Jewish Alpha School — What We’re Building

2026-03-29

Here’s what I’m actually building.

I want to take Jewish curricula — Hebrew language, Torah, Gemara — and convert them into Engelmann-style Direct Instruction for Alpha School’s Timeback platform.

What does that actually look like? Imagine a prince learning from his tutors. There is no hour-long lecture. It’s a conversation — a 10-to-15-second lesson followed by a question that demands a response. Then another. And another. Many interactions every minute, building and demonstrating growing skills in real time. Short, atomic lessons where every moment earns its place.

Jewish curricula are actually well-suited for this. They’re already structured with teacher guides, vocabulary-heavy, and sequenced. Torah has been taught in a specific order for thousands of years. Hebrew has a finite grammar system. Gemara has a methodology. The content is there — it just needs to be rebuilt into these atomic interactions, mastery verified at every step, no moving on until the student owns the material.

I’m also aware that there are “seventy faces to Torah.” There will be many ways to teach the same material. Each city, each school, each community has its own perspective it wants to support through how it teaches. I’m not looking for the “one right way” in any category. In fact, I want to make it possible for anyone aligned with the mastery technique to develop curriculum that can be used on this platform. We may end up with a dozen Hebrew curricula. Good. We will also have data that shows knowledge gained over time — and that gives our people choices grounded in evidence, not tradition alone.

The vision is a Jewish Alpha School where kids master Hebrew, Torah, and Gemara in two focused hours — and then have the rest of their day for the things that build character, ambition, and community. Not six hours of sitting in a classroom absorbing 70% of material they’ll forget by next semester. Two hours of real mastery, and then time back.

The ultimate goal isn’t one school. It’s a program that any community can launch. A synagogue in Denver, a JCC in Atlanta, a group of parents in Tel Aviv — anyone willing to run a Jewish Alpha School program gets access to the platform, the curriculum, and the playbook. The model scales because the technology scales. We’re not building a school. We’re building the system that makes a thousand schools possible.

We’re working with Alpha’s team to have Jewish Alpha School curriculum on their Timeback program, which conceptually is like Apple’s App Store. It will take time and effort. But that’s the point. Now is the time to build and prove this works so that it is ready for many schools.

I’ve already engaged curriculum developers and spoken with leaders in the Jewish content space about how this fits the broader landscape. A group of founders and investors are exploring this with me. The interest is real and growing.

But here’s what I need most right now: curriculum designers.

If you know how to take a Jewish textbook — a Hebrew language course, a Chumash curriculum, a Gemara methodology — and turn it into atomic Direct Instruction lessons with an interaction every minute, I want to talk to you. If you’ve designed curriculum for any structured learning system and you’re curious about applying it to Jewish education, I want to talk to you.

This isn’t a someday project. We’re building now.

Email me and tell me what you’ve built.

Next in this series: why the cost curve makes this inevitable.