“When a man or woman shall commit any sin that men commit, to do a trespass against the Lord, and that person be guilty; then they shall confess their sin which they have done: and he shall make restitution for this trespass in full.” So reads chapter 5 from the book of Numbers. Repentance is on the Jewish mind these days. The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is called the Ten Days of Teshuva—the Ten Days of Repentance—and during it observant Jews engage in prayer and penitence.

What is repentance? How does it operate? What’s actually happening in the mind of the penitent?

Daniel Rynhold is dean of the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and professor of Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University. He has thought and written much about repentance and sees it as a way to illustrate some of the most interesting contrasts between medieval and modern philosophers. Joining Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver here to discuss the subject, he focuses on three major thinkers, two from within the Jewish tradition and one outside of it.

The first is Rabbeinu Yonah, the 13th-century author of the rabbinic work The Gates of Repentance. The second is Joseph B. Soloveitchik, known as the Rav, who was perhaps the central intellectual figure of post-war Modern Orthodoxy. The third is the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a famous critic of the Enlightenment, of liberalism, and of modernity. The last two are the focus of his book, written with Michael Harris, Nietzsche, Soloveitchik, and Contemporary Jewish Philosophy, published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah, when Jewish communities celebrate the new year and, as part of this celebration, read chapter 22 of Genesis. This contains the famous story in which God asks Abraham to take his son Isaac to a mountain and offer him there as a sacrifice.

What is this passage all about? What does it mean? What can be learned about Abraham, about Isaac, or about God by reading it carefully? Joining Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver today to discuss these questions is Jon D. Levenson, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School and frequent Mosaic contributor. Levenson has written about this episode in several books, including The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son published in 1993 by Yale University Press, and also in Inheriting Abraham, published in 2012 by Princeton University Press.

Akeidat Yitzḥak, the binding of Isaac, as the Jewish people traditionally refer to this episode, has a long afterlife in Christian and Muslim traditions; it is also a centerpiece of philosophical reflection among modern thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard. Reading the text now in the aftermath of those later reflections, it’s difficult to retrieve its original meaning. The temptation is overwhelming to propose moral justifications for Abraham and for God, to excuse or at least to try to soften the drama of Genesis 22.  To hear what the text of the Hebrew Bible really might have to say in response to that temptation requires undoing some modern assumptions—a task that Levenson and Silver take up.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Last Saturday, supporters and opponents of Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki, confronted one another in violent clashes. Yet rather than in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital city, this confrontation took place in the streets of south Tel Aviv. In the second half of the 2000s, east African migration to Israel began to accelerate. Since then, in part due to changes in labor policies and law enforcement and in part to a barrier wall erected along the Egypt-Israel border, the number of new east African migrants has fallen precipitously. Nevertheless, although statistics are hard to come by with great precision, there are probably around 40,000 non-Jewish African migrants living in Israel today.

What brings these mainly Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Sudanese immigrants to the cities and towns of Israel? And how does and how should Israel distinguish between those seeking humanitarian asylum and those looking for work opportunities and social benefits?

These questions have become major points of debate in Israel. Some argue that the state must act in the world as a corrective to the Jewish experience of statelessness in history—that since Jews have so often been migrants and refugees and dependent on the help of others, Israel must help others in need when it can. Others argue that Israel—the political answer to the problems of Jewish statelessness—has an overriding moral obligation to welcome and to secure the lives and liberties of Jews—that it has a special obligation to pursue the ingathering of the Jewish diaspora and so to make a distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants.

To discuss these issues, Yonatan Jakubowicz, formerly an advisor to Israel’s Minister of Interior, and a founder of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Podcast: Mordechai Kedar on the Return of Terrorism in the West Bank

Since the end of the second intifada nearly twenty years ago, and the attendant calming of the West Bank, the main source of violence against Israel has been the Gaza Strip. That's involved fewer terrorists blowing themselves up in Israeli cafes and more rockets fired across the border. But over the last year the pace of terrorism from the West Bank is once again accelerating, with two attacks in Israel just this week.

Mordechai Kedar is a scholar of Arab politics and a retired lieutenant colonel in the IDF, where he specialized in military intelligence, focusing on Syria, Arab political discourse, Arab media, and Islamism. Today, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he shares his assessment of what’s happening in the West Bank.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Starting in January of this year, there have been popular protests each week in Israel. On Saturday night, when Shabbat comes to a close, hundreds and thousands of people go into the streets protesting the government and its policies, chief among them judicial reform. Yet it was plain from the beginning that the protests were about more than judicial reform—that the lens of judicial reform isn't adequate to fully understand the deeper emotions on all sides of this civil crisis.

