future projects where new holidays, communities, and speculative texts are first tested as games before they are written down. In that sense, these games are not an endpoint but a launch pad, a sign that Jewish life will keep unfolding inside new technologies, still circling the same core questions of memory, risk, light, and communal responsibility, while inviting the next generation to help code what comes next.
Judaism has no halakhic precedent, no formal theology, and no inherited best practices for artificial intelligence. There is no daf of Talmud that tells us what to do when our creations begin to imagine, write, and decide alongside us. That absence is not a weakness of tradition; it is a feature of its design.
Across history, Jews have not inherited perfect systems; we have built them and evolved them. The Mishnah transformed memory into a network, medieval commentaries became the first hyperlinked texts, and the printing press democratized Torah (Scholem 207–10). Today, Sefaria, an open‑source library connecting millennia of commentary, extends that same impulse into the digital realm (“Sefaria: A Living Library”). Each technological revolution has become a new revelation of Torah’s possibilities.
These questions are not abstract for me. As a muralist, UX designer, and Jewish futurist, I spend most days sketching ideas for speculative ritual objects, teaching with digital tools, and experimenting with AI‑assisted imagery that asks what Torah might look and feel like in a world of holograms, networks, and neural nets (“Jewish futurism”). The ideas in this essay emerge as much from the studio and classroom as from the beit midrash (Jewish houses of study).
So the question before us is not “What does Judaism say about AI?” but “How might Judaism create with AI?” What might revelation look like when it learns to code?
From Fear to Framework
The Jewish conversation about AI often begins with fear. Questions like, “Can a machine issue psak?”, “Will it erode human authority?”, and “What remains sacred when language itself is synthetic?” appear frequently in contemporary halakhic and communal discussions (Grossman; “AI Meets Halachah”).
Those are vital questions, but they treat Judaism as if its primary task were to regulate technology. In truth, Judaism’s genius has always been to design with it. The halakhic mind guards boundaries, while the artistic mind builds bridges. Both sustain covenant.
In my own work, I see this tension every time I bring AI into a Jewish classroom or community workshop. Some participants arrive worried that a model might replace rabbis, artists, or teachers; others are excited and want to use it as a shortcut for everything. Holding both responses at once has become part of the practice.
AI does not threaten Torah; it extends Torah’s medium. The question is not whether AI can write a responsum, but whether it can help us see Torah more deeply, teach more inclusively, and create more beautifully (Freeman and Mayse).
Judaism as a Metamodern Design System
Theorists of metamodernism describe our age as one that “oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony” (Vermeulen and van den Akker). Judaism has been oscillating like this for three thousand years. It holds paradox as pedagogy. Every midrash begins with faith that truth exists and ends with humility that no single voice can hold it.
Modernism believed in rational progress, while postmodernism dismantled it. Judaism, like the metamodern imagination, lives between those poles and moves between faith and doubt, reverence and critique, permanence and change (Scholem 5–9). The beit midrash is built on this oscillation, with generations of sages arguing in the margins and preserving even rejected views as part of Torah’s living archive (Kol HaMevaser; Sacks).
Design thinking names this same dynamic: empathy, iteration, and purpose (Brown). Revelation, too, is iterative. Sinai was not just a single event but a recurring dialogue in which each generation prototypes new vessels for holiness such as scroll, page, press, and screen (Kaplan; “A Jewish Theological Perspective on Technology”). To be Jewish in the age of AI is to practice metamodern design and to make meaning through contradiction with sincerity and skepticism in equal measure.
Jewish tradition has long trained us to live with this kind of paradox. In the Talmud, opposing positions can both be affirmed as elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim, “these and those are the words of the living God,” even when only one becomes binding law (Kol HaMevaser). A machloket l’shem shamayim, an argument for the sake of heaven, is praised precisely because it keeps contradictory truths in productive tension (Sacks). Designing Jewishly with AI means treating its many outputs less as threats to certainty and more as invitations into this older discipline of holding multiple, sincere possibilities at once.
When I teach with AI tools, the classroom becomes a small beit midrash (house of study) that includes the system as a noisy study partner. The goal is not to crown the model as an authority, but to use its strange suggestions to sharpen our questions and clarify what feels authentically Jewish (Freeman and Mayse).
The Missing Dimension in the Jewish AI Debate
Most Jewish writing on AI focuses on halakhah or philosophy, on rules, limits, and fears of replacement (Grossman; “Artificial Intelligence and Us”). What is often missing is the creative and embodied dimension of Jewish life: the building, singing, making, and designing through which Torah becomes lived experience. A growing cohort of Jewish artists and educators is already experimenting with AI in grounded and thoughtful ways, and their practice should shape the wider conversation (Jewish Creative Sensibilities).
What is missing is a language for Jewish Design Thinking, a covenantal process that insists we think, act, and then think again before acting again (Prizmah; Adat Ari El). Jewish Design Thinking uses the raw materials of Torah, halakhah, story, and ritual to prototype futures in which technology serves covenant rather than the other way around. In my own projects, that rhythm looks like sketching speculative altars and merkavot in Procreate, feeding fragments of those images into fine‑tuned Stable Diffusion models trained on my work, and then painting or compositing the outputs back into finished pieces that can live in community spaces (“Jewish futurism”).
Jewish life has always realized its deepest ideas through concrete forms, from the engineered choreography of Shabbat to the legal and spatial design of the eruv (Prizmah; Adat Ari El). My practice simply extends that logic into neon, pixels, and code.
Judaism is not only a religion of interpretation; it is a culture of creation. The Mishkan was not explained. It was constructed. Bezalel, “filled with the spirit of God,” designed holiness in metal, fabric, and light (Exod. 31.1–5). Art is not ornament to Torah; it is one of Torah’s oldest dialects.
To respond to AI in a Jewish way, we cannot only interpret it. We have to create with it. This is how Judaism answers itself, through making.
The Library, the Aura, and the Algorithm
To locate AI inside this longer story, it helps to notice how modern thinkers have imagined libraries, images, and code. Their work forms a kind of shadow commentary on Torah in the age of algorithms.
In The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges imagined an infinite library of all possible books, an uncanny prophecy of both divine omniscience and algorithmic excess (Borges). His librarians wander an endless text in search of coherence, much like today’s AI systems that spin out countless variations of meaning from their training data.
Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, warned that technology could dissolve the “aura” of the artwork, yet he also saw its democratizing power and observed that “the technique of reproduction detaches the object from tradition” (Benjamin 221). Judaism, too, detaches and reattaches tradition each time it is rewritten. Every new edition of the Talmud and every digital platform like Sefaria relocates ancient words into new communities of readers (“Sefaria: A Living Library”).
