We are now in a period in the liturgical calendar of the Jewish people known as the Three Weeks, which begins on the seventeenth day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, and continues through the ninth day of the month of Av. It is a period of mourning and commemoration of many experiences of tragedy and sorrow in the Jewish past, and it culminates on the Ninth of Av, or Tisha b’Av, because on that day, in the year 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar’s forces destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem. It was also on that day, in the year 70 CE, that Roman forces destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem. These events the Jewish people, together, as a nation, remember at this time of year.

But how can a person remember an event that he or she never experienced? That is the organizing question that the rabbi and historian Jacob J. Schacter asks in his eight-part video course, “The Jewish Meaning of Memory.” That course, like all of Tikvah’s video courses, is available free of charge at courses.tikvah.org.

This week, to elevate our study during the Three Weeks,  we are broadcasting its first episode.

October 7th exposed to everyone what many in and around the academy have known for years: American universities—not all, but many—are failing catastrophically to educate the next generation about the history, cultures, and politics of the Middle East. Instead of producing students versed in the region’s complexities, these institutions have become factories for ideological activism. And nowhere is this truer than in the case of Israel and its history: Zionism in the modern university classroom is rarely examined as a movement of national liberation but instead as a caricature of colonialism, racism, repression, and occupation. And outside of the classroom, we’ve seen the most prestigious campuses in the United States transform into nodes of anti-Israel activism and Jew hatred.

These are immense and long-standing problems. But instead of just diagnosing their sources and discussing their perils, today we’re going to talk to someone who’s actually done something about it.

Robert Satloff saw this crisis clearly. Having published back in 2001 the eminent historian Martin Kramer’s short volume on the corruption of Middle East Studies, Ivory Towers on Sand, Satloff has spent decades watching the field drift toward anti-Israel political advocacy. As the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, he decided to stop complaining and found his own professional master’s program.

Working with Pepperdine University, the Washington Institute has established a completely new graduate program designed to train policy professionals with rigorous scholarship and historical accuracy, without anti-Israel bias. The program offers full scholarships, accepts no foreign funding, is fully accredited, and will convene its inaugural cohort in Washington, DC this fall.

This week, America celebrates 249 years of independence. As the countdown begins to our 250th birthday, our semiquincentennial, it is natural to ask what citizenship means to us as Americans, and as American Jews. How do we fulfill our obligations not just to preserve what we’ve inherited, but to renew it for future generations? These aren’t just political questions—they’re moral ones, rooted in how we understand our responsibilities to one another and to the institutions that shape our common life. 

To address those questions, this week’s podcast is going to do something a little different. Rather than host a conversation, we bring you a speech by one of the great teachers of American civics: Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs.

Speaking at the 2024 Jewish Leadership Conference, Levin offered a meditation on what we can learn from the biblical figure of Nehemiah—drawing on the story the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls to understand how we must approach the renewal of American culture today. His central insight is striking: just as Nehemiah’s workers rebuilt Jerusalem with “a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other,” we too must simultaneously rebuild and defend our institutions.

This is a speech that bridges ancient biblical wisdom to the challenges of American society, showing how the Hebrew Bible speaks directly to our moment of cultural dissolution and the opportunity for renewal. If you’re inspired by this kind of discussion—the intersection of Jewish ideas and public life—you might want to consider attending this year’s Jewish Leadership Conference, featuring Herzl Prize laureates Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, and Dan Senor. You can find information about the 2025 conference at www.jewishleadershipconference.org.

On June 22, American B-2 bombers dropped hundreds of tons of explosives on three nuclear sites in Iran—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Right after President Trump announced that the pilots were out of Iranian air space, the world started to learn the details of Operation Midnight Hammer, the extraordinary American mission to neutralize Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. News coverage started immediately—and some of the most incisive and careful analysis appeared outside of the legacy media. Some of the best news coverage in English could be found at the Free Press, the Daily Wire, and the Call Me Back podcast.

Rather than bring on the guests who’ve already offered up their analysis in those venues, we thought it would be valuable to have a series of conversations on dimensions of this war—not only Operation Midnight Hammer, but the last two weeks beginning with the Israeli airstrikes on Iran—that take up some of the deeper, less immediate concerns. War is violent and bloody. But war is also a teacher, and it reveals things about the nations who wage it.

“Living Through History: Learning from the Twelve-Day War” is a series of conversations from the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic and featuring its host, Jonathan Silver. These include a discussion with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik on what the war reveals about providence and Jewish history; with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour about what the war reveals about the clash of civilizations; with the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, about what the war reveals about the U.S.- Israel relationship at this moment in Zionist history; and with Victor Davis Hanson about what the war reveals about the American interest. Today you can listen to the first, with Rabbi Soloveichik.

On June 24, members of New York City’s Democratic party will select their nominee for the mayoral election that is scheduled to take place in November of this year. As of last year, 56 percent of registered voters in New York were Democrats, but even that number doesn’t fully express the extent of the Democratic party’s hold over the city’s affairs. Democrats hold a supermajority on the city council and control the three major citywide offices—mayor, comptroller, and public advocate—and all three of New York City’s congressional representatives are Democrats. New York is a Democratic city, and it is widely believed that the winner of the Democratic primary will be heavily favored in the fall vote. Even though the official election isn’t until November, the most important element in that election will be determined next week.

Because New York remains the most important Jewish city in the United States, next week’s primary election will have outsized consequences for more Jews than any other municipal election. To discuss the candidates and to explore the Jewish questions that are going to be put before the next mayor, Jonathan Silver is joined by Jay Lefkowitz, a senior partner at Kirkland and Ellis, an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, and a member of Tikvah’s board of trustees. Lefkowitz also served the George W. Bush administration as the United States envoy on human rights in North Korea and the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy.The conversation touches on anti-Israel and anti-Jewish violence, domestic terror, and education and funding in haredi schools—all of which are election issues in way or another—and on what matters most to Jewish voters.

The conversation touches on anti-Israel and anti-Jewish violence, domestic terror, and education and funding in haredi schools—all of which are election issues in way or another—and on what matters most to Jewish voters.

On April 22, 2025, Islamist terrorists struck Indian civilians in Kashmir. Twenty-six people were killed, most of them Hindu tourists. This attack would trigger what analysts now call the “88-Hour War”—a brief but intense conflict between India and Pakistan that ended only after American diplomatic intervention. This four-day war revealed a shift in the strategic landscape that only decades ago would have been unthinkable. When Indian forces engaged Pakistani positions, they deployed Israeli-made drones. When diplomatic support mattered, Israel stood unambiguously with India. Meanwhile, Pakistan relied heavily on Chinese weapons and Turkish diplomatic backing. The conflicts of the Middle East were being played out on the Indian subcontinent.

On this week’s podcast, Jonathan Silver is joined by Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a June 4 article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Mideast Power Plays in India and Pakistan.” In it, Dhume explains that India—once among Israel’s harshest critics and a reflexive supporter of the Palestinian cause—has become Israel’s largest arms customer, accounting for 34 percent of Israeli weapons exports. That story about arms exports then opens up onto a larger story about how two democracies, each seeing themselves as ancient civilizations facing modern terrorist threats, have found common cause. Silver and Dhume discuss the transformation of Israel-India relations from cold-war hostility to strategic partnership, by focusing on the arms trade between them.

On April 13, 2025, an arsonist set fire to the residence of the governor of Pennsylvania. When apprehended, he told law-enforcement officers that he did so using Molotov cocktails. The attack took place just hours after the governor, an American Jew, and his Jewish family, had concluded their Passover seder.

The next month, a far-left activist murdered two members of the Israeli embassy staff in the name of Palestine, having gone to a Jewish venue hosting a Jewish event in order to hunt down and kill Jewish people. Not long after, on May 28, a Michigan man was apprehended outside of a Jewish preschool, after threatening Jewish parents and children. It was later discovered that he had attempted to acquire firearms and had planned to kill members of the school.

Then there was the most recent news. On June 1, an Egyptian national came to a solidarity walk for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado. There, he threw Molotov cocktails and used a homemade flamethrower in order to burn the attendees. While hurling the explosives, he was recorded yelling “Free Palestine,” and other like phrases.

A new season of violence has descended upon the Jews of America. Or, perhaps, one ought to say that a new season of violence has descended upon America with the Jews as its central of target, revealing for all to see the dangers of domestic terrorism.

The historian and analyst of anti-Semitism Jeffrey Herf, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, joins Jonathan Silver to discuss this spike in domestic terrorism. It is his contention that the phenomenon has an antecedent in the 1960s radical movements that, then as now, transformed leftist ideas into violent action. The slogan “globalize the intifada,” has been a hallmark of campus and leftist protest since October 7, but it has slipped the bounds of speech and resulted in violence, with deadly results. Drawing on the work of the writer Paul Berman, Herf goes on to argue that if history is any guide, violence against Jews is likely to increase. He laid this out in an article he published in the Free Press just hours after the Boulder attack.

