Brett Lockspeiser
Chair
Brett Lockspeiser is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sefaria. He developed a self-identity as a secular Jew by spending a year in an ultra-orthodox yeshiva. He doesn’t believe in religion, but he does believe that the Torah tradition of the Jewish people is one of the great jewels of human culture and wisdom.
Since he started Sefaria with Joshua Foer, Brett has devoted his professional life to the thriving of Torah in a connected, digital world. Brett’s story highlights the ways in which any person with an interest in Torah—observant, secular, novice or pro—can participate in creating the future of the living Torah.
Brett studied symbolic systems at Stanford University and began in technology as a product manager at Google where he led the team that created the Google News Archives. After leaving Google, Brett worked with a number of startups and nonprofits in the Bay Area, creating web applications such as KAPSUL, a tool for curatorial collaboration. Brett and Joshua founded Sefaria after realizing how few of the basic possibilities for Torah and technology had yet been realized. Sefaria is bringing the entire Jewish textual tradition into a new, digital form: free, open source, beautifully designed, interactive and interconnected.