Lev Manovich later described digital media as infinitely variable and “not fixed once and for all” (Manovich 36), while Ray Kurzweil imagined humanity and technology eventually merging in The Age of Spiritual Machines, a secular echo of Kabbalistic visions of unity (Kurzweil 3–6; Scholem 254–60). Torah, like code, thrives through iteration, versioning, and unexpected recombination.
AI, in this view, is not heresy but a kind of midrashic engine. It recombines the infinite library and tests new relationships between language and light. Classical halakhah is clear that only a human sage, embedded in community and covenant, can issue binding psak; no machine can acquire the da’at and relational responsibility that Jewish law demands (“AI Meets Halachah”; “Not in Heaven”). Yet nonbinding interpretation, or midrash, has always welcomed imaginative recombination, playful juxtaposition, and speculative voices that never become law. In that sense, AI resembles a hyperactive study partner. It cannot decide halakhah, but it can surface unlikely parallels, draft parables, and map conceptual constellations that human learners then sift, critique, and sanctify (Freeman and Mayse).
I see this most clearly in a piece that grew out of Ezekiel’s visions of angels. I used my fine‑tuned model to generate non‑angelic, almost alien interpretations of the prophetic descriptions and then collaged them into a single spiritual mass, a kind of living landscape of eyes, light, and motion (“Jewish Futurism”).
Communing with the angels., Collage of human and AI generated elements. Mike Wirth 2022
The glowing figure in the foreground is my own silhouette, walking and dancing through that terrain like a meditative avatar. The AI outputs gave me dozens of unsettling textures, but the real work was deciding which fragments felt true to the terror and beauty of Ezekiel’s language and which were just spectacle.
Another work explores the myth of the Sambatyon river, said to rage six days a week and rest only on Shabbat. For that piece, I fine‑tuned Stable Diffusion on my existing style and then asked it for impossible rivers: streams of light, shattered planets, and planetary eyes that watched the water (“Jewish Futurism”). I layered those textures with hand‑painted elements to create a scene where a lone human figure stands at the edge of a cosmic torrent that briefly calms. The model could hallucinate a thousand strange rivers, but only a human choice could decide which one carried the emotional weight of a world that is always almost at rest and never quite there.
Readiness Before Revelation: The Sar HaTorah Framework
The Zohar’s parable of the Sar HaTorah, the angelic teacher summoned by a rabbi for instant wisdom, warns that revelation demands readiness (Zohar, Introduction). The rabbi gains divine knowledge but nearly dies from overload. The story is not opposed to knowledge. It is about integration.
This tale offers a design ethic for AI. The Sar HaTorah Framework structures engagement in three stages:
Hachanah (Preparation): set intention, purify data, and ask why we are creating.
Hishtatfut (Participation): collaborate consciously with the machine, using its speed and scale while maintaining human authorship, accountability, and empathy.
Teshuvah (Reflection): review consequences, biases, and impacts; take responsibility for harms and repair what was overlooked.
In the classroom, this often looks like taking a breath before anyone opens a laptop, naming aloud what we hope the tool will help us do, and agreeing on red lines for its use (Freeman and Mayse). After a project, it means debriefing not just the final image or app, but the process and its ethical ripples.
Approached this way, AI becomes not a shortcut to wisdom but a partner in its disciplined pursuit. It enacts a metamodern humility in which we build with awe and awareness at the same time.
Hiddur Olam: Beautifying and Repairing
Hiddur Olam, “to beautify the world,” fuses Hiddur Mitzvah (beautifying ritual) with Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). It reframes creativity itself as spiritual service and as a design system where beauty and ethics co‑produce meaning (Wirth, “Hiddur Olam”).
Rooted in Dewey’s experiential learning, Kolb’s learning cycle, and Mussar’s ethical traits (Dewey; Kolb; Wirth, “Hiddur Olam”), Hiddur Olam unfolds in six stages: Study, Envision, Ground, Co‑Create, Reflect, and Carry Forward. When joined with AI, it turns technology into sacred process:
Study: AI can surface patterns across commentary and reveal connections that human readers might miss (“Torah Study and the Digital Revolution”).
Envision: it can visualize text, sound, and symbolism and map Torah as a constellation of interlinked ideas (“Torah Study and the Digital Revolution”).
Ground: it can prompt ethical reflection by modeling dilemmas, bias, or moral consequences (“Judaism and AI Design Ethics Part 1”).
Co‑Create: it can amplify creative collaboration and scaffold group art or music rooted in Torah themes (Adat Ari El).
Reflect: it can archive process transparently and support cheshbon hanefesh, or ethical accounting.
Carry Forward: it can translate insights into accessible formats such as AR, VR, and multiple languages and expand the covenant of learning (Prizmah).
Over the past few years, I have been testing Hiddur Olam through a multi‑volume art book project on the Torah portions, beginning with Bereshit (“Hiddur Olam”). I created one image for each parasha, always starting from a single word, line, or moment in the text that echoed something I recognized from creative life. A character’s hesitation might become a blurred stroke; a moment of cosmic expansion might turn into layered spheres and ripples of color. Sometimes I used AI for ideation or textures, often running newer versions of my own trained model, and then refining by hand until the image felt like an honest parallel to both the Torah story and the inner drama of making anything at all (Wirth, “Spiritual Creativity”). Sharing these works with students and communities has turned the cycle itself into a practice, where the art becomes a mirror for their own struggles with beginning, failing, revising, and starting again.
Each use becomes holy when guided by middot: kavannah (intention), emet (transparency), tzedek (justice), hiddur (beauty), and teshuvah (reflection) (“A Jewish Theological Perspective on Technology”). Hiddur Olam transforms design into devotion and code into covenant (Wirth, “Hiddur Olam”).
Taken together, the Sar HaTorah stages and Hiddur Olam’s six steps form a kind of Jewish Design Thinking cycle. It begins with study and intention, moves through collaborative making, and returns in reflection and repair. This is not generic human‑centered design. It is mitzvah‑centered and community‑centered design, measured by tzedek, emet, and hiddur rather than by engagement metrics alone (Prizmah; Adat Ari El).
Creative Practice as Torah
In the classroom and studio, creative collaboration becomes a form of Torah she’bema’aseh, Torah of action. When communities co‑paint a mural, code a generative landscape, or build an interactive ritual, they perform theology (Jewish Creative Sensibilities).
