Last week, Michael Smuss died at age ninety-nine. Born in 1926, he was the last surviving fighter of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. His passing marks the end of an era, and brings to a close a chapter of living memory. Now the responsibility to tell this story passes fully to us.

In the spring of 1943, against impossible odds and with almost no weapons, a small group of young Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw staged a revolt that would reverberate through history. This was not just a military engagement, but a story of Jewish resistance, dignity, and moral choice under unimaginable circumstances.

Before the war, Warsaw was home to nearly 400,000 Jews—the largest Jewish community in Europe. This was a vibrant, diverse Jewish population: workers and intellectuals, religious and secular, Yiddish-speakers and Polish-speakers. Jews published daily newspapers, ran theaters, fielded soccer teams. They were 40 percent of Warsaw’s population.

Then came September 1939. Within weeks, Warsaw fell to the Germans. Over the next year, the Nazis systematically stripped Jews of their rights—blocked bank accounts, forced them to wear special armbands, and conscripted them into slave labor. In November 1940, they sealed 400,000 Jews into a ghetto of just two square miles, then forced in 150,000 more from nearby towns and cities. With official rations of just 184 calories per day and no heating, 100,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. But 80 percent stayed alive through extraordinary resourcefulness—smuggling food, establishing soup kitchens, creating underground factories. This too was resistance.

In July 1942, the Germans began mass deportations to Treblinka, where most were murdered upon arrival. Over seven weeks, they sent 300,000 Jews to the gas chambers, with the help of a Jewish police force. By September, only 60,000 remained.

At that point, something shifted. Survivors asked why they hadn’t fought back. The shame and anger became a catalyst. Between September and April, the ghetto prepared. They built 750 bunkers with electricity, water, and food stocks. When the Germans came on April 19, 1943, expecting to round up the Jews with no resistance, they were met with gunfire, grenades, and mines. The Germans thought it would take three days. It took 27—because the entire community had transformed the ghetto into a network of underground revolt.

To tell this story, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Professor Samuel Kassow of Trinity College. They discuss the courage of the fighters as well as the resistance of those who built the bunkers, who preserved cultural life, who maintained their dignity in ways that have largely been forgotten. They also confront difficult questions about heroism, survival, and how to fulfill the sacred obligations of remembering.

Now that there is a fragile cease-fire in place, it’s time to ask what to do with Gaza’s intricate system of tunnels.

There is, of course, nothing new about the use of tunnels in war. From ancient Jerusalem to Vietnam to Islamic State in Mosul, militaries have dealt with underground warfare for millennia. But the scale, purpose, and strategic role of Hamas’s tunnel network is fundamentally different from anything we’ve seen before. Gaza is approximately 140 square miles, and there are at least 600 miles of tunnels below its terrain. Before the war began, there were likely more tunnels in Gaza than there were roads.

But it’s not just the density of Gaza’s tunnels that is unprecedented. For the first time in history, a military force built its entire strategy around its subterranean defenses, deliberately constructing tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure—schools, hospitals, homes—not to protect civilians, but to use them as human shields. This wasn’t merely a tactical decision; it was the primary means by which Hamas intended to achieve its political goals.

John Spencer, a leading expert on urban warfare and military history and executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute, joins the Tikvah Podcast to discuss this unprecedented military challenge.

He has visited Gaza six times since October 7, studying these tunnels firsthand and speaking with the Israeli commanders who’ve had to fight in them. Today, he walks us through how Israeli forces had to remap the battlefield and reimagine warfare, learning to fight simultaneously above and below ground. We’ll discuss the psychological demands of entering these tunnels, the innovative tactics that turned Hamas’s greatest defensive asset into an Israeli offensive advantage, and the immense challenge that remains: what do you do with hundreds of miles of tunnels now that active hostilities have paused?

Written by Tomer Persico, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, the book is the biography of the idea that all human beings—not just kings or heroes—are created in the image and likeness of God.

At the heart of the book is a deep irony: the religious idea of imago Dei contains within it the seeds of secularization; this religious innovation developed into a concept that would marginalize religion itself. The very emphasis on individual conscience and human equality that Judaism and Christianity cultivated eventually led to further questioning of law, and then authority, and then even the disciplines of religious life. That is, over the course of millennia, one of God’s pronouncements led some to question God’s providence and even God’s existence.

Now, if you’re listening as an orthodox believer or theological traditionalist, you may be tempted to object: surely modern secularism represents a betrayal of the biblical depiction of the human condition, not an outgrowth of it, and there is much truth to that position. But Persico’s argument is directed primarily at the committed liberal democrat who believes deeply in individual rights, human dignity, and equality, but who may not realize where these convictions come from. To that person, Persico seems to be arguing: even you, especially you, are an inheritor of a biblical idea. Your deepest moral commitments didn’t spring from nowhere. They have a genealogy that begins in Genesis.

On today’s podcast Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver sits down with Persico to discuss what all this implies.