ByANDREW SILOW-CARROLL/JTA

JUNE 17, 2026 07:08

This morning I consulted the AI Sigmund Freud about a recent dream. The reply came only as swirling dots, leaving me to wonder if the famed analyst had nodded off or if the query had overloaded his simulated mind.

Freud joins eight other notable Jewish personalities in Ask Jewish Lives, an AI tool drawing from Yale University Press biographies. Users can also interact with Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Baruch Spinoza, Theodor Herzl, Henrietta Szold, Talmudic sage Akiva, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, and the prophet Elijah.

The Jewish Lives team built the free site to broaden access to Jewish heritage and stories. Companion lesson plans now help instructors bring Ask Jewish Lives into high school and college settings.

Rebecca Keys, managing director, explained the goal: extend the reach of the printed series by harnessing AI for fresh encounters with Jewish biography and history.

She noted that every response stays grounded in the source biographies, protected by safeguards that limit unsupported claims or fabrications.

AI bot shares Einstein's, Szold's thoughts on Zionism

Testing the tool revealed a handy aid for quick, sourced replies on the featured lives. Given current interest, I asked both Szold and Einstein how they viewed Zionism, specifically where they stood between a Jewish nation-state and a shared homeland with Arab neighbors.

The figures offered nuanced replies consistent with their era. Szold described backing a single territory where Jews and Arabs could coexist peacefully and recalled colleagues like Judah Magnes opposing majority rule aimed solely at dominance.

Einstein expressed that nationhood never required a state for him and warned that narrow territorial nationalism risked breeding chauvinism that would erode Judaism's ethical foundation and invite conflict.

Footnotes linked directly to passages from the Klagsbrun Szold biography and the Gimbel Einstein volume, capturing a pre-state period before consensus formed on the practical shape of a Jewish homeland.

Brandeis, former head of the Zionist Organization of America, gave an answer closer to the 1948 reality of a majority-Jewish democracy.

Brandeis envisioned one unified land as a secular democracy where Arab minority rights would receive firm constitutional protection, per the Rosen biography.

Decades later, many liberal Zionists still hold this vision of a Jewish democratic state that avoids indefinite rule over non-citizen Arabs.

Away from weighty topics, the site evoked the classic game of inviting past figures to dinner. I wondered what conversation Szold or Brandeis would truly enjoy, yet a bot never hesitates, so I posed a personal question to Szold about her romance with Louis Ginzburg.

She recounted falling deeply in love with the younger Talmud scholar while studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Heartbreak followed when he became engaged to someone else, yet that pain ultimately fueled her turn toward assertive independence and Zionist work.

The platform delivers text only, with replies often paraphrased from the books rather than verbatim quotes.

After rephrasing, Freud eventually outlined his interpretive method without claiming to analyze the dream directly, which felt appropriately professional.

AI platform more flexible than Wikipedia, historian says

Keys stressed that the project collaborates with the original authors and aims to steer users back to the full biographies rather than replace them. Harvard historian Derek Penslar praised the tool as accessible yet richer and more adaptable than standard reference entries.

Publishers remain concerned about AI models consuming their texts for training. Questions also arise about whether such chatbots encourage researchers to bypass deeper reading.

When asked, Akiva, drawing on Daniel Matt's biography, delivered a reflective message distinguishing mechanical output from genuine understanding and the value of personal intellectual effort.

He cautioned that building a machine capable of writing or deciding creates only a container, not the source of wisdom itself.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.