From exploding pagers to airstrikes and a possible ground invasion, what are the IDF’s goals in Lebanon?

Everyone knows that on October 7, Hamas perpetrated a horrible, genocidal attack on Israel. In response to that attack, Israel committed itself to neutralizing the military threat from Gaza. On October 8, not wanting to seem any less committed to the eradication of the Jewish state, the Lebanon-based terror group Hizballah began to shoot rockets and missiles into Israel’s northern territories. Nearly a full year later, Israeli towns and villages within Hizballah rocket range remain empty, and many tens of thousands of Israelis live as evacuees in hotels and apartments.

Week after week, month after month, the rockets from Lebanese territory have not stopped. Israel has conducted occasional defensive operations, but about one week ago, the Israelis unmistakably increased the tempo and intensity of their own attacks, taking the fight to the territory of the adversary rather than continuing to bear its missile barrage.

The retired Israeli brigadier general and defense strategist, Assaf Orion, joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss this situation. Assaf is the Liz and Mony Rueven International Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and a prolific author and thinker not only on the security architecture of the Middle East and Israeli military planning and strategy, but also on China and great-power competition.

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.

A few weeks ago on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a new school opened its doors and welcomed its inaugural classes of students. Emet Classical Academy is America’s first Jewish classical school and a project of Tikvah. It’s designed for 5th- to 12th-grade students, and is an animated by a vision of the importance of Western civilization, the responsibilities of American citizenship, high standards of excellence in classical languages, math and science, and the power of music, poetry, and the visual arts. Joining that is a full curriculum in the Hebrew language, the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, and the history, politics, and meaning of modern Israel.

The establishment of Emet is even more significant given the current cultural, political, and ideological moment. Many of its pillars are deemed irrelevant, if not shameful, at the country's elite, ideologically charged private schools, many of which were abandoned by students in Emet’s first classes. To discuss all this, Emet’s founding head of school, Abe Unger, joins host Jonathan Silver. Together, they talk about Emet’s founding, the cultural and educational questions to which Emet holds itself forth as an answer, and what it’s like to learn in Emet.

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 academic year of 2023-2024 was an annus horribilis for Jewish students on American campuses. But, for all the attention paid to the likes of Columbia and UCLA, one can zoom out and ask whether the protest activity was evenly distributed across American colleges and universities, or whether it was concentrated at certain kinds of schools?

Marc Novicoff, the associate editor of the Washington Monthly and a freelance writer, asked that question in June, and found that the protests and encampments were correlated with the tuition price, the level of student-body wealth, and the prestige of the university. As the school year begins once again, Marc sits down with host Jonathan Silver to explain his findings, and describe how he tested the proposition that elite colleges are much more likely to be the home of pro-Hamas, anti-Israel demonstrations.

For a while after October 7, the war produced an atmosphere of national solidarity in Israel, quieting some of the tensions that had divided Israelis from one another with a special intensity throughout the previous year. That quiet now seems to be ending.

There was always bound to be a tension between two of the Israeli government’s primary war aims: that of rescuing the hostages, and that of defeating Hamas until total victory. The government insists that it is pursuing both of these aims, but many Israelis don’t believe it. Many of them are persuaded that Prime Minister Netanyahu is prolonging the war and foregoing opportunities to secure the hostages’ freedom because the war keeps his political coalition together and that keeps him in power. Tens of thousands of Israelis, mapping more or less onto the tens of thousands of judicial-reform opponents seen last year, are now in the streets protesting.

Then when, last weekend, the bodies of six more murdered hostages were retrieved from Rafah, the anger overflowed its bounds and spilled out onto the streets. In the protestors’ view, it was Netanyahu who could have prevented these horrible deaths. Netanyahu could have gone along with Hamas’s cease-fire terms. Netanyahu could have patriotically apologized and resigned.

Liel Leibovitz, the editor-at-large of Tablet, thinks otherwise. Host Jonathan Silver speaks this week with Leibovitz about a recent essay analyzing the roots and effects of the protests themselves, "'Bring them Home’ Is Bringing Us to the Brink.” In it, Leibovitz looks at the protesters’ motivations, at a style of politics he thinks has been imported from America, and deeper questions raised by the Israelis marching against their government. In their conversation, Silver and Leibovitz try to peer a little more deeply into the ongoing drama of modern Zionism and the meaning of modern Israel.