Ran Baratz is the founding editor of the Israeli magazine Mida and a regular contributor to the conservative newspaper Makor Rishon. Speaking here with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he tries to understand what’s really happening now in Israel. If the events of the last six months are not just about judicial reform, then what are they about? And how can any deeper sources of Israeli animosity be understood and addressed? For those who support the protestors, here’s a chance to learn how some Israeli conservatives actually think. For those who oppose the protestors, here’s a chance to think about their motivations sympathetically. Both endeavors are fitting for democratic citizens of the same nation, and their friends around the world.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

In the period between 1936-1938, now known to historians as the Great Terror, Joseph Stalin oversaw the murder of over 700,000 Soviet subjects. Some of them were political rivals. Some of them held heterodox views. Some of them were merely accused of holding heterodox views. Nearly 30,000 of them were executed at two mass gravesites, Kommunarka and Butovo. Today’s podcast guest recently journeyed to Kommunarka to pay homage to one of these victims, his great-grandfather.

Dovid Margolin is senior editor at Chabad.org and the author of a new essay, “The Jews in Defiance of History” in the September 2023 issue of Commentary, that looks at Stalin’s Great Terror through his own family’s legacy. Margolin is a Lubavitcher Hasid, and remarks on the fact that under so much pressure to assimilate—even to the point of persecution and death—the Jews of the Soviet Union did not disappear. That fact leads him to note one of the reasons that the Communist understanding of history cannot be true: because the existence and perpetuation of the Jews disprove it. Here he speaks to Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver about that idea, about his journey, and about his family.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

On October 27, 2018, a gunman burst into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, armed with a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and three Glock .357 semi-automatic pistols. He executed eleven Jews at prayer. When police arrived, they shot the gunman multiple times, but he survived and was taken into custody. Earlier this month, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection.

How does Judaism look upon capital punishment? Does this killer still bear the image and likeness of God and possess a dignity that is irreducible, such that he could be punished but should not be killed? Or did he surrender that moral standing by the act of murder? Do resources from within the Jewish tradition suggest that capital punishment has a deterrent effect on other potential criminals?

To think about these questions, Rabbi Shlomo Brody, the director of an organization dedicated to helping Jews navigate choices regarding aging, end-of-life care, and organ donation, joins the podcast. In 2021, he wrote an analysis of the death penalty for terrorists as seen by Jewish law. That essay, published in a volume entitled Hokhma LeShlomo, frames the conversation he has here with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

The celebrated novelist Dara Horn's new book People Love Dead Jews has an arresting title, one designed to make the reader feel uncomfortable. That's because Horn makes an argument that tries to change the way people think about the function of Jews in the conscience of the West.

In the book, and in this podcast conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, Horn suggests that Jewish communities, figures, and abstract symbols of “the Jews” have come to serve a moral role in the Western imagination that, when one takes a step back, is bizarre and grotesque.

It’s easy to acknowledge the darkness of the Holocaust and to marvel at the optimism of Anne Frank, but Horn detects in that acknowledgement something insidious that hasn't yet been fully revealed or explained.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Perhaps more than any other major religious tradition, Judaism is mediated through words. God first communicated to Abraham through intelligible speech. Moses brought down from Mount Sinai tablets inscribed with words codifying the structure of Jewish moral order. The book of Deuteronomy commands that every Jewish king write his own Torah scroll. For millions of Jews, the study of Jewish texts constitutes the holiest activity of all.

So perhaps it is not surprising that, seen in this light, words, letters, the technology and artistry of writing, the vocation of the scribe—the sofer, in Hebrew—deserve an elevated place in Jewish tradition. The English word calligrapher comes from the Greek phrase kalos graphos, beautiful writing; the vast tradition of Hebrew calligraphy offers no small amount of beautiful writing.

This week on the podcast, host Jonathan Silver looks at a stunning new book, The Beauty of the Hebrew Letter by the sofer Izzy Pludwinski, and speaks with its author. It's a lavish coffee-table book full of gorgeous illustrations; it can be bought here.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

In the sixth century BCE, the kingdom of Judah and its capitol in Jerusalem were besieged by the Babylonian forces of Nebuchadnezzar II. After a long period of deprivation, the walls of the city were finally breached. On the Hebrew date of the 9th of the month of Av—Tisha b’Av—the Temple that had stood in Jerusalem for centuries was plundered and destroyed, the inhabitants of the city were massacred, and the survivors were taken into captivity.

This experience remains one of the most traumatic in Jewish history. The Hebrew Bible records it in the book of Eicha, known in English as the book of Lamentations. Its five chapters, all of them highly structured, contain some of the most grotesque and poignant language of oppression and suffering in all of biblical literature. There are descriptions of mothers driven to such desperation that they resort to cannibalism; there is a haunting description of a man whose body has so withered from starvation that his skin hangs on him like desiccated wool.