It’s not uncommon, to put the matter lightly, to find Jewish Americans well represented in the legal field. But the conventional storybook narrative of how Jews rise to occupy positions of promise and prestige in the law tends to emphasize the gradual softening or quieting of religious observance in favor of a broader, more secular American identity.

I remember back in 2010 when Elena Kagan had been nominated by President Obama to serve on the Supreme Court. In response to a question from Senator Lindsay Graham about a domestic terrorist event that took place on December 25, 2009, Elena Kagan—then dean of Harvard Law and since 2010 a Supreme Court justice—explained that, on that day, “like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” It was funny and charming and played perfectly to the room and the cameras looking on.

But Elena Kagan’s remark also illustrates, to me at least, precisely the sort of culturally Jewish secular sensibility that you wouldn’t be surprised to find in elite positions like the ones she’s held. There are, of course, religiously observant Jewish lawyers, some of them extremely accomplished and some of them having contributed greatly to the American constitutional order. 

Matthew Solomson is not only a lawyer but a federal judge who represents a different model and different sense of identity, one in which deep Orthodox commitment and distinguished public service not only coexist but reinforce one another. Judge Solomson was elevated to the federal bench in 2020, and last month the president designated him as the chief judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims.

Rather than abandoning his Jewish observance and religious devotion in the name of secular citizenship, Judge Solomson is staking out a different path, and his example suggests that America is strengthened when its citizens bring their deepest commitments—including religious commitments—to bear on public service. In conversation with Jonathan Silver, he addresses the questions his career raises about the very nature of American democracy, the meaning of Jewish life in America, and the possibilities for religious citizens to serve the United States in an increasingly secular age.

In 2019, Netflix released a six-episode miniseries starring the English comedian and actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Cohen played an Israeli spy, Eli Cohen. The latter Cohen was a Jewish immigrant from Egypt who, once in Israel, was recruited and trained by the Mossad. He then assumed the identity of Kamel Amin Thaabet, a wealthy Arab businessman who, having eventually moved to Damascus, became a backer and confidant of key officials in the Baath party. From his home in Syria, Cohen as Thaabet dispatched vast quantities of military and political intelligence to the Israelis throughout the early 1960s. Viewers of the Netflix show, The Spy, see all of this dramatized, as they also see Cohen’s eventual capture, torture, and hanging. The Netflix series, and the story it brings to a new generation of viewers, is true.

Eli Cohen is celebrated as one of Israel’s great intelligence agents, one of its great mistaravim, or those who assume the identity of Arabs to carry out their missions. There are streets and institutions and many children and even, in the Golan, a town in Israel named after Eli Cohen. For 60 years the Israeli government has tried to persuade, bribe, cajole, and if necessary steal the Syrian government’s Eli Cohen file. During the rule of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, they could not get them. With the fall of the Assad regime, and with a new regime in Damascus looking to curry favor with the United States and the West, earlier this week the Syrians handed over some 2,500 documents from Syria’s Eli Cohen file.

This week, Yossi Melman—a Haaretz reporter, journalist, and author of some eight English-language books on Israeli intelligence—joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to talk about Eli Cohen, what Israel has reclaimed, and why this story remains so important some six decades on.

Born in 1928 in Manchester, Paul Johnson was a British Catholic who while at the helm of the New Statesman liked to boast that he had met every British prime minister from Churchill to Blair and every American president from Eisenhower to George W. Bush—the latter of whom awarded Paul Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006.

After publishing a fascinating, spanning history of Christianity, Paul Johnson grew ever more curious about Judaism, Christianity’s elder brother in faith. That fascination led, in 1987, to the publication of his A History of the Jews, which until now is perhaps the best paced, best written single-volume history of the Jewish idea in English. It was sometimes quipped that it was given as a gift to half the bar mitzvahs in America. Paul Johnson died at the age of ninety-four in January 2023.

Shortly after Johnson’s death, the Jewish historian J.J. Kimche published an analysisA History of the Jews. Kimche provokes some very fascinating questions, including why this lifelong Catholic took such a sympathetic view and lively interest—theological, historical, social, cultural—in the Jews. What does such a non-Jew see in Jewish history, and what can we, as Jews, learn from his external perspective on our own past? Kimche joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss these questions.

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 May 4, 2025, a ballistic missile traveling up to sixteen times faster than the speed of sound struck ground close to the terminal at Ben-Gurion airport, halting flight traffic and leaving a crater at the point of impact. It was the first time that the airport buildings themselves have been so close to a successful missile attack.

This particular missile was fired from a distance of 1,300 miles, from Yemen, the Arab nation situated to the south of Saudi Arabia, whose coastline opens up to the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the crucial Bab al-Mandab Straight, a narrow chokepoint in global shipping that allows ships to travel from India and points east through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean.

The missile was shot by the Houthis, a Shiite Islamist organization that is supported by, and operates in coordination with, Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They have been firing rockets at Israel for many months. Back in July 2024, they successfully struck an apartment building near the U.S. embassy’s Tel Avi branch. And since October 2023, they have been targeting commercial naval craft in the Red Sea.

Since March 2025, the United States has been conducting a campaign of air and naval strikes against the Houthis. But after the Ben-Gurion airport attack of May 4, the Israelis took matters into their own hands. On May 5, some 30 Israeli military aircraft attacked targets in Houthi-controlled Yemen, including the al-Imran cement factory and the Hodeidah port. On May 6, the Israelis destroyed the airport in Sana’a.

This week, we focus on the Houthis, their place in Yemen, their relationship to Iran, and the threats they pose towards global shipping and Israel. Discussing these topics with us is Ari Heistein, who works in business development in Israel, is a close intellectual collaborator with the former Israeli chief of defense intelligence Amos Yadlin, and until recently served as chief of staff at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. This podcast was recorded on Tuesday morning, May 6, 2025.

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.

President Trump and his team came into the White House determined to reverse the course of American foreign policy. Most every president does. It’s what President Obama wished to do vis-à-vis President Bush, President Trump vis-à-vis President Obama, and President Biden vis-à-vis President Trump. Where Biden was for, Trump would be against; where Biden was left, Trump would be right; where Biden was blue; Trump would be red. Every question of foreign policy with any relevance whatsoever to the cut and thrust of domestic American politics would henceforth be set in the opposite direction.

In the Middle East, President Trump thought that his predecessor was too acquiescent to Iran, too squeamish about empowering the Israelis to protect themselves, and too untroubled by Houthi attacks. For President Trump and many of his supporters, the quintessential act of the Biden administration was the withdrawal from Afghanistan in the fall of 2021—a symbol of American weakness, incompetence, fecklessness, and delusion.

With the start of his second term as president, Donald Trump set about restoring the maximum-pressure campaign on Iran. He confronted—with aggressive military force—the Houthis. He restored the American supply of materiel to Israel. And yet, these decisions do not tell the whole story of the Trump administration’s conduct of American foreign policy during its first hundred days. The foreign-policy record, the disorder, the personnel, and some possible future steps of the administration seem confused.

To bring forth some clarity from this confusion, and to shed light on the murky picture of the Trump administration’s approach to the Middle East, Michael Doran joins this week’s podcast. Doran is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, contributor to Mosaic, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and the Free Press, and the co-host, with Gadi Taub, of a new podcast called Israel Update.

This conversation was recorded live for an audience of members of the Tikvah Society. If you’d like to learn more about supporting our work, and joining the Tikvah Society, please visit Tikvah.org/Society.

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 Catholic cardinal Jorge Mario Bergolio ascended to the papacy in 2013. In honor of Saint Francis of Assisi, he chose as his papal name Francis. For a dozen years he was the head of the Catholic Church and a major figure in the moral and cultural life of the West. After a prolonged illness, Pope Francis died on April 21 of this year.

There are over 1.4 billion Catholics in the world, and they play a significant role in the production of Western culture and Western opinion. The foundational structures of Europe are derivative of, or inseparably woven into, the history of the Catholic Church. And whether the pope strengthens or undermines the moral confidence of Western nations matters: it mattered during the papacy of John Paul II during the cold war; it mattered in the confrontation with jihadist terror during the papacy of Benedict XVI; and it cannot but be a factor in the horizons of Western civilization. This podcast focuses on a particular dimension of the late Pope Francis’s legacy, namely, how he engaged the Jewish people, Israel, and the Middle East.

To discuss the legacy of Pope Francis, the Church’s engagement in the Middle East, and who might be the next Catholic pope, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver sat down with Father Benedict Kiely. Kiely was born in London, ordained a Catholic priest in Canterbury, and has spent most of his ministry in the United States. In 2014, he founded Nasarean.org, a charity that supports persecuted Christians around the world, and especially in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. One of his aims is to see the church grow closer to its Middle Eastern roots, and that means, in some grand spiritual way, closer too to its Jewish roots.

For Catholics, the question of the Church’s attitude toward Zionism and Israel is not perhaps among the most pressing of ecclesiastical priorities. One would not expect it to weigh heavily on the Vatican’s conclave in the election of the next pope. This conversation thus takes the perspective of an outsider.