One workshop on Shabbat and technology at Providence Country Day stays with me. I asked the Jewish students club to design speculative Shabbat devices that would honor the spirit of rest, with one constraint: each idea had to use AI as an ingredient, not a loophole. Their first concepts included a “pre‑Shabbat planner,” an AI that would work only during the week to help organize meals, divrei Torah sources, and guest logistics so that by candle‑lighting every screen could shut down and people could actually exhale into the day of rest. Another group sketched a “story seed” tool that would generate just the first paragraph of a midrashic bedtime tale from a few spoken prompts, leaving the rest of the story to be finished aloud at the table without any devices. As they presented, the students argued, like a pop‑up beit midrash, about which designs genuinely deepened Shabbat and which quietly pulled them back toward constant convenience. The room shifted when one quiet student finally said, “Maybe the most Jewish thing AI can do on Shabbat is remind us to stop using it,” and everyone recognized that their “coolest” ideas were often the ones that erased the need to slow down at all. That shared moment of realization, more than any prototype, was the Torah we made together.
AI enhances this work when it supports, rather than replaces, human imagination:
It can model interpretive possibilities and expand midrashic dialogue (Freeman and Mayse).
It can generate interactive visualizations of text structure and help learners see commentary as relational networks (“Torah Study and the Digital Revolution”).
It can simulate moral scenarios and invite learners to wrestle with empathy in digital form (“A.I., Halakhic Decision Making”).
In these settings, authority dissolves into participation. Knowledge becomes co‑created, ethical, and embodied (Jewish Creative Sensibilities). This is a powerful expression of metamodern faith that is sincere, self‑aware, and alive to paradox.
Judaism Answering Itself
Judaism has always been metamodern. It believes and doubts at once, reveres and revises, and guards and reinvents (Scholem 1–10). Its survival has never depended on static answers but on the courage to redesign its questions.
AI now becomes the next instrument of that redesign. It allows us to test what covenant means in a world of mirrors. It can trace interpretive lineages across millennia, simulate voices of rabbis and philosophers, or visualize the evolution of a single idea through time (“Torah Study and the Digital Revolution”; “A Jewish Theological Perspective on Technology”).
Jewish futurism will not succeed on imagination alone. It needs Jewish Design Thinking, a disciplined way to dream, build, and then review our creations against tikkun olam, emet, and kavannah before we release them into the world (Prizmah; Adat Ari El). My Jewish futurism projects, from neon speculative self‑portraits to AI‑integrated ritual prototypes, are small attempts to practice this in public (“Jewish futurism”; Wirth, “Spiritual Creativity”). They are betas for a future Judaism in which our tools are strange and luminous, but our commitments to repair and responsibility remain non‑negotiable.
AI cannot choose why we study, create, or repair. That remains human work. The Sar HaTorah teaches readiness, and Hiddur Olam teaches responsibility. Together, they suggest a metamodern theology of technology that is reverent, experimental, ethical, and open‑ended (“A Jewish Theological Perspective on Technology”).
Works Cited
Adat Ari El. “The Intersection of Design Thinking and Jewish Education.” Adat Ari El, 29 July 2025.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken, 1969, pp. 217–51.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Labyrinths, New Directions, 1964.
Brown, Tim. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. Harper Business, 2009.
Dewey, John. Experience and Education. Kappa Delta Pi, 1938.
“AI Meets Halachah.” Jewish Action, 7 June 2023.
“Artificial Intelligence and Us.” jewishideas.org.
Freeman, Molly, and Ariel Mayse. “AI and Judaism.” New Lehrhaus, 2024.
Grossman, Guy. “Jewish Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Biology.” Hakirah, vol. 35, 2023.
Jewish Creative Sensibilities: Framing a New Aspiration for Jewish Education. The Lippman Kanfer Foundation, 2019.
Kaplan, Mordecai. “Religion of Human Techno‑Genesis.” Jewish Philosophy Place, 2014.
Kol HaMevaser. “Elu Va‑Elu Divrei Elohim Hayyim and the Question of Multiple Truths.” 2015.
Kolb, David. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice Hall, 1984.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines. Penguin, 1999.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MITPress, 2001.
“Not in Heaven: The Major Challenge to Artificial Halakhic Decisions.” Times of Israel Blogs, 2025.
Prizmah. “Design Thinking for Jewish Day Schools.” Prizmah Center for Jewish Day Schools, 2019.
Sacks, Jonathan. “Argument for the Sake of Heaven.” Covenant & Conversation, The Rabbi Sacks Legacy, 19 June 2022.
Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Schocken, 1941.
“Sefaria: A Living Library of Jewish Texts.” Sefaria.org.
“Torah Study and the Digital Revolution: A Glimpse of the Future.” The Lehrhaus, 28 Jan. 2020.
Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010.
Wirth, Mike. “Hiddur Olam: Creativity, Community, and the Future of Religious Education.” 2024.
When I teach Design history courses, my students love how similar events, people and milestones are neatly packaged into movements and eras with interesting names, usually with an “ism” thrown in for good measure. One of our favorite thinking exercises is to try and apply a movement or era name to the art happening today. We mostly think of Frankenstein-like names, following the contemporary trend of making combinations of specific cultural groups, places, with older movement names. Like Jewish and futurism, we learned that every movement has its ancestors, both good and bad, even if they didn’t call themselves by the same name. I can say that as teacher and artist in this story, the feeling of placing oneself into the continuum of creative history is inspirational and revealing of purpose.
Before “Jewish futurism” was a modern phrase, there were lowercase “f” futurists in Biblical prophets, medieval mystics, modern artists, inventors, and one rejected capital “F”, Futurist (Italian), who for better for for worse, all had dreams with variegated mixtures of optimism and pessimism of the world ahead. Jews who were in awe of speed, energy, and light- imagined boldly and used creativity to repair what was they saw as broken in their time. They were asking the same or similar futurist questions we ask now, but with varying intentions:How do we sanctify technology? How do we balance innovation with ethics? How can art and design deepen our connection to our values rather than distract from it?
But unlike other futurist movements, Jews were rarely gathered under one banner. In the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, they were often distributed participants within the world’s avant-garde movements.
Photo of futurism vs Futurism notes on whiteboard 2018, Queens University of Charlotte, Photo by Mike Wirth
They were scattered across modernism, abstraction, and science fiction. Jewish artists and thinkers helped define of futurist leaning movements like Cubism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Art Nouveau (Jugendstil), the Bauhaus, comics, science, cinema, and technology, yet they entered these movements as outsiders, navigating exile, assimilation, and the tension between belonging and vision.