Lamentations expresses a range of emotional responses to that trauma. Some, seemingly in line with Jeremiah’s chastening prophecy, understand the destruction of the city as a just punishment for a sinful people meted out by God; while others direct frustration, desperation, and even bitterness at God. The rabbi and academic Bible scholar Joshua Berman has just published a new commentary called The Book of Lamentations with Cambridge University Press. His interpretation and his new book frame a discussion this week with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

The first century Roman essayist and philosopher Plutarch is perhaps most famous today for his stylized, paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen. In Plutarch’s parallel lives, Alexander, who conquered the Mediterranean world, is compared to Julius Caesar, who did the same a few hundred years later. Alcibiades and Coriolanus are paired together to show how spiritedness and martial virtue, when not tempered by political judgment, can wreak havoc.

Plutarch’s lives are moral portraits; their task is the moral formation of the reader, civic education, and the inculcation of virtue. They inspired Shakespeare’s portraits of Coriolanus, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, and Casca. The Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau likewise drew inspiration from them in, for example, his treatise Emile. And the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once called Plutarch’s parallel lives “a bible for heroes.”

But what about the Bible, and the Jewish tradition it inaugurates? Meir Soloveichik, the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, and host of the podcasts Bible365 and Jerusalem365, believes that Jewish history offers its own examples of Jewish leadership. He's just published a new book, Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship, that attempts to do for the Jews what Plutarch did for the ancient Greeks and Romans. He joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver here to talk about that new book.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

At the end of May, the Biden administration released the first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism. This document looks at the threat anti-Semitism poses to America, outlines ways the federal government can improve the safety and security of Jewish communities, offers plans for countering anti-Semitic discrimination online, in media, and in schools, and describes the administration’s vision for partnering with various religious and civic groups to address the issue.

The existence of this strategy is both praiseworthy and worrying. Often in Jewish history it has been the very governments to which Jews are subject that themselves fuel or carry out anti-Semitic attacks; now, the government is trying to prevent them. Still, the fact that such a national strategy is now needed is a sign of some disturbing trends in American culture and American public life.

Tevi Troy, a veteran of the American government, recently analyzed the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism in a new essay, called “How to Combat Anti-Semitism,” for the journal National Affairs. Here, he joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his ideas.

In particular, he wonders if, however, praiseworthy or well-intended the impulse behind this national strategy might be, the federal government has the wherewithal to do any good here. Then, looking a little more deeply into the report, he raises other questions—questions having to do with the definition of anti-Semitism, the strategic conceptions deployed to fight against it, the partners that have been enlisted to help implement these initiatives, and so forth.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Loyalty—as a human sentiment, as a moral virtue, as a matrix of decision-making—is the subject of this podcast conversation.

Avital Levi, a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University and a teacher of Bible and philosophy in Israel, is curious about what keeps nations that are deeply divided together. Conservative Americans dislike liberal ones, and vice versa; and the same goes for Israelis and for the populations of many other nations. So what keeps those nations from descending into civil war? Levi looks at modern philosophical approaches to ethical decision making and thinks they’re not fully equipped to answer that question. Instead, she argues, another approach is needed.

This approach begins not by asking what people are support as partisans but whom they stand with as citizens. Loyalty is the quality she thinks is most important here—the moral virtue responsible for belonging and membership, that contours the devotion that people muster to stand with their fellow citizens even when they dislike them. Together, Levi and Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver discuss what motivated her research into loyalty—and why it matters.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Earlier this week, the American foreign-policy expert and Mosaic writer Michael Doran published an important essay called “Biden’s Ties That Bind.” In it, he argues that the Biden administration’s true strategic aims in the Middle East are not a change from the Obama administration’s aims but are consistent with them.

These aims were to empower Iran in order to establish a balance of power in the region which would, in turn, allow America to focus more attention on China. And to empower Iran, the United States must constrain Israel, Iran's chief regional nemesis. Doran’s essay seeks therefore to explain how the Biden administration deploys symbols of an American-Israeli united front in order to advance toward a new deal with the Tehran. Here, he joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss that idea and the evidence he sees for it. 

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

This week, the Tikvah Podcast offers up not a conversation but a speech. It’s a speech that was offered up to American Jewish high school and college graduates by Tikvah’s CEO, Eric Cohen. 

In the fall of 2021, four Jewish women—Carolyn Rowan, Liz Lange, Nina Davidson, and Rebecca Sugar—came together to create an organization for parents grappling with the challenges of raising committed Jewish children in today's confusing and contentious cultural environment. The Jewish Parents Forum organizes events for parents to get to know one another and to learn how to address the practical challenges facing Jewish mothers and fathers today, from the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism to identity politics to vociferous anti-Zionism to what to do about social media and phones.

