AI is “an extraordinary opportunity for Sefaria, but the goal shouldn’t be to use AI simply because it is new,” Luxenberg told eJP

Meta’s Alex Luxenberg was named on Thursday as Sefaria’s next CEO, eJewishPhilanthropy has exclusively learned. He takes over on Sept. 1.

Luxenberg comes to Sefaria, the free digital library of Jewish texts, after eight years at Meta, his latest position being strategic partner manager of wearables, which included leading Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses portfolio. He has also held leadership roles at Twitter and American Express.

“Sefaria has already fundamentally changed what is possible for Jewish learning, making an extraordinary library of Jewish texts available to anyone, anywhere,” Luxenberg told eJP, referring to Sefaria’s open-source library of Jewish texts as “one of the most important pieces of Jewish infrastructure of our time.”

Founded in 2011 by best-selling author Joshua Foer and former Google product manager Brett Lockspeiser, Sefaria merges technology and Torah. In recent years, it has been an innovator in using AI to augment Torah study.

Luxenberg views the journey of Sefaria as being still at the beginning.

“Jewish texts and ideas have always evolved alongside new ways of accessing and transmitting them,” he said. “The printing press changed Jewish learning, as did new forms of publishing, the internet and mobile technology. We are now at another major inflection point as AI changes expectations around access, translation, discovery, personalization and conversation. Sefaria has the opportunity not simply to adapt to that change, but to help shape it, to help define how people encounter and engage with Jewish texts and ideas for generations to come.”

Luxenberg takes over as CEO from Daniel Septimus, who served in the post from 2013 to June 2026. Septimus joined the fledgling digital library in 2013 when the nonprofit had a library of 8.5 million words. Thirteen years later, it hosts a library of 383 million words and has more than 1 million monthly users. 

Through the “Powered by Sefaria” initiative, programmers have used Sefaria’s open-source data to develop over 120 independent projects, including a tool that color-codes Torah by the amount of commentary in each section and a digitized ArtScroll Siddur. This year, Sefaria released an AI-powered Library Assistant and its first comprehensive AI-assisted English translation — the first ever comprehensive English translation of Kli Yakar, the early-17th-century Hebrew Torah commentary by Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim of Luntschitz.

“A major part of my work has been translating new and sometimes complex capabilities into things that are genuinely useful to people and institutions,” Luxenberg said about his past work. “I bring an operator’s mindset: setting ambitious goals, building strong teams, creating clarity across functions, developing partnerships and using data to understand what is working and where we can improve.”

Luxenberg hopes that “Sefaria becomes even more central to the way people encounter and engage with Jewish texts and ideas, whether they are opening a Jewish text for the first time or have been learning for decades.”

Success at Sefaria, for him, “means reaching more people, but it also means helping people learn more deeply. I want Sefaria to make discovery easier, create more pathways into the library, give educators and institutions better tools and help turn moments of curiosity into sustained engagement.”

“In Alex, we found a technologist with a passion for innovation and a life-long explorer of Jewish texts with a bold vision to further open that world,” Sam Moed, chair of Sefaria’s board, said in a statement.

Luxenberg graduated from The Ramaz School in Manhattan and received his bachelor’s degree in English from Yeshiva University. He serves on boards for North Shore Hebrew Academy and Israeli educational nonprofit Amit Children, where he founded the AMIT Future Leaders Initiative. At Meta, he was a leader of Jews@, the organization’s Jewish employee resource group, which, among other things, provided kosher food to employees, led tours through the Lower East Side and created a halachic sukkah featuring augmented reality.

Luxenberg said he views technology as an asset and AI as “an extraordinary opportunity for Sefaria, but the goal shouldn’t be to use AI simply because it is new. The question is where technology can remove barriers between a person and the depth of the library while preserving trust in the underlying texts and sources.”

Story by: Jay Deitcher | E Jewish Philanthropy