Moreover, there are very deep theological matters that will always divide the Catholic Church from the Jewish people. And some of those very deep theological matters also shape the way that Catholics tend to think about Zionism and the modern state of Israel. The Jewish people are animated by a belief in covenantal chosenness, and a sense of sacred obligation to uphold God’s ways in their actions, in their families, and in their nation. That obligation is structured by tradition and law, and it is expressed nationally in the people of Israel, which, after a long hiatus in exile, again has a sovereign state in the land of its fathers. For Catholics, of course, the Church is the new Israel, and despite very welcome and laudable developments since the promulgation of Nostra Aetate in 1965, that is an unbridgeable theological chasm. Nonetheless, friendship between Christians and Jews is essential to revitalizing our shared civilization and passing it on to future generations.

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 Jewish people is not just celebrating, but reenacting the Exodus from Egypt that our ancestors undertook many generations ago. The complex, ritualized retelling of this story can be found in the Haggadah, the text that structures the Passover’s ceremonial meal, or seder. But of course the defining telling of this story is to be found in the book of Exodus itself.

In 2021, the great Jewish thinker Leon Kass published a searching, capacious commentary on that book called Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus. Not long after, he sat down with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to record a video course based on his commentary, consisting of eight, roughly hour-long episodes. This week, we’re bringing you the audio version of episode two, focusing on the national narrative created in the text. The episode addresses the character of Moses, the nature of Egyptian society, the purpose of the plagues, and the essence of awe and reverence, all against the backdrop of the Exodus’s three defining components: the promulgation of a national story, a law to structure society, and an elevated national aspiration that provides the Jewish people with a mission.

You can watch the entire video course, free of charge, by enrolling here, and you also explore our other courses as well.

Later this week Jewish families all over the world will sit down at the seder table and, guided by the text of the Haggadah, recapitulate in a highly ornate and ritualized form the Israelite redemption from oppression in Egypt. The text of the Haggadah itself is fascinating, not only because of its sources and composition and what it emphasizes and how, but also because it references itself. There are discussions of previous seders within the seder. It is a document that structures a holiday designed to help us remember. Memory and the presence of the past is the great theme of the Haggadah, and it is the great theme of Dara Horn’s new graphic novel for middle-grade readers, One Little Goat.

Dara Horn is the author not only of One Little Goat but also of Eternal Life, A Guide for the Perplexed, and three over novels, as well as her celebrated volume of reporting and essays, People Love Dead Jews. This week, she joins the podcast to discuss this theme—the inescapability of the past, the formative nature of the past, the obligations imposed on us as memory-bearing creatures and as a memory-shaped people—and why it is woven into all of her work, including her most recent book.

Is the Trump administration pro-Israel? There’s a great deal of evidence to believe it is. It’s given Israel the armaments and rhetorical support it needs to fight on until total victory in Gaza. It has targeted the Houthis in Yemen. It has a record of taking action—economic, diplomatic, and military—against Iran and so has a degree of credibility in countering Israel’s greatest external threat. The president has put champions of the U.S.-Israel relationship in key roles: the secretary of state, the national security advisor, and the secretary of defense are all on the record advocating even closer relations between Washington and Jerusalem. President Trump invited the Israeli prime minister for an extensive, private meeting in the Oval Office, the first such meeting of his second term. The Republican convention last year was perhaps the greatest single spectacle of American Zionism aired in prime time.

And yet, there are some who see in the Trump administration an equal measure of signs and portents that it will not strengthen but weaken the U.S.-Israel relationship. There is a current of isolationism within the administration and among its key supporters, combined with a strategic concept that weighs American investment in the confrontation with China against American investment in the Middle East. In senior and subcabinet appointments, as well as in the Trump coalition’s media environment, these voices have a significant presence as well. In addition, there has been a welling up of genuinely anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist passions and enmities from rightwing social media and from Trump-aligned populist figures with large online followings.

So what is it? Is the second Trump administration’s conception of an America-first foreign policy pro-Israel or isn’t it? The answer is that the administration contains both of these elements, and it’s the president’s job to manage the tensions between them. That tension—between those who see Israel as an asset to American interests and those who see it as a liability—has been present in every Republican administration since Israel was established in 1948.

To discuss what that debate has looked like in the past, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the presidential historian Tevi Troy. Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute, a senior scholar at the Straus Center at Yeshiva University, and a former deputy secretary of HHS. His most recent book is The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.

In the months leading up to the October 7 attacks, Israel was bitterly divided along the tribal lines that had been hardened by the government’s effort to reform the country’s judiciary. There were major protests, acts of civil disobedience, and boycotts, coupled with enormous frustration, distrust, anger, and resentment among Israelis. Then, as you might expect after suffering so grievous and unprovoked an attack as Israelis suffered on October 7, the country responded by unifying, displaying great civic strength. The invisible filaments that hold a society together were pulled taut by the war. Most everyone was a part of it and most everyone was together: volunteering, cooking, babysitting, working, cleaning, helping, schlepping, driving, organizing. When Israel’s men returned to the reserves and left their families, their businesses, their startups, and their careers, friends and neighbors became family and kept each other going.

Now, nearly eighteen months into this war, that momentary unity seems like a distant memory. The war continues, and Israeli society is again divided.

To discuss these civic tensions, the writer and teacher Micah Goodman joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver. Goodman is the author of seven books, most recently The Eighth Day: Israel After October 7, and in the course of the conversation he speaks about what he has learned in the last year-and-a-half about Zionism, the Israeli people, and the precious, resilient state that they’ve built.

This conversation was recorded live in Jerusalem in front of an intimate audience of students attending Tikvah’s Israel Fellowship, a program that overseas students studying in seminaries and yeshivot in Israel can use to supplement their religious study, as well as of members of the Tikvah Society.

To expect women and men of flesh and blood to live lives of ethical perfection is to expect too much. Lapses in judgment, ignorance, vice, and sin are inescapable parts of the human condition. Each year, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, we recite the Al Het prayer, enumerating over 40 sins that we have committed. Sinning is natural, or, as the poet Alexander Pope famously put it, “to err is human, to forgive divine.”

And there’s a deep truth to that, for while error and vice are natural to the human condition, religion has introduced into the moral landscape the human imitation of God’s compassion that releases us, and allows us to release one another, from the crushing burden of guilt and vice. That religious innovation is forgiveness, and it plays a central role in the ethical life of Jews and Christians.

A society without forgiveness, in which moral stain can never be wiped away, in which no mechanism for absolution exists, is a society that will grow fearful, fragmented, feeble, and frail. A society that is properly calibrated to the inescapable truths of human sin, and also has an instrument that absolves the sinner and and enable him or her to rejoin society, is resilient. A few years ago, American was bound up in a spate of so-called cancellations in which public figures stood accused of some wrong action, wrong statement, or wrong thought, and were deemed unfit for employment or standing in society. And, in the progressive circles that led these efforts to purify the public arena, no apology would suffice. No cleansing was sufficient to remove the stain: once a bigot, always a bigot.

It was around that time that a group of Jewish and Christian theologians began meeting to discuss the idea of forgiveness. Over the course of several years of study, reading, and discussion, a statement emerged. “Forgiveness: A Statement by Jews and Christians” was published in the February 2025 issue of First Things magazine.

But of course, something of civilizational significance happened while this group convened, and that was the October 7 Hamas attacks, and the adulation of the attackers by American and European activists. In the face of such evil, could forgiveness be offered? Should it be? What are the limitations on forgiveness and what are the moral obligations on the part of the penitent seeking forgiveness?

Two of the statement’s signatories, Tikvah’s chief education officer Rabbi Mark Gottlieb and the Villanova University professor Anna Moreland, join Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss these and related themes.

Today, as Jews celebrate the holiday of Purim, they’ll also study the book of Esther, named for the young queen whose Jewish identity was unknown to her husband—Persia's king—and his court. The book of Esther tells the story of how she and her cousin Mordechai outwitted the king's second-in-command, the vizier Haman, who sought to destroy the Persian Jews. Beloved among children and adults, the story has also been read by some as a manual for Jewish political survival in the Diaspora.

Ronna Burger of Tulane University, a professor of philosophy, also sees in Esther a commentary on the sources of human success: do humans accomplish their aims through sheer luck, divine help, or careful decision-making? In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, she walks through Esther, demonstrating how each of these elements—chance, providence, and prudence—emerge from the biblical text.

Last February, the Egyptian-American intellectual Hussein Aboubakr Mansour wrote an article in which he considered the possibility of a new idea of Palestinian nationalism. The IDF was destroying Hamas. The remnant of the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy and trust among the frustrated Palestinians—already weak—was decaying at an accelerated rate. The grotesque complicity of UNRWA in Hamas’s crimes might yet deal enough of a blow to the international Palestine-human-rights complex that Mansour could allow himself to hope that the old idea of Palestine might be susceptible to being replaced by something different, something more constructive. A consequence of Hamas activating a series of events that led to war and defeat and destruction might also lead to an opportunity to re-found Palestinian nationalism on healthier foundations.