This spring, the Jewish Parents Forum invited  Cohen to deliver a graduation address on these themes for students in Tikvah’s education programs. In that speech, he raises questions that all American Jews are now confronted with—questions that are also those that all Jews at all times must ask and answer.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

This past Sunday, photographs began to appear on social media of a sports stadium, the Wells Fargo Center just outside of Philadelphia, full of haredi men—some 27,000 of them. The name of the gathering was Adirei HaTorah, a Hebrew phrase that means “warriors of Torah.” All those people were convened in order to honor a small group of men: hundreds of relatively anonymous adults engaged in full-time Torah study at Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey.

Beth Medrash Govoha is one of the most interesting Jewish educational institutions in the world. It’s the largest yeshiva outside of Israel; thousands of students are enrolled there full time. Most if not all of them are married, which means that there are also thousands of wives, and many thousands of children, amounting to an entire world of Orthodox Judaism.

What does the decision to honor the adults who dedicate themselves to Torah study reveal about the spirit of the Lakewood world ? To answer that question, the rabbi Eli Steinberg, a 10-year veteran of the Lakewood yeshiva, formerly on the professional staff there, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver on a tour of the Adirei HaTorah celebration last Sunday, and of the society built around a school of which that celebration is a fascinating expression. Together, they also ask if there’s something there from which all Jewish communities can learn.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

In July of the year 1263, the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani met to debate the rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, sometimes known as Nachmanides, to discuss whether Jesus was the Messiah, and thus whether Christianity or Judaism had a greater claim to truth. They  conducted this debate in the court of King James of Aragon, who famously guaranteed the rabbi’s freedom of speech, allowing Nachmanides to even advance arguments that, being regarded as heretical by Christian clergy, would have otherwise caused him to be imprisoned or worse. These proceedings are known, famously, in history as the Disputation of Barcelona.

To fully understand the context of this debate, one has to know something more about the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani: he was not born Pablo Christiani. In fact, he was born as a Sephardic Jew with the birth name of Saul. Only later in life, having lived as a Jewish man and having been exposed to some Jewish learning, did he convert to Catholicism. Joining the Dominican order as a friar, Saul—newly dubbed Pablo—dedicated his life to converting the Jews, possibly with argument and persuasion—he liked to use statements from Talmudic writing as evidence for Christian theology—but also through the threat of violence and force.

What is it that would so compel a person to turn against their own family, their own teachers, their own neighbors, their own religion—and not as a matter of indifference but as a matter of revenge on the sources of his own formation?

That is one of the questions that runs underneath a new story by the legendary essayist, novelist, and short-story writer Cynthia Ozick. Her newest story is called “The Conversion of the Jews,” and it was published in Harper’slast month. Ozick’s “The Conversion of the Jews” follows a 24-year-old scholar of words and languages named Solomon Adelberg, as he, in the early 1930s, attempts to discover how and why Christiani undertook his conversion. These questions lead Adelberg to a hollowed-out monastery in the Judean desert, through the occult world of mysticism and magic, and eventually to attempting a séance with the icon of a saint in his Lower East Side apartment. This week, to discuss that story, and the many ideas, themes, and questions it raises, Cynthia Ozick joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver on our podcast.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Most everyone who reads it loves the book of Ruth, with its bucolic settings, its charming loves, its grace, and its devoted characters—Naomi, Boaz, and Ruth herself. Alongside that appeal, the book of Ruth also conveys truths about the human condition: about who children are and what they mean for the life of a woman, a family, and a nation; about the complementary human and divine sources of redemption; and about a distinctly Hebraic sense of the shape of a human life.

These ideas and more are offered up in a 2021 book about Ruth by Leon Kass and Hannah Mandelbaum, Reading Ruth: Birth, Redemption, and the Way of Israel. The origins of their book—a line by line commentary on Ruth—is itself a story no less moving than the text it interprets. Hannah Mandelbaum is Leon Kass’s granddaughter, and they began to read the book of Ruth together while mourning Amy Kass, Kass’s late and beloved wife of 54 years and Mandelbaum’s grandmother. In so doing, they followed a path that Ruth herself treads, from desolation to gladness, with a distinguished Jewish future unfurling along the way.

Leon Kass is an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, the author of many books, including studies of Genesis and Exodus, and the dean of faculty at Shalem College in Jerusalem. In this conversation, recorded at an event in 2021, he joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to talk about Reading Ruth and writing it with his granddaughter.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Many modern movements and philosophies have invited humans to look for answers to fundamental human questions not outside of themselves—as many traditional religious forms and classical and pre-modern philosophical traditions did—but inside of themselves. This is an impulse to seek contentment through self-realization, to judge a person’s inner attitudes by the extent to which they are authentic to who they truly are. That means that personal thoughts and feelings now govern behavior more than external standards or external channels of ambition. Modern people do not want the self to melt away into something greater, or holier; modern people are self-made.

