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.