One year later, after watching Palestinians in Gaza cheering the remains of the Bibas children, murdered in Gaza and then kept as monstrous ransom, Mansour recently revised the possibility of a renewed Palestinian nationalism, and in light of all that has transpired, came to a different conclusion altogether.

Today, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy and contributor to Mosaic, joins Jonathan Silver to discuss his essay, “Why There Should Not Be a Palestine,” published on his Substack, the Abrahamic Critique and Digest.

A few weeks ago, this podcast featured a conversation between Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, moderated by Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver. The subject was Douthat’s new book, Believe, a work of monotheistic apologetics, which argues that everyone should be religious. Among the many topics discussed was the remarkable revival of spiritual energy in America.

At present we are living through a kind of religious awakening, one that shares some features with the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, despite some fundamental differences. Previous surges in American religious life were, to put it plainly, much more conventionally Christian. This one is a great deal more complicated, and it is fractured in the same way that our culture is fractured.

Some forms of Christianity are indeed growing, while many traditional Christian confessions continue to shrink. A good deal of the spiritual energy in America is not channeled into any recognizable Christian form: wellness culture, identity politics, occultism, and other phenomena have all taken on some aspects of religion, and are accorded sanctity by their devotees.

This week, we turn that general question to the Jewish community, and in particular, to American Orthodox Judaism. To what extent do the trends of American religious life and American spiritual dynamics affect Orthodox communities? What are some of the sociological, communal, liturgical, and institutional changes that are taking place there? How has October 7 affected the religious consciousness of American orthodoxy?

To explore these questions, Jonathan Silver speaks with Rabbi David Bashevkin, the director of education for NCSY, the youth movement of the Orthodox Union; a professor at Yeshiva University; and the founder and host of the Jewish media company and podcast, 18Forty. American Orthodoxy is itself remarkably diverse, and this conversation focuses mostly on modern or centrist Orthodox institutions, whose limits and contours Rabbi Bashevkin helps to dimension.

In July of the year 1263, the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani met to debate Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, sometimes known as Nahmanides, 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 Nahmanides to advance even 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 understand fully 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 Sephardi 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 texts 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 his own family, his own teachers, his own neighbors, his 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. This work is called “The Conversion of the Jews,” and it was published in Harper's in May 2023. Ozick’s “The Conversion of the Jews” follows a twenty-four-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. To discuss that story, and the many ideas, themes, and questions it raises, Cynthia Ozick joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver on our podcast (originally broadcast in 2023).

On January 15, Israel and Hamas agreed to a temporary cease-fire. About 30 Israeli hostages would be released, each one in exchange for some 30 to 50 convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Of course, this is a controversial arrangement that sets a terrible precedent to incentivize future hostage-taking.

At the same time, imagine if your mother or father or daughter or friend were among the hostages. Then you wouldn’t really care about that future risk when confronted with the chance to return your own loved one to safety. As many have said, it is a very bad deal, and it is easy to understand why Israelis would support it, even in full knowledge of the risk.

There have by now been many discussions and analyses of this deal and what it means. I recently hosted one of those discussions with the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and the former American special representative for Iran, Elliott Abrams. Today’s conversation is meant to be a little different. It takes a broader, more capacious historical view of how Israel has dealt with this tragic dilemma over the last five decades.

Israel for many years has insisted that it would not negotiate with terrorists. It said that when planes full of Israeli hostages were taken in the late 1960s and it has developed a reputation for this tough-minded, hard-headed position. At the same time, it has always negotiated with terrorists, starting with the planes full of hostages taken in the late 1960s. In this its rhetorical position and its actions have always been at odds and remain so today. That’s the messiness of practical, prudential judgment in a democracy when the lives of citizens are at stake. To understand this history, and unpack the dilemma at its heart, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the Israeli journalist Amit Segal, who can be seen on Israel’s Channel 12 and whose work can be read in the pages of Yedioth Ahronoth.

Ross Douthat occupies one of the most fascinating roles in the religious life of the American public. He is a serious Christian, a devout Catholic, a learned student of American religious history, and a perspicacious observer of the spiritual drives that are an inescapable aspect of the human condition. But what makes his role so fascinating is that he is also an opinion columnist at the New York Times. And readers of the New York Times tend to be considerably less religious, and if religious, then considerably less traditional in their religious habits and beliefs, than Douthat. So there are times when he stands on the fault line between two different epistemological universes, called on to explain the world of faith to progressive America.

In a couple of weeks he will publish Believe, a new book that takes notice of the longing for spiritual transcendence among non-religious Americans, people who look to exercise regimens, or astrology, or claims of extraterrestrial life to engage in a kind of spiritual play. To them, Believe has an arresting argument, which is that in light of what we now know about the universe, the claims of religion—not of occult and supernatural paganism but traditional, monotheistic religion—are a great deal more persuasive. Believe is a form of contemporary, monotheistic apologetics.

Earlier this week, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver hosted Ross Douthat together with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik for a keynote discussion at the Redstone Leadership Forum. Rabbi Soloveichik is the leader of Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. The Redstone Leadership Forum is Tikvah’s flagship gathering of some 100 student delegates from our college chapters at over 30 campuses.

This week, we bring you the recording from that live event.

Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia on October 1, 1924. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy and serving in the Navy, he returned to his home state, where in 1971 he was elected governor. He became president of the United States in 1977 and remained in office until 1981.

His legacy on matters relating to the U.S.-Israel relationship is ambiguous and contested. He famously presided over the Camp David Accords, signed by the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in 1978 and 1979. This peace agreement with the very country that had been Israel’s most dangerous military adversary for the first three decades of its existence has been rightly celebrated as a monumental diplomatic accomplishment. Some historians, including today’s guest, see it however as primarily an accomplishment of Sadat and Henry Kissinger, the powerful secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, Carter’s predecessors. But the image of President Carter and his aides playing chess and secretly negotiating with the Israelis and Egyptians late into the night at Camp David continues to hold a powerful grip on the popular imagination.

When Carter was defeated in the presidential election of 1980 by Ronald Reagan, he became a very young former president. Over the next four-plus decades, he would write distorted, savage, strange, tortured books about Israel and the Palestinians, finding virtually everything about Jewish sovereignty and the defense it requires repugnant. President Carter was a devout Baptist, and he often criticized Israel and its leaders in theological terms. On today’s podcast, we look back on President Carter’s view of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and how he understood the essential qualities of the Jewish state.

To discuss this topic we have invited the historian and analyst Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. The background to this conversation is Doran’s 2018 essay “The Theology of Foreign Policy,” which appeared in First Things magazine. Therein, Doran argues that in order to understand American views about Israel, you have to understand the deeper theological argument inside American Protestantism between modernist and fundamentalist approaches to Scripture. (Doran discussed this topic on the August 10, 2018 episode of the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic). This week, he applies this framework to the presidency and post-presidency of Jimmy Carter.

The holidays are always times for Americans to come together with their families. Anyone can summon archetypal images of a dining table with three generations—grandparents, parents, and children—together with siblings and the extended family they bring with them—cousins, aunts, and uncles. But family formation has been growing less common in America over time, and at some point in the last decade the number of American adults, aged eighteen to fifty-five, who are married with children, and the number of American adults who are single and childless, converged. Since 2010, the percentage of American adults who are married with children has continued to diminish, and the percentage of the single and childless—known as kinless—has grown. In 2023, demographers estimate that compared to only 32 percent of adults who are married with children, America now has a higher percentage, 38 percent, who are kinless.

This finding has vast social consequences for the country and its society, even for those Americans who are married and who do have children. It has consequences for families who not only have the 2.1 children each family must produce for the population to remain constant from generation to generation, but even and especially for those families who have considerably more than 2.1 children. Inevitably, the shared assumptions, convictions, cultural attitudes, and orientations toward tax policy, real estate, and government service of those with large families will drift farther and farther from those of the kinless.

The sociologist Brad Wilcox, author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, and the coauthor of a December article in Deseret, titled “Home Alone for the Holidays,” joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to probe these consequences and explain how we got here.

In 2024, we convened 42 new conversations, taking up some of the great questions of modern Jewish life, questions of war and peace, of Israel’s security and Israel on the global stage, and of Jewish survival and flourishing in the diaspora. This year Mosaic’s editor and the podcast’s host, Jonathan Silver, spoke with military officials, activists, scholars, reporters, rabbis, theologians, institution builders, students, and in one poignant conversation a father grieving for his son who fell in battle defending Israel and the Jewish people.

Because 2024 marks 820 years since the death of the great medieval sage Moses Maimonides, the Tikvah Podcast began the year with a four-part introduction to his work and his legacy. This was also a presidential election year in the United States, and as the fall campaign wound down, and in its immediate aftermath, we examined some of the political questions that would determine the future of American policymaking and the role of the Jewish people in American politics. From large, enduring questions to focused, timely ones, each week we’ve aimed to sustain the great Jewish conversation in depth.