Self-Made is the title of a forthcoming book from Tara Isabella Burton, the author of Strange Rites and an occasional Mosaic contributor. Strange Rites was about the way old spiritual drives have endowed new and unorthodox practices—like eating organic food or exercising at a fancy gym—with spiritual significance. Self-Made tells the story of how so many people came to believe in the importance of creating their own bespoke personalities, in “branding ourselves,” in self-definition, in fashioning desires into purposes. It’s an important book, and Burton is one the most theologically attuned social critics writing today. Here, she joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to talk about it. Their conversation ranges through many time periods and the philosophical and literary authors who have influenced her thought on these matters. In other words, it’s a bit more abstract that most conversations on this podcast.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of religion. An employer can’t say that he won’t hire Muslims or Mormons or Jews, and he can’t fire one of his employees because of their faith. But how is religion defined? Religion, after all, is both a belief and a practice. It’s not only what happens in the head of the believer—it’s also the actions the believer undertakes based on their religion. That question has been a major point of legal battles relating to religion and the Civil Rights Act over the last sixty years.

In 1977, the Supreme Court heard the case of TWA v Hardison. Larry Hardison was a Christian employee at Trans World Airlines and felt that he could not work on the Sabbath (which his particular Christian denomination kept, like Jews, on Saturdays). TWA tried to reassign him, but that didn’t work and he was eventually fired. When Hardison sued TWA for religious discrimination, the court sided with TWA, arguing that, yes, accommodations should be made for believers, but that TWA tried to make some reasonable accommodations and could not be expected to make more than that. Not everyone on the court agreed; Thurgood Marshall wrote, in his dissent from the majority’s opinion, that “religious diversity has been seriously eroded” by the ruling.

Since then, the decision in TWA v Hardison has held. Yet it may not hold for much longer. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard a new case about an American Christian who, like Larry Hardison, was fired for keeping the Sabbath. That case, Groff v. DeJoy, could be a major moment in the history of religious freedom in America. Nathan Diament, executive director for the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center, is the co-author of the OU’s amicus brief on this case, and also the author of an April 17 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Can the Post Office Force a Christian to Deliver on Sunday?” He joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his argument, the history of the issue, and what the Supreme Court might decide.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

About three weeks ago, Yaakov Amidror, Israel’s former national security advisor and a retired IDF major general, remarked during a radio interview that Israel must prepare for war. “It’s possible,” he said, “that we will reach a point where we have to attack Iran even without American assistance.” Why? Iran, he explained, is relatively confident in  its regional power in light of a recent agreement with its erstwhile rival Saudi Arabia and the fact that America is reducing its involvement in the Middle East.

Amidror's view, therefore, is that Israel must be ready to take independent action to strike Iranian nuclear targets and safeguard its citizens. To explain that assessment, Amidror joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver in conversation here.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

It's sometimes argued that, as material and political and economic conditions improve in a society, that society tends to grow less religious. Polls have seemed to demonstrate for years the validity of this argument in America. Gallup, for instance, recently found that fewer than half of all Americans belong to a house of worship or religious congregation, down from about 70% at the turn of the century some 20 years ago.

But perhaps such polls show do not show that Americans are becoming less religious at all. Perhaps they suggest instead that Americans are simply less devoted to traditional forms of biblical faith. That's the background for the argument advanced in the cover story of the May 2023 issue of Commentary, called "The Return of Paganism." Written by Liel Leibovitz, the editor at large of Tablet, the essay argues that the diminution of traditional forms of Christian worship has not made Americans less religious but has instead opened up space for inescapable religious impulses to find expression in beliefs that are awfully similar to ancient forms of paganism. To talk about these ideas, their manifestations in American culture and politics, and their implications, Leibovitz joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

For patriots, patriotism, or one form of it at least, is a recognition of the obligations that flow when one recognizes all that one owes to previous generations and what they undertook and passed down.

And if one wanted to inculcate that form of patriotism, how would one do it? Rick Richman has a simple and powerful answer to that question. Richman recently published And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel, a book that tries to foster connection to Israel and the Jewish people by telling stories from the past.

Rick’s answer: we have to teach them history. History, as he sees it, has a role to play in the formation of devotion to the Jewish people. It can help Jews see all that they owe by relaying the stories of all that their predecessors have accomplished, and by implication, what Jews now have an opportunity and obligation to pass on to their own descendants.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Earlier this month, Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “The Solution to Israel’s Crisis Might Be in America’s Constitution.” That essay forms the point of departure for this week’s discussion with Levin himself.