In contrast, Jewish futurism, then, is a reunion of that diaspora. It’s a collective recognition that Jewish creativity has always been dispersed, but futurist. Our task now is to connect those remote sparks into a shared constellation.
Jewish futurism, as I understand it, isn’t about breaking from tradition, it’s about revealing the through line of Torah, design, and imagination. The real work is to dialogue with this evolution together. Our ancestors did it through parchment, pigment, and print. We do it through pixels, algorithms, and immersive light.
This essay is an attempt to trace that lineage by identifying the people and moments, ancient and modern, that carried the qualities of Jewish futurism before we had words for it.
2. Prophets and Visionaries: The First Jewish Futurists
The Jewish imagination has always been forward-looking and possessed the virtues of futurist thought. Many stories in the Torah show characters facing grave challenges who reluctantly, yet diligently, press onward toward many future promises. Isaiah dreamed of a world where swords would become plowshares (Isaiah 2:4), reimagining technology as an instrument of peace rather than domination. The non-canonical, Book of Enoch envisioned the celestial ascent of a very minor Torah character, an early meditation on transformation and transcendence.
Enoch 1806-7, William Blake, Via Wikimedia Commons
These were not myths of escape but frameworks for moral invention and prototypes of a better world.
The Torah itself ends in anticipation when Moses glimpses the Promised Land but never enters. The Jewish story begins by looking at the horizon toward a promise deferred, yet always pursued. That restless hope is also in the DNA of Jewish Futurism.
3. “Next Year in Jerusalem”: Our First Futurist Statement
The phrase L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim, Next year in Jerusalem, has always been the ultimate Jewish futurist phrase. It is both prayer and design challenge. It asks: what will it take, ethically and creatively, to build the world where that hope becomes real?
“Next Year in Jerusalem” translated from Hebrew, Birds’ Head Haggadah, 1296 Image via Sefaria
Jerusalem is not only a city but a symbol of the convergence of heaven and earth, ethics and aesthetics, faith and form. Every Jewish generation has tried to construct its own version of it. Jewish Futurism is our turn to do the same, using the tools and technologies of our age to reimagine what Jerusalem might mean tomorrow.
4. Mystics, Makers, and the Ethics of Revelation
Centuries later, the mystics of the Zohar built the first great Jewish model of complexity. Attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the Zohar describes creation as a system of divine emanations, the Sefirot, a network of energy, feedback, and interdependence that sounds remarkably like a precursor to modern systems or network theory.
An even earlier mystical text, the Hekhalot Rabbati, contains the story of the Sar HaTorah, the “Prince of Torah.” In it, a rabbi summons an angelic teacher to grant him instant divine wisdom. The revelation overwhelms him beyond capacity, leaving him nearly destroyed. The angel warns that knowledge received without readiness shatters the vessel. This is not a warning against study, but a parable about integration, teaching that divine insight requires ethical preparation, humility, and spiritual maturity.
This early mystical story prefigures a central idea of Jewish Futurism: revelation without discipline leads to collapse. Innovation, like wisdom, must be tempered by moral structure.
A few centuries later, in Safed, Isaac Luria (the Arizal) and his circle extended that vision, transforming cosmic trauma into design theology. Their concept of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world, framed healing not as an abstract ideal but as an iterative process of creation and refinement. The Kabbalists turned Divine catastrophe, the shevirat ha-kelim or shattering of vessels, into a blueprint for human creativity, a call to rebuild with intention.
In the same spirit, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague gave shape to one of Judaism’s most enduring myths of technological creation, the Golem, a being formed from clay and animated through sacred language. The Golem’s body was innovation, its control was halakhah. It remains Judaism’s first meditation on artificial life, automation, and moral limits, what we now call the ethics of technology.
Together, these three sources, the Zohar’s vision of divine networks, the Sar HaTorah’s warning about unintegrated revelation, and the Golem’s lesson in ethical creation, form the foundation of Jewish Futurism. They map the two coordinates that still define our creative practice today: creation as systems design, and ethics as the boundary of holiness.
5. Enlightenment, Utopia, and Early Jewish Design
The 19th and early 20th centuries brought the industrial age, and with it, new Jewish imaginings of the future. Theodor Herzl’sAltneuland (1902) offered not just political
Theodor Herzl in Basel, 1901, Photo by EM Lilien via Wikimedia Commons
Zionism but a speculative blueprint of his vision of a technologically advanced society guided by justice. Ephraim Moses Lilien, often called the “first Zionist artist,” translated Herzl’s ideas into visual form, merging Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) beauty with prophetic idealism.
Around the same time during late Ottoman period (1906) and into British Mandate rule, Boris Schatz founded the Bezalel School of Art and Design in Jerusalem.
He believed that Jewish creativity could rebuild both spirit and society and was a major shaper of the Zionist art movement. The school fused European aesthetics, often brought by fleeing Jewish practitioners, with biblical themes, teaching the essence of Hiddur Mitzvah, beautifying the mitzvah.
Logo of The Bezalel School 1906, by EM Lilien. Via Wikimedia Commons
The Bezalel School was the first organized institutional embodiment of Jewish Futurism making art and design as acts of national and spiritual renewal.
1. Futurism vs. futurism: Origins and Overlaps
Futurism (capital F) was first coined as an art movement name by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. His Futurist Manifesto, published in Le Figaro, announced a radical social ideology backed by an aesthetic devoted to speed, light, energy, and the mechanical beauty of modern life. Artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini sought to capture motion and power in a new visual language for the twentieth century. Yet as the movement matured, its rhetoric of destruction and renewal fused with Italian nationalism and ultimately fascism, turning artistic innovation into ideology.
One adjacent Jewish figure, Margherita Sarfatti, an art critic and Mussolini’s cultural adviser, championed early Futurist ideals while stressing that art must bridge past and future, not obliterate tradition. When fascism hardened, she was expelled from Italy under the racial laws, exposing Futurism’s fatal contradiction — a vision of progress that devoured its own makers.
By contrast, futurism (lowercase f) describes the broader impulse toward innovation that surfaced across Europe under other names: Vorticism in Britain, Constructivism in Russia, and the Bauhaus in Germany. The same fascination with machines, energy, and new media became, outside Italy, a moral and creative language for modern life.
The groundwork for all of these movements was laid by proto-futurists — visionaries who imagined the future before it had a name. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells wrote of flight, electricity, and space travel. Scientists and photographers Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge dissected motion through sequential imagery.