Of course, the most significant Jewish story of 2024 was Israel’s military operation to defeat its enemies, secure its borders, and protect the millions of citizens threatened by the ring of fire that Iran had constructed around the Jewish state. Israel’s military planners and operations have not been without their mistakes and miscalculations this year—no human enterprise is. But one year ago, in December 2023, it did not seem possible that, by December 2024, the IDF would have crippled Hamas and Hizballah and neutralized much of Syria’s arsenal, that the Syrian government would have been defeated and replaced, and that Iran’s defensive missile shield would be practically destroyed. As of the day of this recording, the Israeli air force is attacking military sites in Yemen. And all of this without the scale of civilian damage and loss of life that one could reasonably have expected in the Israeli homeland. There are still over 100 hostages in Gaza, a number of Americans among them—we do not forget about them for even a minute. But it must be said that the success of Israeli intelligence and the IDF over the course of the last months is historic. That, in one way or another, has been an ongoing focus in our conversations this past year.

As 2024 is coming to an end, we’re looking back at a number of clips from the past year. These include conversations with the celebrated author Cynthia Ozick, Rabbi J.J. Schacter, the director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer, the former Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, Rabbi Mark Cohn, the political scientist Yechiel Leiter, Rabbi Shlomo Brody, the journalist and intellectual Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, the former IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus, and the author and journalist Timothy Carney.

As we plan 40 or 50 more conversations in 2025, we hope you’ll return to our archive and listen to some of the most fascinating conversations that we’ve already recorded. In order to help us, please consider supporting our work at the Tikvah podcast, and visit Tikvah.org/support to invest in this program and everything that we do at Tikvah.

About 120,000 Jews live in Toronto, a city of about three million residents. Eight out of every ten hate crimes in this city involve what local officials call an “anti-Jewish occurrence.” Then there is Montreal, with its 90,000 Jews and its total population of about 1.8 million. There, in the three months following October 7, 132 hate crimes were directed at Jews, which is ten times the number of total reported hate crimes as during the entire year of 2022. In fact, there has been, across Canada, a 670-percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents since October 7. This is in a nation of about 40 million, of which just 350,000 are Jewish. These data come from a blockbuster article by Terry Glavin, published last week. In Canada, hardly a week goes by, it seems, where synagogues are not vandalized, burned, or shot at. Moreover, the conventions that predominate elite institutions, government, media, and NGOs all hold as an orthodoxy that Israel is a unique evil, guilty of every modern sin. How did liberal, polite Canada become such a menacing place for its Jewish citizens?

Terry Glavin, a columnist with the National Post and a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his recent article in the Free Press, “The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada.” This article tells the story of how a liberal country collapsed into progressive ideological commitments, which, when applied to immigration policy, and laced with the intersectional logic of a racialized social doctrine, lost the capacity to resist institutional capture by the activists who most hate the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

On March 8, 1963, the Baath party overthrew the government of Syria, and since then the Assad family has ruled the country—until last weekend, when the son of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad, fled to Russia. The 60-year Baathist domination of Syria came to an end, deposed by a Sunni Islamist organization called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Whereas many current conversations are, appropriately, focused on the military and political revolution that Syrians are now living through, the ideological revolution deserves equal consideration. There is no way of knowing how long the current government in Syria, or the Syrian state as we know it, will endure. We don’t know if the new regime will be just and serve its people well, or whether it will be corrupt and tyrannical. We don’t know how Syria will relate to the West, to America, or to Israel. But by recovering the ideological genealogy of Baathism, from which Syria’s present rulers fought to free their country, we can begin to try to understand Arab politics the way that Arab intellectuals do. To that end, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a writer, student of the modern Middle East, and senior fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.

Over 33,000 undergraduates are enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, known universally by its acronym, UCLA. It’s one of the most competitive schools in the country, accepting less than 9 percent of its applicants. Among the current undergraduate student body, Hillel International estimates that there are about 2,500 Jewish students.

The story of informal discrimination against Jewish students on prestigious campuses is, by now, a sad and familiar story. And in fact, that story is not foreign to Jewish students at UCLA. Worse still, an undergraduate Jewish leader on campus, Bella Brannon, has recently filed a motion with the student government alleging not informal, social discrimination, but formal employment discrimination against Jewish students.

Here some background is necessary. UCLA has an active student government: the Undergraduate Students Association Council, known by its acronym, USAC. USAC is organized in various offices and commissions, one of which is the Cultural Affairs Commission, or CAC. According to CAC’s website, it is “meant to ignite conversation regarding current events” and “facilitate exhibitions of creativity.” It supports dance, art, music, culinary festivals, poetry readings, and tours of culturally significant areas of Los Angeles.

An elected member of the student body is charged with administering each of these commissions, and receives from the university a modest honorarium or payment of some kind for that service as well as a budget to hire fellow students to manage the commission’s many programs. Because UCLA is a public university, a good deal of that money comes from California taxpayers.

Brannon’s motion claims that the current CAC commissioner has made explicit a policy to disqualify Jewish students, described as Zionists, from employment at the commission. Her motion was recently described in an article in UCLA’s Jewish newspaper, Ha’Am, by the undergraduate writer Benjie Katz. This week, these two students, Bella Brannon and Benjie Katz—who are both leaders of the campus Tikvah chapter—join Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss their experiences.

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.

Modeh ani l’fanekha, I thank you, are the first words uttered by observant Jewish women and men every day of their waking life. The first conscious thought is one of gratitude. The impulse to give thanks is a natural human sentiment, as we are reminded during this American season of thanksgiving. 

How does gratitude appear in the biblical text, and how does the Hebrew Bible’s moral teaching instruct the natural impulse to gratitude? On this week’s podcast the CEO of Bnai Zion, the rabbi and scholar Ari Lamm—who has thought deeply about the biblical text, its drama, and its cultural and religious significance—discusses these questions with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

Jewish Americans have been loyally voting for Democratic presidential candidates since the early decades of the 20th century. And a very great many Jews supported Vice-President Harris in the election earlier this month. But the exit-poll results reported by most news outlets—that 79 percent of the Jewish voting public cast their ballots for Harris—are, at the very least, open to some very serious questions, and probably altogether unrepresentative.

The poll that generated the figure of 79-percent Jewish support for the Democratic nominee, it turns out, does not include results from the states of New York, New Jersey, and California—three states that contain some of the most densely populated Jewish voting districts, and that are homes to those Jewish subpopulations that are a great deal more likely to support Republican policies and Republican candidates. A poll that excludes the most populous Jewish cities, and that excludes most Orthodox communities, is a poll that necessarily will reveal a distorted picture that privileges Jewish populations that tend to vote for Democrats.

Fortunately, other information is available. Maury Litwack is the founder and CEO of Teach Coalition, a lobbying organization active in at least seven states that aims to make it easier for religious parents to send their children to religious schools. He and his team conducted their own exit poll of Jewish voters, looking at places that tend to have a higher concentration of Jewish citizens—the swing state of Pennsylvania and the swing Congressional districts in New York State. The Teach Coalition poll found that Harris did not win more than 50 percent of the Jewish vote in those districts.

On this week’s podcast, Litwack joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his analysis of these data. He does not see evidence that all Jews are becoming Republican, or that they all support President Trump, or that all Orthodox Jews are doing so. There are certainly trends that point in that direction, but they’re not sustained by the findings of this poll. What is sustained by the findings of this poll is that the Jewish vote is up for grabs—and that both parties ought to be competing for it. Thus the Democratic party that has the most to lose if it believes that it still has the Jewish vote in its pocket—an unfounded belief that is reinforced every time the figure of 79 percent is repeated.

This week, in their liturgical recitation and study of the Hebrew Bible, Jewish communities all over the world will relive the terrifying moment when God commands Abraham to take his son, his beloved son, who was to be his heir and fulfill his deepest dreams for family transmission and ancestry, Isaac, and sacrifice him.

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 to discuss these questions on this week’s podcast (originally broadcast in 2023) 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.

On October 25 of this year, Israel carried out a series of retaliatory strikes on military targets in Iran. The Iranian supreme leader has made public pronouncements ordering his military to prepare a series of counterstrikes, though, as of this recording, those counterstrikes have not yet commenced. The prospect of a continued exchange of aerial attacks between Israel and Iran has captured the world’s attention, and for good reason: Iran is a nuclear-threshold state operating in close coordination with Russia.

This shift in attention has taken media coverage away from Lebanon, but in fact, the Israeli military’s operational successes in that country over the last month raise some very important questions. Hizballah has been degraded significantly—its arsenal diminished, its leadership eliminated, its command structure disrupted, its lines of communication fractured, its decision-making process broken, its finances destroyed.

How, in light of this, does Hizballah continue to operate? And how does Israel leverage these impressive tactical successes into a strategic victory that will allow the citizens of the Galilee and the Golan to return to their homes?

Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury Department senior official and the author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, discusses these questions and others with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

The Zionist writer Ahad Ha’am famously remarked that more than the Jewish people kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jewish people. There is a deep truth that is embedded in the organization of time, the ritualization of communal ceremonies of remembrance and praise, and the recapitulation of the traumas and triumphs of the past: that the calendar can function as a source of national solidarity. Living in rhythm with the Jewish calendar and all that entails is what makes Jews, Jews. The calendar is the instrument that the Jewish people developed to teach our children Jewish history and the fundamental principles of Judaism, and it is what sustains and reinforces those principles throughout the span of a person’s life. It serves, you might say, as a strategy for national cohesion. Jewish nationhood depends on the organization of Jewish hours, days, weeks, and months.

In this episode of the Tikvah Podcast, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver speaks with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who has just published a new book that interprets each of the Jewish holidays in light of how it contributes to Jewish national belonging. Rabbi Soloveichik leads Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue; is the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University; and is the impresario of the website MeirSoloveichik.com, where you can find all of his writing along with his many video courses and podcasts, including his daily commentary on the Hebrew Bible, Bible365. His new book Sacred Time was published in 2024 by Koren.

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.

On June 8, 1978, Harvard University invited the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to deliver a major commencement address. Solzhenitsyn was, by this time, a world famous figure who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Some two and a half decades earlier, while serving in the Soviet army during World War II, he was arrested and sent to the Gulag for criticizing the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in a private letter. He was imprisoned there for nearly a decade, during which he underwent a profound spiritual, religious, philosophical reorientation and awakening, eventually reflecting on his experiences in a major study of Soviet Gulag system, The Gulag Archipelago.

In time, he was freed from the camp but exiled from the Soviet Union. He settled in America, and there, was thought perhaps to be a valuable critic of the Soviet system. But the fact that he was a critic of Soviet repression and the soul-deforming debasement that Russians were forced to endure did not necessarily mean that he would endorse the American system in which he had found his freedom.

When Harvard invited Solzhenitsyn to address their graduating classes that year, probably weren't expecting so thoroughgoing a critique civic, philosophical, and moral as the one he delivered, warning Americans about deep-seated tendencies of mind that could lead their nation into the very sort of societal sickness from which he had just escaped. This week, as students return to campus, Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of America’s vulnerabilities may still be relevant. To think about that, host Jonathan Silver here speaks with the literature scholar Gary Saul Morson, author of a recent essay called “Solzhenitsyn Warned Us".

Israel’s critics today like to argue that the country is illegitimate because it is the product of what they call settler colonialism. They consider non-Jewish Arab peoples the native inhabitants of the land—inhabitants who were displaced by the appearance of Jewish immigrants over the last 150 years. The great colonial moment was capped in 1948, when the Jews established political sovereignty in the state of Israel; then, subsequent wars, including and especially the Six Day War of 1967, further expanded and entrenched that moment.

According to this sort of analysis, Israel is always and forever illegitimate. Much the same is seen as true of America, which was not only illegitimate at the moment it seized native lands, but is still illegitimate, and will always be illegitimate. This dynamic is captured in a comment by Patrick Wolfe, a frequently quoted Australian scholar of settler colonialism: “invasion is a structure, not an event.”

This worldview establishes a moral hierarchy, draws political alliances, establishes political adversaries, and has been at the root of the ideological assault on Israel and its allies. It’s an idea that the critic and writer Adam Kirsch explores in his new book, On Settler Colonialism, published recently by W.W. Norton & Company. Here he joins host Jonathan Silver for a discussion of his book and the controversy around Israel.

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.

Right now, over 50,000 Israelis from the northern reaches of the country are not living in their homes. The intensity of rocket fire from Hizballah, arrayed across the Lebanese border, is too dangerous. For that reason and several others relating to Hizballah's patron, Iran, a war to Israel's north looms. In April of this year, the Israeli security analyst and IDF reserve intelligence officer Raphael BenLevi published an essay in Mosaic that explains the history of Israel’s northern border security, and what Israel can do now to restore it. To discuss that essay and its arguments, Mosaic’s editor and the podcast's host Jonathan Silver convened a conversation with the Lebanese writer Hanin Ghaddar and the Iran expert Richard Goldberg.

This week, given the intensification of concern toward Israel's north, brings the audio of that conversation in podcast form: as good a place as any to start thinking about the dangers that Hizballah poses in the larger conflict between Iran and Israel.

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, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she’d invited the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, to be her running mate in this fall’s presidential election. Walz has pretty conventional views of Israel for a Democrat: he believes in Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself, he has previously spoken at an AIPAC gathering, he condemned Hamas after October 7, that Hamas is not representative of the Palestinian people, that Israel is guilty of allowing too much civilian harm and civilian casualties in Gaza, that there must be a two-state solution, and that Israeli settlements are a barrier to that political outcome. That's what any number of other candidates on the vice-presidential shortlist also think, including Arizona senator Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.

For that matter, until the announcement, Shapiro was widely thought to be the front-runner by virtue of his popularity in what's expected to be the most important swing state in the election. Why didn't Harris select him? Over the last week, there’s been an enormous amount of speculation about the reasons. One of the most foreboding possibilities is that Shapiro is a religious Jew, and among the activist class of the Democratic party, being an Israel-supporting religious Jew is now a liability. Of course, no one from the campaign or any Democratic official has said that Walz's selection had to do with that liability. But many of America’s Jews—Democratic and Republican alike—took it that way, and so did many of America’s anti-Semites.

To disentangle the role that such factors may have played in the Harris campaign’s decision, host Jonathan Silver speaks here with the longtime political reporter and editor of Jewish Insider, Josh Kraushaar. Together, the two look at what the activist opposition campaign looked like, and how that campaign interpreted the selection of Walz as a validation and a victory.

On the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av in the year 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian forces destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Since then, Tisha b’Av has served as a day of commemorating Jewish tragedy, a day when Jews remember those killed for being Jews and recite kinnot, elegies recounting the sacrifice and suffering that is an inescapable part of the Jewish past.

Tisha b’Av this year, taking place on August 12-13, will be the first since the October 7 attack on Israel, and its arrival raises a number of questions. To examine them, host Jonathan Silver is joined here in conversation by the rabbi J.J. Schacter, who for decades has led important Tisha b’Av services and has reflected deeply on questions of kinnot and memory as both a professional historian and a communal leader and teacher. (He recently delivered a free online video course on the meaning of Jewish memory accessible at memory.tikvahfund.org.)

Together, they explore how the liturgy of Tisha b’Av might be expanded to address October 7, how rabbis decide to commemorate specific events with their own fast days and when are they instead subsumed under the rubric of Tisha b’Av, and what elegies Jews will sing this year and in the future to weave October 7 into the religious consciousness of the Jewish liturgy.

In April 2024, a court in Argentina ruled that the 1994 bombing of the AMIA, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, was directed by Iran and carried out by Hezbollah. It was an official government acknowledgement of what was long thought to be true, and certainly the conclusion that the Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman had arrived at prior to being assassinated the day before he was due to testify.

Today, July 18, on the thirtieth anniversary of the AMIA bombing, Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, announced his intention to prosecute Iranian leaders involved in the attack. To commemorate the anniversary, we’re rebroadcasting this week a conversation from 2019 that Jonathan Silver had with the rabbi Avi Weiss, author of a Mosaic essay on the subject from the same year.

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 month, Keir Starmer was elected prime minister of the UK. He is something of a reformer in the Labor party, which, before him, had been led by Jeremy Corbyn. The two have a different public temperament and different public persona. They have a different attitude toward the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Corbyn normalized a degree of anti-Semitism within mainstream Labor politics that was so odious it forced ideologically committed Labor members who are Jewish to leave the party. Since Starmer took over, the party has made a conscious effort to put forward a different, more welcoming face toward Jews.

And what about beneath the surface? Is Starmer different in practice and policy toward Israel and the Jewish people? To answer that question, host Jonathan Silver speaks here with British journalist Melanie Phillips, who wrote an essay on the subject recently called "All Change."

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.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon is one of the masters of modern Hebrew fiction, who helped to spark the revival of modern Hebrew literature in Israel and around the world. His work is not only beloved, but also profound, laden with many allusions to the vast canon of traditional Jewish text that shaped his literary imagination: one hears in Agnon’s work echoes of the siddur, the Hebrew Bible, and an astonishing array of rabbinic literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1966.

Yesterday, Tikvah released a five-part, online video course introducing students to S.Y. Agnon’s short stories, novels, and anthologies—​writing that strengthened the Jewish people in those pivotal 20th-century years when the state of Israel was reborn. The course is taught by Rabbi Jeffrey Saks, director of research at the Agnon House in Jerusalem, series editor of the S.Y. Agnon Library at the Toby Press, editor of the journal Tradition, and the founding director of the Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions in Jewish Education – ATID. This week, we bring you the audio from the first episode of Rabbi Saks’s forthcoming video course on the writings of Shay Agnon. To register for the course, go to tikvahfund.org/agnon.

