How the Jewish Calendar Got Coded — and How Ingenious Coders Made it Happen

Humanity is currently engaged in a massive, civilization-sized project to digitize all knowledge; among the more successful projects is the digitization of Jewish knowledge.
Image: Library of Congress
Image: Library of Congress
Dr. David Zvi Kalman is a research fellow in the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Kogod Research Center. David Zvi works on issues of technology, religion, and art. He holds a position as Senior Advisor for Sinai and Synapses and is the host of the Belief in the Future podcast. He is the owner of Print-O-Craft Press, an independent publishing house that has released books including Jessica Deutsch’s The Illustrated Pirkei Avot and Noam Sienna’s A Rainbow Thread:

“Humanity is currently engaged in a massive, civilization-sized project to digitize all knowledge. You may have heard about this. The project is huge, but it’s not unified; contained within it are thousands of smaller projects, each devoted to digitization in a specific field. Some of these fields have developed slowly, while others have zoomed ahead.

Among the more successful projects is the digitization of Jewish knowledge. Jewish texts and scholarship have become so radically intertwined with computing that it is hard to imagine them ever separating. While these achievements might seem like the inevitable byproduct of a global effort, they are not; instead, the success has relied on a particular class of individuals who have the right technical knowledge, religious background and religious motivation to translate information from scripture into code.”

Read the full article in the Forward

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