Photo montage of flying pelican taken by Étienne-Jules Marey 1882, Image is in the Public Domain from source
Philosophers Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, along with Symbolist poets, infused culture with ideas of vitality, time flux, and transformation that would animate futurist art decades later.
Although none of these early futurists were Jewish, Jewish innovators shaped the technological world that made Futurism possible.Albert Einstein’s relativity redefined time and space.
Yiddish language advertisement for Edison’s Phonograph, the competitor of the Gramophone, 1909, Weekly Jewish Bits Newspaper. Image via source
Emil Berliner invented the gramophone making it possible for Jewish sound and oral tradition to be archived and disseminated globally for the first time; Charles Adler Jr. created the traffic-signal system that organized modern cities.
In the arts, Jewish modernists such as Marc Chagall and Jacques Lipchitz extended Cubist abstraction into spiritual allegory, transforming the language of modernism into a vessel for transcendence. Chagall, especially in his Paris period, reimagined futurism not as mechanical speed but as illumination and ascent. I call this mystical futurism. Paintings like Paris Through the Window (1913)
and The Eiffel Tower (1911) shimmer with the chromatic pulse of electric light, fracturing the modern city into simultaneous layers of time, memory, and dream.
The Green Violinist 1923-24, Marc Chagall, Oil on Canvas, Image in Public domain via source
His Violinist series vibrates with musical energy rendered as color and form, suggesting that sound itself could become a visual current. In Chagall’s hands, the machine age becomes a theater of revelation—modernity recast as a mystical experience of motion, radiance, and spiritual flight.
Jacques Lipchitz, working in sculpture, carried this vision into three dimensions. His early Cubist bronzes such as Man with a Guitar (1915) and Flight (1918) dissolve the human form into rhythmic, interlocking planes that seem to oscillate in space. Rather than glorifying machinery, Lipchitz sought to capture the vital energy and inner light of movement itself. Both artists turned Cubism’s structural analysis into a Jewish futurism of rhythm and spirit, where motion was not domination but devotion, and modern form became a bridge between earth and heaven. And in Britain, David Bomberg fused modern geometry with prophetic vision. Bringing a softer humanism to the abstract modernist aesthetics of Vorticism, the UK cousin of Futurism.
The Mud Bath 1914, David Bomberg (1890-1957) oil on canvas. Image in the Public Domain via source
His painting The Mud Bath (1914) exemplifies the mechanical rhythm of Vorticism, while The Vision of Ezekiel (1912) merges machine aesthetics with biblical wonder. For Bomberg, the mechanical and the mystical share a single pulse — creation itself.
Vision of Ezekiel, 1912,David Bomberg, oil on canvas. Tate Gallery.
A telling example is Margherita Sarfatti (1880-1961), the only female member associated with the Italian Futurism art and design movement (1909-1944), was Jewish, an art critic and intellectual. She once championed the movement’s early aesthetics of speed and even personally advised Mussolini as well as being his mistress.
While Sarfatti’s writings do not emphasize her Jewish background, they articulate a sustained belief in modernity that is anchored in continuity that art must recall and transform tradition, not demolish it. In her words: “This idea of art as a bridge from past to future aligns with the broader notion of futurism not as mere disruption but thoughtful renewal.”Her reviews and essays would propel the Futurist movement to a national level.
Margherita Sarfatti, (1920s) Photo by Litta Carell Image via source
When fascism hardened in 1938, she was expelled from Italy for being Jewish. Her story encapsulates the fate of many Jewish modernists: contributors to cultural innovation, later rejected by the very movements they helped inspire.
5. Modernism and the Avant-Garde: Lissitzky to the Bauhaus
In Eastern Europe, El Lissitzky carried Jewish visual tradition into modernism. His 1919 lithographs for Had Gadya reinterpreted Passover through Constructivist abstraction,
Had Gadya 1919, Lithograph by El Lissitsky. Via Wikimedia Commons
using geometry as theology. His phrase, “The goal is Jerusalem,” perfectly captured the Jewish Futurist impulse: the messianic hope rendered through design.
At the Bauhaus Design school(Germany 1919-1933), Jewish artists such as painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, architect and designer Marcel Breuer, and textile artist and printmaker Anni and Josef Alberses continued this lineage.
Bauhaus Curriculum Chart 1922, Walter Gropius,
They believed design could uplift society through clarity, functionality, and light. Through their curriculum of studying various materials, these educators echoed the rabbinic principle bal tashchit (do not waste) and the mystical pursuit of the illumination of ideas in visual and functional forms that solve problems as well as dialogue with beauty.
Their classrooms were secular temples of Tikkun Olam: ethical creativity as public good.
6. Mythmakers: Sci-Fi, Comics, Cinema
Jewish imagination found new life in mass media, Especially in science fiction writing, comics, and cinema, where exile and ethics could hide in plain sight.
As modernism gave way to the machine age, a new arena for Jewish imagination emerged in the world of pulp magazines and speculative storytelling. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback, a Luxembourg-born Jew, founded Amazing Stories and coined the term
Cover of Amazing Stories Magazine- Issue #1, 1926, Editor-in-chief Hugo Gernsback, Via Wikimedia Commons
“scientifiction,” launching the modern science fiction magazine industry. Through his editorial vision, the future became a place to test human ethics as much as scientific progress.
Jewish writers soon filled those pages. Isaac Asimov, William Tenn (Philip Klass), Robert Sheckley, and Harlan Ellison turned speculative fiction into a moral and philosophical workshop. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics echoed halakhic reasoning — codifying responsibility before creation. Tenn’s On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi transformed Talmudic humor into cosmic commentary. Their stories asked enduring Jewish questions: What does it mean to create life? To act justly? To be human in a world of our own making?
The science fiction magazine became, in its way, a cosmic Mishnah on paper that featured serialized debates about ethics, invention, and destiny. In these pulp worlds, Jewish storytellers extended the prophetic imagination of Isaiah, Elijah, Enoch and the speculative daring of the Kabbalists into the age of electricity, rockets, and radio waves.
In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman: an alien refugee, morally bound to defend humanity. Though a very Moses-like framing, Clark Kent wasn’t explicitly Jewish.
Comparison of Moses and Superman stories. Image left by Gavri El Image right is property of DC Comics. CC 4.0
Yet his story’s core themes of exile, justice, hidden identity, redemption, to echo the Jewish experience wrapped in universal myth.
At Marvel, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee filled their universe with wandering scientists and reluctant heroes. Their stories turned vulnerability into virtue. The Spider-Man line, “With great power comes great responsibility,” reads like Pirkei Avot for a new generation.