Levin does not, of course, think that Israel should simply adopt the American constitution, or any of its particular features. Israel is a sovereign nation with its own history and its own destiny, and no foreign documents will suit it word for word. Yet the American constitution contains within it elemental concepts of democracy, equality, and representation—understandings that the women and men now called upon to establish judicious political structures in Israel might be able to learn from as they structure their own political order.

So here, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, Levin expands on his essay and looks at the American constitution in search of those foundational ideas—and in particular of the ones that might be useful for Israelis at their current moment of political instability.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Nearly 75 years ago, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s sovereignty: a renewed Jewish state, the political expression of the national home of the Jewish people, located in their ancestral homeland.

Many essays and books have been published about the words Ben-Gurion spoke that day—Israel’s Declaration of Independence. But the professor Neil Rogachevsky and his co-author Dov Zigler take a new angle on the declaration and what it means.

In a new book from Cambridge University Press, Israel’s Declaration of Independence: The History and Political Theory of the Nation’s Founding Moment, they look at the drafting process and distill from the elements that endured from draft to draft—as well as the elements that were changed or removed—a political theory of Israel's founding, in which the political purposes of the Israeli project are made most clearly manifest.

How, in other words, did Israel’s founders think about rights, about citizenship, about the justifications of Israel’s sovereignty, an Israeli view of freedom, of civil order, and of religion? That’s the subject of their new book—and the subject of the conversation they have here with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Part of what animates the two sides in Israel’s current judicial-reform crisis has to do with the specific proposals that the Knesset is currently debating. But the crisis is not only about these concrete constitutional issues. It is also a proxy for a larger cultural and sociological conflict pitting different sectors of Israeli society against one another.

Critics of the proposed reforms tend to be in the political center and the political left, to be more secular or at least critical of Israel’s Orthodox rabbinic establishment, and to be comfortable in the vision of Israel passed down by its largely Ashkenazi founding generation. Supporters of the reforms, meanwhile, tend to be on the political right, to be more religious and more supportive of the rabbinate, and to belong to a coalition of Israelis with roots in the Arab Middle East, North Africa, and, in part, the former Soviet Union.

Yehoshua Pfeffer is uniquely positioned to discuss all sides of the issue. A rabbi and the editor of Tzarich Iyun, a magazine of ḥaredi ideas, Pfeffer also clerked on Israel’s Supreme Court. He recently wrote an essay in Tzarich Iyun called “No Longer a Minority: Behind the Veil of Israel’s Public Unrest.” He joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss that essay and the broader schisms in Israeli society today.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

News broke last week that China had mediated a restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Afterwards, analysts of the Middle East wondered what that means for the quiet relations that Israel and Saudi Arabia had been building recently thanks primarily to their joint opposition to Iran. Had Israeli domestic politics turned Saudi Arabia away? Did the American withdrawal from the Middle East over the last decade create a vacuum that China saw an opportunity to fill? How, if it all, did this relate to reports of recent liberalization in Saudi society, or the ongoing protests in Iran? Would this deal breathe new strength into the latter regime at the very moment that it has acquired new fighter jets from Russia and grows closer to breakout nuclear capacity?

Jonathan Schachter, one such observer of the Middle East, thinks that the Iran-Saudi deal is, in significant measure, a diplomatic signal directed at President Biden and the United States. In conversation here with host Jonathan Silver, he looks at that deal in light of a set of Saudi announcements that were released just one day before. Those announcements hint at what might induce Saudi Arabia to formalize its relations with Israel and even more deeply root itself in the American-led, Western alliance structure. He believes that the Saudis are sending America a question: do you, the United States, want to see us go in the direction of our Thursday announcement, or do you want us to go in the direction of our Friday one?

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

To understand the dramas, disagreements, and protests roiling Israeli politics at this moment requires an understanding of the government’s proposed judicial reforms, as well as the history of Israel’s Supreme Court and its relationship to the Knesset. It also requires knowledge of Israeli society, and how the founding generations of Israel’s political leadership—which tended to be Ashkenazi, secular, and oriented to the political left—have given way to an Israeli population that tends to be more ethnically diverse, more traditional and religious, and oriented towards the political right.

That history, in turn, has got to be mapped onto the fact that Israel is also home to subcommunities that each have different historical relations to one another and to the government, and that is each pursuing different interests and outcomes. To understand this Israeli moment, in other words, requires understanding how each Israeli sector—Arab, Haredi, secular, national religious—relates to the nation as a whole.

