Jewish Studies workshop puts AI teaching, research and antisemitism on one agenda

A call for evidence, before conclusions

The European Association for Jewish Studies published a call on October 12 for an online workshop examining AI in teaching, research and antisemitism. Scheduled for December 7, it invites exploratory work as well as accounts of emerging practice. The programme brings together questions about educational usefulness and the representation of Jewish life, rather than treating a tool’s fluency as the only issue. Source: eurojewishstudies.org

The call names Hebrew and Yiddish teaching, assessment materials, historical and literary research, and AI’s potential roles in identifying or amplifying antisemitism. These are proposed subjects for examination, not results of completed conference research. A meeting announcement cannot establish how often a model misrepresents Judaism or whether a particular classroom intervention works.

Proposals are due November 2; participation requires EAJS membership.

What an educator could bring

For a teacher considering a submission, one useful starting point would be a documented classroom decision rather than a collection of impressive answers. Our suggested exercise is hypothetical: ask students to compare a generated explanation of a Jewish text with the assigned source and the teacher’s account of its context. Record the prompt, tool version, answer and corrections, then distinguish a factual mistake from a disputed interpretation.

A fluent answer may be useful to discuss without being suitable to teach as fact. Equally, an error in one exercise would not establish a failure rate across all Jewish Studies tasks. Keeping the example, the correction and the claim together would make a classroom report easier for other educators to examine or repeat. This is an editorial suggestion, not a workshop requirement or a tested intervention.

Representing another tradition carefully

Christian educators have a responsibility here too when teaching about Judaism. Ephesians 4:25 calls Christians to truthful speech within the life of their community. Applying that ethic to teaching should encourage accuracy and fair representation, including willingness to correct a convenient explanation. It does not turn Christian Scripture into an authority over Jewish interpretation. Ephesians 4:25 (NIV)

For a church classroom, the practical question is who can check both the source and the way another tradition is described before material reaches learners. The forthcoming workshop creates a place to investigate such questions; its announcement supplies no shortcut around doing that work.