Kirby’s later series,The New Gods (1970-73), pushed further, turning superhero cosmology into visual midrash. His battles of light and shadow mirrored the Kabbalistic drama of creation and repair, while also superimposing a planetary level version of The Shoah, Holocaust. At that time, Kirby successfully introduced specifically Jewish originating super beings into the American comic book lexicon.
Metron in his Mobius chair as depicted in New Gods #5 (November 1971), art by Jack Kirby (pencils) and Mike Royer (inks) Image property of DC Comics- Under Fair Use.
Notably, Metatron, an angel who Enoch embodied in his adventure through the four worlds of existence in Kabbalah, the Mother box– an Ark of the Covenant like container, the Mobius chair– a holy throne like object that has next level AI capabilities, and a boom tube– a merkaba, chariot-like, teleportation device.
These artists translated Torah’s moral code into pop language, giving the world a modern accessible form of Jewish prophecy.
Many times simultaneously, Jewish filmmakers carried that same prophetic imagination into cinema, using light, time, and narrative as tools for moral exploration. Stanley Kubrick reimagined the Golem story for the machine age, probing what happens when human creation outgrows moral control. In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and in A.I. (2001), he questioned whether technology could ever mirror compassion, or like the Golem, it would always lack a soul. Though Steven Spielberg directed the movie, Kubrick originally had the rights and was developing the A.I. movie before his death in 1999.
Sidney Lumet turned the courtroom and newsroom into ethical laboratories. In 12 Angry Men and Network, justice and conscience collide with ego, power, and fear. His films translate lo ta’amod al dam re’echa, “do not stand idly by”, into an embodied principle of characters wrestling with justice. Darren Aronofsky brought Kabbalah, gematria and psychology into direct conversation, finding mysticism in mathematics in Pi, and cosmic yearning in The Fountain and Noah. Ari Folman, through animation, examined how memory and trauma shape moral responsibility in Waltz with Bashir and The Congress.
Still from Pi (1998), by Darren Aronofsky, Image is property of Artisan Entertainment. Used under Fair Use.
Meanwhile, the Coen Brothers and Joseph Cedar turned irony and uncertainty into spiritual inquiry. Their stories unfold like modern Mussar mini-dramas of human frailty tested by fate. Mel Brooks reclaimed film genres that once erased Jewish presence, proving laughter itself can be an act of tikkun, repair.
Across their films, the same Jewish questions resurface: What does it mean to be responsible for the world you’ve made? Can imagination redeem suffering? These filmmakers transformed those questions into a universal visual language that wove Jewish ethics, paradox, and hope into the cinema’s shared dream.
7. Jewish Thinkers of Media and Technology
As technology reshaped culture, Jewish thinkers were among the first to ask how it changed human perception. In 1933, German-Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin questioned how the mechanical reproduction of photography altered our sense of the sacred, almost anticipating today’s debates about ethical AI use and authorship.
He deeply questioned the aura of an object by exploring our emotions surrounding originality, creativity and human desire.
Crowd shoots photo of Mona Lisa at the Louvre’ 2014, Photo by Victor Grigas Used under CC ASA 4.0
At the birth of the internet age, Lev Manovich analyzed digital media as a new textual form, understanding databases and user-interfaces to function like Talmudic commentary, where meaning emerges through interaction and dialogue. Ray Kurzweil reimagined transcendence through technology, envisioning the “singularity” when humans merge with machines. I see this as a secular echo of the Kabbalistic longing for devekut, union with the Divine. Yet where mysticism seeks connection through personal refinement, Kurzweil imagines it through building our technical and intellectual abilities.
Revealing both the similarity and the danger of modern transcendence without ethics. And educators like Ari Waller continue to explore how design and interactivity can transform Jewish learning for a digital age.
Together, they extend the Jewish tradition of commentary into the domain of code.
8. Standing in a Chain of Builders
Looking back, it’s clear: Jewish Futurism has always existed in spirit, even if it didn’t have a name. It’s the instinct to design with conscience, to imagine with ethics, and to translate Torah into form.
We stand on the shoulders of those who used story, structure, and symbol to envision better worlds. They left us blueprints that are sometimes literal and sometimes mystical. Our task is to read them carefully and continue the work.
To innovate without memory is to build a Golem. To create without conscience is to call down the Sar HaTorah unprepared. But rather to design with kavvanah and tzedek, intention and justice, is to join the same futurist lineage that began at Sinai.
9. The Present Continuum: Art, Design, and Collective Vision
Today, artists, designers, and technologists continue that same conversation. My own work in digital art, murals, and the Hiddur Olam project is part of that continuum, a lineage of Jewish creativity that treats design as an act of devotion and world-building. I see AI not as a threat but as a kind of Sar HaTorah, a force that can offer insight if met with readiness and humility. Like the artisans of the Mishkan, I believe design becomes sacred when it channels empathy, restraint, and intention.
In 2022, I presented my philosophy and artwork of Jewish Futurism at the Conney Art Conference and later gave a live presentation at the JADA Art Fair during Miami Art Week. Both experiences reminded me how many Jewish creators are already working toward this shared vision—each in their own medium, each blending tradition with technology.
Lech Lecha 2022, AR activated artwork by Mike Wirth, Miami Art Week 2022, Miami Beach, FL
That same year, I debuted my ongoing project Rimon: The Cosmogranate, a digital and physical artwork exploring creation, fragmentation, and repair through interactive design. The piece reimagines the pomegranate—a symbol of divine abundance—as a cosmic interface, linking Kabbalistic symbolism with data visualization and immersive art. Rimon became a practical expression of my Jewish Futurist framework: systems thinking meets sacred storytelling.
Since then, I’ve met writers, digital artists, collage-makers, jewelers, and illustrators who are all exploring what Jewish creativity can mean in the twenty-first century. I’d love to meet them all, to learn what they’re building, and to be in conversation. There are also scholars whose work leans more toward theory than creative practice, but they’re vital too. This movement needs everyone: makers, thinkers, builders, and interpreters.
Together we form a creative ecology of imagination and insight that reaches across generations and disciplines, connecting our past to our unfolding future.
No one can pursue this vision alone. There needs to be a gathering of like-minded Jewish Futurists, artists, technologists, scholars, and dreamers, willing to experiment together. A community that treats innovation as avodah, sacred service, and technology as a tool for renewal rather than disruption. Through shared projects, symposia, and creative residencies, we can imagine and prototype what a Jewish future might look and feel like, rooted in text, tradition, and ethics, but alive with invention.