This week, Jonathan Silver discusses the judicial reforms and those deeper causes together with the professor, media personality, and author Gadi Taub, as well as the political scientist, and former state department official Peter Berkowitz.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

This year, Koren Publishers released a new edition of the book of Esther. It contains the complete, unabridged, and Hebrew text of Esther, the same text found in any other volume of the Hebrew Bible. But the rest of it is all new: a graphic novel version of the story illustrated by Yael Nathan and masterminded by Jordan B. Gorfinkel. Gorfinkel, known commonly as Gorf, was an editor at DC Comics for nearly a decade, where he managed its signature Batman franchise. The themes of American superheroes—who disguise their true identity and then at the opportune moment cast off their disguise for a higher purpose—bear not a little on the text of Esther.

This week on the podcast, Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver joins Gorfinkel to discuss the editorial, artistic, and design decisions that went into the presentation of the graphic novel Esther.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

One of the great debates in the history of Jewish theology is about how to reconcile two contradictory truths. First, that God is beyond human comprehension, and—unlike pagan deities—does not have a corporeal presence and is not subject to human emotions. Second, that the Hebrew Bible often describes God in human, bodily terms, as do the liturgy and rabbinic elaborations on Scripture.

Thus, in one of the most poignant moments of the liturgical year, Jewish worshippers refer to God as Avinu Malkeinu, “our Father, our King.” This is but one of many Jewish prayers that, following the biblical text, describe God as a father. And God has long been thought of in paternal terms in the Jewish imagination.

Yet, as Moses Maimonides and other Jewish philosophers never tire of reminding us, God exists beyond such human categories as sex, and can’t be fully comprehended as a father. Therefore it is no contradiction that there are also aspects of womanhood and motherhood—specifically its creative, generative capabilities—that can be used in describing God. And perhaps that is why the Hebrew Bible sometimes portrays God not only as a father but also as a mother. Malka Simkovich, whose essay on this subject was published in August 2022 in the Christian Century, discusses biblical portrayals of God’s maternal love with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

In the early years of the 19th century, some German scholars decided to read and analyze Jewish texts in a new way. They looked at Jewish sources through the eyes of academic scholarship, rather than with the rabbinic ones, or literary ones, or folk ones which had kept Judaism alive. Their approach came to be called, in German, Wissenschaft des Judentums—the science of Judaism—and it was to be dispassionate and rigorous. Unlike a rabbi, a scholar could pursue the truth without concern that the consequences of his research might affect the religious life of the Jewish community. And, by adopting sound methodological tools shared by other academic disciplines, the practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums could bring their work into conversation with scholars in other fields. It was, in other words, the beginning of what is today in the universities called Jewish studies.

Since this academic discipline was premised on the need to abstract from Judaism’s particularity, it is not surprising that some other scholars of Judaism were suspicious of it. Judaism cannot escape its particularity, these scholars argued, nor can it escape its theological and covenantal doctrine of election or chosenness, nor can it escape its self-understanding in national terms, ancient or modern.

For a time, in the second half of the twentieth century, the particularists steered the ship of Jewish studies. Many young scholars recognized their work in relation to a moral obligation to preserve and replenish what the Shoah had nearly destroyed. This generation was propelled into the field not out of an embarrassment at Jewish distinctiveness, but instead out of a desire to recognize Jewish distinctiveness. Many scholars conceived of their work as a kind of redemption, an effort to begin reassembling a shattered people.

And what now, as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century?

Fewer and fewer scholars of that generation are active. Is Jewish studies reverting to form, and returning to its universalizing and abstracting roots? And what explains the ideological and intellectual animus against Israel and the Orthodox that seems to be in the air? Together, Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic, and Joshua Karlip, a professor of Jewish studies at Yeshiva University and the author of a recent Commentary essay called “The Demise of Jewish Studies in America—and the Rise of Jewish Studies in Israel,” look at this moment in the history of Jewish studies in the United States.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

When the United States entered the Second World War, it needed to fight against both the Nazis in Europe and the Middle East and the Japanese in the Pacific. To manage that gargantuan task, American military planners divided the regions of the earth into different areas of responsibility, within which a single authority would unify and command forces from every military branch and service. That structure has lasted through today, so that the United States now has eleven combatant commands.

Due to longstanding tension between Israel and its Arab neighbors, it had been included in the US military’s European Command, even though much of the rest of the Middle East was organized as a part of its Central Command, known as CENTCOM. That Israel was included in European Command for all those decades had some benefits, like greater interaction with NATO. But in recent years its presence there limited America and Israel’s ability to work together; as the cold war drew down, and the war on terror ramped up, European Command was no longer at the cutting edge of military strategy, attention, or resources.

The Abraham Accords surfaced a new public friendliness between Israel and many of the Arab neighbors. In recognition of this fact, Israel was officially transferred to CENTCOM in January 2021, making possible enhanced coordination among the US military, the IDF, and regional Arab forces.

