I write this from my home outside of Tel Aviv, where I am constantly reminded that Israel is not just a country with a strong technology sector. Israel is the most AI-intense country on earth. Anthropic's most recent geographic adoption data put Israel at the top of the world rankings for Claude usage relative to working-age population - a finding our recent published study on Israeli AI adoption documented in detail. In raw terms, more Israelis use frontier AI per capita than citizens of any other country. The Startup Nation has become the AI Nation.
Israel is at the front of the AI wave because Israel built much of it. Israeli founders and engineers are inside OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft Research. Israeli startups are building the foundational tools the world is now using. Israeli classrooms - including Jewish-religious classrooms - have moved faster than almost any peer system on earth in incorporating AI into teaching and learning. Children here are learning to think with AI, not against it, from very young ages.
The American Jewish day school system has not. And that is the problem this column is about.
The Ronn Torossian Family Foundation just completed the first systematic study of how generative AI engines describe and recommend American Jewish day schools. We studied 45 of the largest and most prominent American Jewish day schools across forty prompts on five generative AI engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The findings are a wake-up call for the diaspora. Nineteen of the 45 American Jewish day schools we studied appear in zero AI engine answers. The schools with the longest histories and largest endowments in American Jewish education are, in many cases, completely invisible to the engines parents now use to find them.
But here is the deeper point, and the one I want diaspora leaders, school heads, and parents to hear from Israel: the visibility problem is downstream of a much bigger one. The American Jewish day school system has not yet seriously committed to teaching our children AI and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). And that has to change now - not next year, not when the field is more settled, not after another planning cycle. Now.
Within five years, AI fluency will be the floor, not the ceiling, for nearly every meaningful career. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, financial professionals, scientists, founders, teachers, journalists - all of them will work daily with AI tools, and the people who lead in those fields will be the ones who learned to think with AI rather than against it.
The Jewish people have always punched far above our weight in every field that mattered. We did it because we educated our children at the front of the curve, not behind it. The best Jewish educations, in every generation, have been the ones that took the new medium seriously before everyone else did.
The new medium is AI. Our children must learn it now.
By "learn it" I do not mean using ChatGPT to summarize an article. I mean real AI literacy - understanding how the models work, how they retrieve information, how to write prompts that produce reliable output, how to verify what they generate, how to build with them, and how to apply them to deepen Jewish learning itself. I mean teaching GEO - how to understand what AI engines surface, how visibility inside those engines is created, and what it takes to be present in the channels that now shape opinion, identity, and decision-making.
Our children are growing up in a world where their first impressions of every idea, every place, and every institution will be filtered through an AI engine. They cannot be passive consumers of that medium. They have to be its authors.
There are admirable exceptions in the American Jewish day school world, and they deserve credit. Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto runs an AI Tinkery, a dedicated student-facing space for AI exploration through a Jewish ethical lens. Jewish Community Day School outside Boston has built in-house chatbots for Jewish text study. Berman Hebrew Academy in Maryland has a director of STEM education and innovation modeling AI use across faculty. Jewish Leadership Academy in Miami was designed for AI-assisted hybrid learning. Ida Crown Jewish Academy near Chicago and SAR High School have named ed-tech leaders driving classroom AI integration. JTA's recent feature documents the work several of these schools are doing.
Six American Jewish day schools, in a country of roughly 250. The other 244 either have not started or have started so quietly that no one outside the school knows. That is not enough. Not given everything else our community is up against - surging antisemitism, a generation of young Jews whose primary information environment is hostile to Jewish identity, the long aftermath of October 7, the rebuilding of confidence in Jewish institutions.
We do not have the luxury of moving slowly on this. Every week we wait, our children fall further behind students who are already being trained to lead in AI from kindergarten.
Israel is not waiting. Israel cannot afford to wait, and the diaspora cannot afford to fall further behind. Israel is now exporting AI technology, AI talent, and AI literacy. American Jewish institutions should be the most natural recipients of that export - but they have to be ready to receive it, and they have to be teaching their children to make use of it.
We are at a moment in Jewish history when the medium of decision-making, of career-making, and increasingly of identity-formation has changed faster than at any previous communal turning point. The Jewish people have always adapted - we adapted to print, to broadcast, to the open internet, to social media. We have to adapt again, and we have to adapt fast. That means putting AI and GEO into Jewish day school curricula now, in every grade, with named faculty, with budget, with seriousness.
Israel did not become the Startup Nation by accident. We did it because we had a way of working - combining urgency, technical depth, and a willingness to ship before perfect. That same way of working has to flow back to the diaspora's most important Jewish institutions.
The Jewish people invented the school. We invented the question. We do not get to be late to the medium that now answers the question - and we do not get to fail to teach our children how to lead it.
It is time for the diaspora's Jewish institutions to lead this - not catch up to it.
Ronn Torossian is an Israeli-American philanthropist, AI expert and investor, and Chairman of 5W. He lives in Tel Aviv. His prior Arutz Sheva column on Aliyah and the Israeli AI economy is available here. The full Jewish Day School AI Visibility Index 2026, published by the Ronn Torossian Family Foundation, is available upon request.