Jewish Futurism is not about predicting the future. It’s about designing the future, ethically, communally, and beautifully. It is a collective project, not an individual quest. The middah of Areyvut, mutual responsibility, is its foundation.
Every Jewish artist, from Isaiah to Lissitzky, from Herzl to Kirby, from Bezalel to Bauhaus, from Benjamin to Manovich, has been part of that same dialogue, how to turn imagination into justice, light, and meaning. Jewish Futurism invites us to take up that question again, not to escape the past, but to reimagine it as raw material for redemption.
Jewish Futurism isn’t a trend. It’s an inheritance and a responsibility. We’re not just imagining what comes next. We’re continuing a project that began with the words: Let there be light.
This article is a teacher’s (me) journey out of the AI shadows and into classroom transformation. This article is a companion to a recorded lecture I gave on how I use AI in the classroom. I recommend watching the video in addition to reading this post, as it offers a deeper dive and helps contextualize the experiments and perspectives summarized here.
AI Isn’t a Hammer, It’s a Screwdriver
A teacher’s journey out of the AI shadows and into classroom transformation. This article is a companion to a recorded lecture I gave on how I use AI in the classroom. I recommend watching the video in addition to reading this post, as it offers a deeper dive and helps contextualize the experiments and perspectives summarized here.
We’ve successfully scared the hell out of ourselves about AI. That’s the truth. Despite the helpful Wall-E’s and Rosie the Robots, the likes of HAL 9000 locking astronauts out in space to the death machines of The Terminator, the cultural imagination has been fed a steady diet of dystopian dread. And now, with the hype and hysteria churned out by the media and social media, we’ve triggered a collective fight, flight, or freeze response. So it’s no surprise that when AI entered the classroom, a lot of educators felt like they were witnessing the start of an apocalypse, like all of us were each our own John Connors’ watching the dreaded Skynet come online for the first time.
But I’m here to tell you that’s not what’s happening. At least not in my classroom.
In fact, this post is about how I crawled out of the AI shadows and learned to see it not as a threat but as a tool. Not a hammer, but a screwdriver. Not something that does my job for me, but something that helps me do my job better. Especially the parts that grind me down or eat away at my time.
If you’re skeptical, hesitant, angry, or just plain confused about what AI is doing to education, pull up a chair. I’ve been there. But I’ve also experimented, adjusted, and seen the light and the darkness. I cannot dispel all of the implications of AI use, but I want to share what I’ve learned so you don’t have to build the spaceship from scratch.
We Owe It to Our Students to Model Bravery
Students are already using AI. They’re exploring it in secret, often at night, often with shame. They’re wondering if they’re doing something wrong. And if we meet them with fear, avoidance, or silence, we’re sending the message that they’re on their own. In a 2023 talk at ASU+GSV, Ethan Mollick noted that nearly all of his students had already used ChatGPT, often without disclosure. He emphasized that faculty need to assume AI is already in the room and should focus on teaching students how to use it wisely, ethically, and with reflection. That means our job isn’t to police usage—it’s to guide it.
I don’t want my students wandering through this new terrain without a map. So I model what I want them to do: ask questions, explore ethically, think critically, and most of all—reflect. I also model the discipline of not using AI output as a final product, but only as inspiration. If I use AI to brainstorm or generate language, I always make sure to rewrite it into something that reflects my own thinking and voice. That’s how we teach students to be creators, not copy machines. Map out where you have been and where you are going in your journey.
That’s what it means to teach AI literacy. It’s not about having all the answers. It’s about being brave enough to stay in the conversation. I was also wandering aimlessly with AI—unsure how to use it, uncertain about what was ethical—until I took this course from Wharton on Leveraging ChatGPT for Teaching. That course changed my mindset, my emotional state, and my entire classroom practice. It gave me a framework for using AI ethically, strategically, and with care for student development. If you’re looking for a place to start, that’s a great one.
AI Isn’t a Hammer. It’s a Screwdriver.
Here’s a metaphor I use a lot: AI is not a hammer. It’s a screwdriver.
Too many people try to use AI for the wrong task. They ask it to be a mindreader or a miracle worker. When it fails, they say it’s dumb. But that’s like trying to hammer in a screw and then blaming the hammer.
When you learn what AI actually does well, like pattern recognition, remixing ideas, filtering, and translating formats, you start to use AI for its actual strengths. As Bender et al. (2021) explain in their paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, large language models are fundamentally pattern-matching systems. They can generate fluent, creative-sounding language, but they do not possess understanding, emotional awareness, or genuine creativity. They remix what already exists. That is why we must use these tools to support our thinking, not replace it. It becomes a tool in your toolkit. Not a black box. Not a crutch. A screwdriver.
I don’t want AI to do my art and writing so I can do dishes. I want AI to do my dishes so I can do art and writing. As Joanna Maciejewska put it: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” It won’t do your dishes. But it might give you time back so you can do something that matters more.
How I Actually Use AI in Class With Students
I teach graphic design, motion, UX, and interactive design. AI is already a mainstay in each of these disciplines—from tools that enhance layout and animation to systems that evaluate accessibility and automate UX testing. But even though AI had become part of the professional design landscape, I was still skeptical. I wasn’t sure how to bring it into my classroom in a meaningful way. So I started small.
Using AI for minor efficiencies—generating rubrics, reformatting documents, cleaning up language—felt good. It felt safe. And it gave me just enough momentum to try it on bigger, more impactful tasks. What made the difference was a mindset shift. I stopped seeing myself as a single musician trying to play every part of a complex score and started seeing myself as the conductor of the orchestra. I didn’t need to play every part, I just needed to know how the parts worked together. That gave me the confidence to use AI—and to teach with it.
Here’s how I integrate AI into our learning:
Students design chatbots that simulate clients, so they can roleplay conversations. I used to pretend to be clients and interact with students through Canvas discussion boards. Now I can read their chat logs and have conversations with them about their questions and intentions.
In Motion Graphics, students use “vibe coding”—a form of sketching in code with the help of GPT to simulate motion, like moons orbiting planets.
In Interactive Design, they use Copilot** to debug code** in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
They learn to generate placeholder images for mockups, not final artwork.
We create custom Copilot agents, like “RUX”—a UX-focused bot trained to give scaffolded feedback based on accessibility standards.
I’m not handing them shortcuts. I’m handing them power tools and asking them to build something that’s still theirs.