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.

Whether or not haredi Jews should be required to serve in the IDF is a perennial question of Israeli politics, one that has caused political parties to form and disband, governing coalitions to rise and fall. It was the subject of a 2021 episode of this podcast with the haredi judge, editor, and rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer. This question has taken on a new intensity lately, as the October 7 attacks and Israel’s war in Gaza have unified most of the country in a belief that the haredi draft exemption is unsustainable, unwise, and unjust.

This week, Pfeffer joins Jonathan Silver again to talk about how the matter now looks from within the haredi community. They discuss how Israeli haredim reacted to the October 7 attacks, the experience of the small number of haredim who have been serving in military operations since the war began, and what Pfeffer thinks they should do. Notably, he argues that, as a matter of Jewish belonging, haredi men ought to enlist and help to protect their country.

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 twenty-five years ago, at the turn of the new millennium, America came very close to selecting not only a Jewish vice president, but a proudly religious, Shabbat-observing, kosher-eating Jewish vice president: Joe Lieberman, senator from Connecticut.

Lieberman, who died this week, epitomized a certain spirit in American public life, when the great debates over the conduct of American foreign policy and the management of domestic affairs still admitted heterodox disagreement. He was also a key figure in the U.S.-Israel relationship, articulating as well as anyone in public life why the widespread support that Americans feel toward the Jewish state also had a strategic value in serving American interests.

In October 2019, Lieberman, by then retired from the Senate, was in Jerusalem, where he addressed the Herzl Conference on Contemporary Zionism. In that speech—later published in a suitably edited form in Mosaic—he took a retrospective tone, looking back at the initial impulses that led Theodor Herzl’s ideas to take concrete form in modern Israel. He looked at the effect that Israel has had on American Jewry. And he honestly examined growing political trends that troubled him.

Today, we rebroadcast a 2019 conversation that Jonathan Silver had with Lieberman in which they discuss that speech and his career.

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 day after this phase of the war began, on February 25, 2022, the writer, former Senate staff member, Navy reservist, and executive director of the KKR Global Institute Vance Serchuk joined Mosaic‘s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss what was happening in real time. Two years later, he joins the Tikvah Podcast again to step back and ask some basic questions, and to offer his considered judgment on the state of the war.

What are its causes? On what basis can one decipher the truth from the conflicting narratives about the war in Europe, in Ukraine, in Russia, and in the United States? What have we learned about the deployment of novel military technology? What sorts of alliances have emerged or been strengthened, and what can we learn from them? Has the invasion of Ukraine helped the West relearn the necessity of military force, and chastened some of the most idealistic discourse about human rights and multilateralism? How does the war in Ukraine shed light on the state of U.S.-Russia relations and competition?

Serchuk recently returned from the Munich Security Conference, where he spoke with foreign officials about the state of the war. And, this August, he’s teaching a specialized seminar on U.S.-Russia Relations as a part of the Security Studies Program at the Hertog Foundation in Washington, DC. If you’re an advanced undergraduate, a recent college graduate, or a young professional working in national security, foreign policy, or related fields, you might consider applying to study with Mr. Serchuk. Applications are available at hertogfoundation.org, and they are due on March 4.

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.

Sixty years ago, outlawing racial segregation was a dominant civil rights priority of liberals. Today, in the name of racial equality, many progressive thinkers and activists champion policies and actions that promote segregation. The story of how that moral transformation took place is one of the central preoccupations of the professor Yascha Mounk, the author of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.

In that book, released last month, Mounk plots the relevant intellectual history, from the postmodern philosophy of Michel Foucault to the post-colonial writing of Edward Said to early expressions of critical race theory in the work of Derrick Bell and to the articulation of the governing idea of intersectionality in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw. Mounk explores how the architects of what he calls “the identity synthesis”—his term for what alternatively goes by identity politics or wokeness, terms that he avoids because he believes they are overly polemical—are not accidentally but conscientiously opposed to the race-blind aspirations of their liberal predecessors.

All this he discusses this week with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver. The two also turn to the question of what this revolutionary moral transformation has to do with the Jews. Does the very notion that Americans should be categorized and evaluated in political, civic, and educational settings on the basis of race—and that, moreover, Jews are often fit into the racially white, oppressor category—mean that logic of the identity synthesis tends toward anti-Semitism? Does the legitimating of racial categorization give ammunition to white supremacists to reject the whiteness of Jews, and indulge their own Jew-hatred? And what does all this mean for the central goal of Jewish education—to teach children to assume responsibility for and pride in the Jewish tradition?

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.

Just over a year ago, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo created the new Commission on Unalienable Rights, tasked with “provid[ing] the Secretary of State advice and recommendations concerning international human rights matters" as well as "fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.” The formation of this commission signaled that Secretary Pompeo views America’s pursuit of human rights at home and abroad as properly rooted the deepest sources of American political philosophy and history.

Why?

In a draft report issued earlier this month, the commission seeks to answer this question and much more. The Commission on Unalienable Rights has been—perhaps peculiarly—controversial from the beginning. Critics accuse it of too myopic a focus on religious liberty and too little focus on sexual and so-called reproductive freedom. But in this podcast, we sit  down with Dr. Peter Berkowitz, director of policy planning at the State Department and the executive secretary of the commission, to hear first-hand the thinking behind the commission’s report and the conclusions it presents.

There probably aren’t many interviews out there with State Department officials in which the topics of discussion include the first chapter of Genesis, Plato’s Republic, and the philosophy of John Locke. This is a conversation you don’t want to miss.

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.

According to Jewish tradition, the holiday of Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year—marks the “birth” of man on the sixth day of creation. But what else was created along with him? According the sages of the Talmud, Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge on the very same day they were made, bringing the capacity for sin latent within them out into the world. Sin, in other words, is part of God’s original creation.

In this season of repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we welcome Rabbi David Bashevkin to the Tikvah Podcast. His new book, Sin-a-gogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought, helps us think about the nature and origins of sin. Rabbi Bashevkin and Jonathan Silver discuss what it means to think of sin as part of the fabric of creation, the relationship between sin and free will, and how we should think about the sins and failures of the individual versus those of the community.

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 well as the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof and "Above the Ocean" by Evan MacDonald.

Throughout our podcast series with eminent Jewish historian Jack Wertheimer, we have spoken about a Judaism of “peak moments.” This is the kind of Judaism most American Jews practice; connecting to their faith at a small number of important dates and life transitions: the High Holy Days, b’nai mitzvah, weddings, funerals. In this week’s podcast—the third and final episode in our series—our conversation focuses on the place where so many of these peak moments take place: the synagogue.

The liturgy and choreography of synagogue services—especially in the liberal denominations—are undergoing important changes. From hosting musical “rock shabbat” services to creating a more informal atmosphere in the sanctuary, shuls are working hard to engage congregants on a more regular basis. And the Orthodox are doing their part to reach out to the unengaged through a massive network of outreach organizations that draw in the non-Orthodox, even as they remain fastidiously observant of Jewish law.

Wertheimer and Tikvah's Jonathan Silver discuss where these efforts have been successful and where they have failed, the goals of Orthodox outreach, and how committed Jews can do their part to secure the Jewish future.

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 well as the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof and "Above the Ocean" by Evan MacDonald.

Recent years have seen a nationalist revival sweep across the globe. Is this a cause for celebration or a reason to worry?

In the Tikvah Fund's upcoming online course, "The Meaning of Jewish Nationalism," we invite you to join Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony for an exploration of the idea of nationalism from its biblical roots to its modern rebirth.

Dr. Hazony, author of the widely-acclaimed book "The Virtue of Nationalism," is one of our age's pre-eminent defenders of a world governed by independent nations. Today, Tikvah is pleased to bring you the first episode of his online course free-of-charge. The full, six-part course will be released on January 31. If you want to be notified as soon as the course is available, just click here and enter your contact information.

The establishment of the State of Israel is one of the most remarkable achievements of the modern era. Never before had a people dispersed throughout the world, deprived of sovereignty for millennia, returned to its ancient homeland to build a thriving country. Who were the leaders and thinkers that helped craft a modern Jewish nationalism for a people so long deprived of self-determination? What moved them? What were their political teachings and key disagreements?

The Tikvah Fund invites you to join Dr. Micah Goodman, Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and CEO and Rosh Midrasha of Midreshet Ein Prat, for a three-part exploration of the writings, legacies, and debates of Zionism’s early thinkers. We will study the teachings of Theodor Herzl, Micha Josef Berdichevsky, Ahad Ha’am, Isaac Jacob Reines, Abraham Isaac Kook, and other representatives of modern Jewish nationalist thought. In doing so, Dr. Goodman will help us see how the founding disagreements within Secular Zionism, Religious Zionism, and Ultra-Orthodoxy can shed light on the spirit of Jewish nationalism and the internal conflicts Israel still faces today.