This week, Richard Goldberg, a veteran Middle East observer and foreign-policy analyst, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan silver to look at the consequences and import of Israel’s move to CENTCOM. They use the recent joint exercises undertaken by the US military and the Israel Defense Forces, known as Juniper Oak 23. Operating together on sea, land, and air, the joint exercises were widely thought to have been designed to convey a signal to Iran.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

“Prayer is the language of the soul in conversation with God. It is the most intimate gesture of the religious life, and the most transformative.” Those lines are from an essay called “Understanding Jewish Prayer” by Jonathan Sacks, the late chief rabbi of the United Kingdom. “As the sea smooths the stone,” he writes, “as the repeated hammer-blows of the sculptor shape the marble, so prayer—cyclical, tracking the rhythms of time itself—gradually wears away the jagged edges of our character, turning it into a work of devotional art.” To pray, he says, is to be “brushed by the wings of eternity.”

Descriptions such as these are inspiring, and, based on them, one might expect prayer to be a powerful emotional experience. Sometimes it can be. But often it isn’t. The structures of prayer in the traditional Jewish liturgy sometimes impede the very sentiments that prayer promises to kindle. That tension is the subject of this week’s podcast conversation between Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver and the president of Shalem College Russ Roberts. Roberts recently published a short essay titled “The Agnostic’s Guide to Jewish Prayer” in which he confesses that “The words by themselves don’t work for me.” Still, he’s prayed three times a day for more than 30 years. Why? “I prayed to have prayed.”

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

To understand the inner life of the biblical world, one must look to Egypt.

In the Hebrew Bible, it plays a role in the psyche of the Jews as the great other, the great alternative. Thus, when the land of Israel suffers from famine, Egypt is a land of plenty. While the land of Israel is subject to the limits and vicissitudes of nature, the Egyptian regime is dedicated to conquering nature and overcoming its cycles of plenty and poverty. And where the land of Israel is full of shepherds wandering in the wilderness encountering God, Egypt, by contrast, is a teeming, tight, narrow imperial capital.

It's in Egypt, that the children of Israel begin to assume a national identity (or, at least the Egyptians think they do). Once freed from Egyptian bondage, they are haunted by memories of Egypt. And as they build their own nation in Israel, they become the anti-Egypt—in moral sensibility, in legal and constitutional structures, in theology.

This week, the podcast is joined by Joshua Berman, a rabbi, academic Bible scholar, and the author of several books, including, most recently, Ani Maamin, about biblical criticism, historical truth, and faith. Over the last year, Berman has been leading groups on an Exodus in reverse—on tours back to Egypt to discover that country’s biblical sites. Together with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he talks about his journeys and reflects on how his engagement with Egypt has deepened his understanding of the formative texts of the Jewish people.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

As 2023 began, Israeli opponents of the new government have been organizing protests and demonstrations. Manifest there, and in the newspapers and magazines and television programs of the center and left, is the fevered and frustrated political rhetoric that one expects to hear from politicians who’ve just lost an election and want back into the game. Rhetoric on the subject outside of Israel—expressed by a great many American Jews—is just as heated, and has led some to withdraw their support for Israel altogether.

What's behind the Jewish hysteria? Joining the podcast this week to discuss the matter is Elliott Abrams, a veteran observer of Israel and foreign policy who is also the chairman of Tikvah. For the February edition of Commentary, Abrams has written an essay called “Jewish Hysterics and Israel’s New Government.” Guided by his essay, Abrams and Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver look at why this government has provoked such passionate emotions in the hearts of American Jews.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

The Uighur people is an ethnic group historically located in central and east Asia; the bulk of its population lives western China. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has severely restricted Uighur religious life and has detained many Uighurs in mass re-education and work camps. On this week's podcast, inspired by a conversation he had with the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the democracy activist Carl Gershman joins us to think about whether the Jewish experience can offer anything to the Uighurs. Gershman, who founded the National Endowment for Democracy in 1984, talks with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver about the plight of the Uighurs, how Jews have improbably survived throughout the ages, and what survival strategies the Uighurs might be able to apply to their own situation today.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

In 2022, we convened 46 new conversations, probing some of the most interesting and consequential subjects in modern Jewish life: the war-torn Jewish community in Ukraine, the nature of modern sexual ethics, the prospects of Israeli judicial reform, how to read the book of Esther, and the passing of one of the great Jewish critics of the 20th century. In conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, each guest brought his or her unique expertise or viewpoint to some timely issue or enduring question that stands before the Jewish people.

In this episode, we present some of our favorite conversations from this year. Guests featured include the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, the Chabad writer Dovid Margolin, the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba, the British intellectual Douglas Murray, the Israeli MK and legal reformer Simcha Rothman, the rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, the journalist Matti Friedman, the professor Ronna Burger, the Christian leader Robert Nicholson, Commentary editor John Podhoretz, and the returning Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.