The Creative Process Needs Scaffolding—AI Can Help
I believe in the creative process. I’ve studied models like the Double Diamond and the 4C Model. I’ve seen how students get stuck during the early stages, especially when self-doubt creeps in.
That’s where AI shines.
AI helps my students generate more ideas in the divergent phase. This echoes research by Mollick and Terwiesch (2024) showing that structured AI prompting increases idea variance and originality during the creative process. It helps them compare, sort, and edit during the convergent phase. And when I ask them to submit their chat logs as part of their final deliverable, I can see their thinking. It’s like watching a time-lapse of the creative process.
We’re not assessing just artifacts anymore. We’re assessing growth. And that includes how students use AI as part of their process. I make it clear that AI-generated outputs are not to be submitted as final work. Instead, we treat those outputs as inspiration or scaffolding—starting points that must be reshaped, edited, or reimagined by the human at the center of the learning. That’s a critical behavior we need to model as teachers. If we want students to be creative thinkers, not copy-paste artists, then we have to show them how that transformation happens.
Accessibility and AI Should Be Friends
I also use AI to make my course materials more accessible. I format assignments to follow TILT and UDL principles. For example, I asked GPT to act as a TILT and UDL expert and reformat a complex assignment brief. It returned a clean layout with clear learning objectives, task instructions, and evaluation criteria. I pasted this directly into a Canvas Page to ensure full screen reader compatibility and ease of access.
For rubrics, I asked GPT to generate a Canvas rubric using a CSV file template. I specified category names, point scales, and descriptors, and GPT returned a rubric that I could tweak and upload into Canvas. No more building from scratch in the Canvas UI.
To generate quizzes, I use OCR with my phone’s Notes app to scan printed textbook pages. I paste that text into GPT and ask it to write multiple-choice questions with answer keys. GPT can even generate QTI files, which I import directly into Canvas. This process saves me hours of manual quiz-writing and makes use of printed texts that don’t have digital versions.
AI helps me build ramps, not walls.
Faculty are also legally required to build those ramps. Under the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), specifically Section 504, course content in learning management systems like Canvas must meet accessibility standards. But let’s be honest—retrofitting dozens or even hundreds of old documents, PDFs, and slide decks into fully accessible formats is a monumental task. It often gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list, which leaves institutions vulnerable to non-compliance. Check out the WCAG standards for more details.
AI can help. It can reformat documents for screen reader compatibility, generate alt text, simplify layout structure, and audit for contrast and clarity. And it can do it in a fraction of the time it would take any one of us. By using AI thoughtfully here, we not only make our content better, we also help our institutions become more equitable and compliant faster.
When I use local LLMs to analyze student writing using tools like LM Studio, I keep student data safe, FERPA compliant, and private. This aligns with concerns raised by Liang et al. (2023) about how commercial LLMs may compromise the privacy of non-native English speakers and their content. It is ethical. It is efficient. And it respects the trust students place in me.
Let Students Build Their Own Tools
One of the best things I’ve done is empower students to create their own AI agents.
Yes, students can train their own Copilot bots. And when they do, they stop seeing AI as some alien threat. They start seeing it as a co-creator. A partner. A lab assistant. ChatGPT has a feature called Custom GPTs, which allows similar personalization, but it’s locked behind a paywall. That creates real inequity for students who can’t afford a subscription. Copilot, on the other hand, is free to students and provides the necessary capabilities to build custom agents or chatbots. Here’s a guide to get started building your own agents with Copilot.
As a way to model this behavior for students, I created a CoPilot Agent myself called RUX, short for “Rex UX”, honoring Rex, our beloved university mascot. I built it using Microsoft’s Copilot Studio, which lets you define an agent’s knowledge base, tone, and purpose. For RUX, I gave it specific documentation to pull from, including core sources like WCAG, UDL, and UX heuristics, and trained it to act as a guide and feedback coach for my UX students. It doesn’t give away answers. It asks questions, gives feedback, and helps students reflect.
Setting up an agent starts with defining your intent. I decided I wanted RUX to act like a mentor who knew the standards for accessibility and good UX practices, but also had the patience and tone of a coach. I uploaded key resources as reference material, wrote prompt examples, and added instructions to prevent the agent from simply giving away answers. This ensures students use it to reflect and improve rather than shortcut their learning.
The great part is that it took me about 30 minutes. And now my students use it to get feedback in between critiques, to check their work against accessibility standards, and to build their confidence.
And the students slowly start to ask better questions.
Final Thoughts: Be the Conductor, Not the Consumer
I tell my students this all the time: don’t just be a user. Be the conductor. That’s the heart of this whole article. I started this journey skeptical and unsure about how to use AI in my teaching, but I kept experimenting. And the more I leaned in, the more I realized I could use these tools to orchestrate the learning experience. I didn’t need to master every note, just guide the ensemble. Once I felt that shift, I was able to build my own practice and share it with students in ways that felt grounded and empowering.
Here are two simple but powerful GPT exercises that are from the UPenn AI in the Classroom course that I recommend for you to get started:
1. Role Playing (Assigning the AI a Persona)
This method helps shape AI responses by giving it a clear role.
Steps:
Tell the AI, “You are an expert in [topic].”
Provide a specific task, like “explain X to a 19-year-old art student” or “give feedback on a beginner-level UX portfolio.”
Refine the prompt with context about the student’s needs or your learning objectives.
Outcome: The AI behaves like a thoughtful tutor instead of a know-it-all. Students can use it as a low-stakes, judgment-free practice partner.
2. Chain of Thought Prompting
This is useful for step-by-step thinking and collaborative problem solving.
Steps:
Ask the AI to help you develop a lesson plan, solve a design challenge, or draft a workflow.
Break the task into steps: “What’s the first thing I should consider?” Then “What comes next?”
Let the AI ask you questions in return. Keep the conversation going.
Outcome: You model metacognition, and students learn how to refine ideas through iterative feedback. It supports both ideation and strategic planning.
Try these as warm-ups, homework tools, or reflection exercises. They’re simple, ethical, and illuminating ways to integrate AI in any classroom.
That’s what I want for my colleagues, too. You don’t have to know everything about AI. You just have to be curious. You have to be willing to ask: “What can this help me or my students do better?”
So here’s your first experiment:
Have students brainstorm ideas for a project.
Have them ask GPT the same question.
Compare the lists.
Reflect. (What worked? What didn’t? How will you approach brainstorming next time?, Repeat)
Then decide what to keep, what to toss, and what to remix. Just like we always have. Let’s stop building walls. Let’s start building labs. And let’s do it together.