These lectures were originally delivered at one of the Tikvah Fund’s educational programs for undergraduates. Click here to learn more about our educational programs.

In this lecture, Dr. Goodman takes us on a journey from 18th-century Lithuania to the modern state of Israel as he explores the haredi response to Zionism and the challenges of modernity.

The establishment of the State of Israel is one of the most remarkable achievements of the modern era. Never before had a people dispersed throughout the world, deprived of sovereignty for millennia, returned to its ancient homeland to build a thriving country. Who were the leaders and thinkers that helped craft a modern Jewish nationalism for a people so long deprived of self-determination? What moved them? What were their political teachings and key disagreements?

The Tikvah Fund invites you to join Dr. Micah Goodman, Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and CEO and Rosh Midrasha of Midreshet Ein Prat, for a three-part exploration of the writings, legacies, and debates of Zionism’s early thinkers. We will study the teachings of Theodor Herzl, Micha Josef Berdichevsky, Ahad Ha’am, Isaac Jacob Reines, Abraham Isaac Kook, and other representatives of modern Jewish nationalist thought. In doing so, Dr. Goodman will help us see how the founding disagreements within Secular Zionism, Religious Zionism, and Ultra-Orthodoxy can shed light on the spirit of Jewish nationalism and the internal conflicts Israel still faces today.

These lectures were originally delivered at one of the Tikvah Fund’s educational programs for undergraduates. Click here to learn more about our educational programs.

In this episode, Dr. Micah Goodman explores the philosophies of Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook in order to trace the key disagreements within religious Zionism from the dawn of the Zionist movement until the present day.

The establishment of the State of Israel is one of the most remarkable achievements of the modern era. Never before had a people dispersed throughout the world, deprived of sovereignty for millennia, returned to its ancient homeland to build a thriving country. Who were the leaders and thinkers that helped craft a modern Jewish nationalism for a people so long deprived of self-determination? What moved them? What were their political teachings and key disagreements?

The Tikvah Fund invites you to join Dr. Micah Goodman, Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and CEO and Rosh Midrasha of Midreshet Ein Prat, for a three-part exploration of the writings, legacies, and debates of Zionism’s early thinkers. We will study the teachings of Theodor Herzl, Micha Josef Berdichevsky, Ahad Ha’am, Isaac Jacob Reines, Abraham Isaac Kook, and other representatives of modern Jewish nationalist thought. In doing so, Dr. Goodman will help us see how the founding disagreements within Secular Zionism, Religious Zionism, and Ultra-Orthodoxy can shed light on the spirit of Jewish nationalism and the internal conflicts Israel still faces today.

These lectures were originally delivered at one of the Tikvah Fund’s educational programs for undergraduates. Click here to learn more about our educational programs.

In his first lecture, Dr. Micah Goodman explores the founding disagreements of secular Zionism by focusing on the relationship between Zionism and Jewish tradition in the thought of Ahad Ha’am and Micha Josef Berdichvky.

In this podcast Jonathan Silver speaks with the Hudson Institute’s Arthur Herman about his November 2016 Mosaic essay, which bucks conventional wisdom with the thesis that much of the world is warming to and developing closer ties with the Jewish State. Despite the impression one might get by observing the attitudes of Western governments toward Israel, this warming phenomenon can be observed from Asia to Africa to parts of Eastern Europe and, perhaps most surprisingly, to the Middle East. The reasons behind these developments are several, ranging from economic and national security interests to an affinity and admiration for Israel’s pluralistic and entrepreneurial society. From Israel’s developing international relations, Herman sees important lessons for the Israel- and Middle East-policy of a new American administration.

In this podcast Tikvah senior director Jonathan Silver speaks with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz about what a proper liberal arts education consists of, its betrayal in the American academy, and its complicated relation to Jewish education and religious life. Their conversation is framed by Berkowitz’s 2006 Policy Review article, “Liberal Education: Then and Now.” Elaborating the thought of John Stuart Mill, Berkowitz explains that a liberal arts education does not teach students what to think, but rather pushes them to understand arguments from all sides. It comprises study of the sciences and humanities, roots students more deeply in their own civilizational traditions, and acquaints students with traditions outside of their own culture. But for religious Jews, does an education in intellectual freedom support or undermine the life of commandment and obligation? Should religious Jews, in America, Israel, and elsewhere seek out a liberal education? And what is the role for a liberal education in the Jewish state?

On Wednesday, September 14, 2016, alumni of Tikvah’s advanced programs and friends of Mosaic came to an intimate discussion between the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony and the American author and historian Walter Russell Mead. The subject of their conversation was the same as the title of Yoram Hazony’s essay in Mosaic: “Nationalism and the Future of Western Freedom.”

Hazony argues that the political battle over the fate of the nation is the most consequential struggle of our time—one whose roots extend all the way back to the struggle between the ancient Israelites and the overweening imperial powers of their day. It was in the Hebrew Bible that the national idea was born, an idea whose enduring virtues would in time profoundly shape the emergence of the modern democratic West. But what is the status of the national idea today, and why do so many in the West oppose it? Can it survive if cut off from its religious origins, or can those origins be recovered in the secular West? What does today’s widespread disparagement of national independence mean for the Jewish state, the state of Israel?

In these three episodes, we hear Yoram Hazony speak about the themes from his Mosaic article, a response from distinguished writer and strategist Walter Russell Mead, and a conversation moderated by Tikvah senior director Jonathan Silver.

On Wednesday, September 14, 2016, alumni of Tikvah’s advanced programs and friends of Mosaic came to an intimate discussion between the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony and the American author and historian Walter Russell Mead. The subject of their conversation was the same as the title of Yoram Hazony’s essay in Mosaic: “Nationalism and the Future of Western Freedom.”

Hazony argues that the political battle over the fate of the nation is the most consequential struggle of our time—one whose roots extend all the way back to the struggle between the ancient Israelites and the overweening imperial powers of their day. It was in the Hebrew Bible that the national idea was born, an idea whose enduring virtues would in time profoundly shape the emergence of the modern democratic West. But what is the status of the national idea today, and why do so many in the West oppose it? Can it survive if cut off from its religious origins, or can those origins be recovered in the secular West? What does today’s widespread disparagement of national independence mean for the Jewish state, the state of Israel?

In these three episodes, we hear Yoram Hazony speak about the themes from his Mosaic article, a response from distinguished writer and strategist Walter Russell Mead, and a conversation moderated by Tikvah senior director Jonathan Silver.

On Wednesday, September 14, 2016, alumni of Tikvah’s advanced programs and friends of Mosaic came to an intimate discussion between the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony and the American author and historian Walter Russell Mead. The subject of their conversation was the same as the title of Yoram Hazony’s essay in Mosaic: “Nationalism and the Future of Western Freedom.”

Hazony argues that the political battle over the fate of the nation is the most consequential struggle of our time—one whose roots extend all the way back to the struggle between the ancient Israelites and the overweening imperial powers of their day. It was in the Hebrew Bible that the national idea was born, an idea whose enduring virtues would in time profoundly shape the emergence of the modern democratic West. But what is the status of the national idea today, and why do so many in the West oppose it? Can it survive if cut off from its religious origins, or can those origins be recovered in the secular West? What does today’s widespread disparagement of national independence mean for the Jewish state, the state of Israel?

In these three episodes, we hear Yoram Hazony speak about the themes from his Mosaic article, a response from distinguished writer and strategist Walter Russell Mead, and a conversation moderated by Tikvah senior director Jonathan Silver.

In this podcast Eric Cohen and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik speak about two artistic geniuses whose works highlight Jews’ humanity, on the one hand, and other-worldliness, on the other. These two sides of the Jewish people—at once part of the human race and God’s chosen people—comprise Jews’ inherently dialectical nature, Soloveichik argues.

Framed by Soloveichik’s recent essay, “Rembrandt’s Great Jewish Painting” (Mosaic, June 2016), the discussion begins with an exploration of the great Dutch painter’s beautiful efforts to depict the humanity of Jews and the Jewishness of biblical scenes. Particular attention is given to Rembrandt’s great painting of Moses receiving the Luchot, which answers and corrects Michaelangelo’s Moses.

In contrast, it is the miraculous nature of the Jewish people, rather than their humanity, that J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings brings out, as Soloveichik argues in “The Secret Jews of the Hobbit” (Commentary, August 2016). Secular and American Jews are uncomfortable with this side of their identity and Soloveichik thinks they can learn something important from the Catholic author’s presentation of the Jewish people as a miraculous people—a trait that remains true today.

The discussion culminates in an exploration of the unique role art can play in understanding and presenting the divine.

Jewish education is an important source of Jewish continuity in America. This is has been true in all times and places throughout the Jewish diaspora, but it is all the more so in the United States, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. In America, with its individual freedoms, the most potent threat to the Jewish community is not anti-Semitic persecution of old, but assimilation. The threat of assimilation in modern America makes an education in Jewish particularism and Jewish peoplehood especially important, and yet the cost of Jewish education is a growing burden on Jewish families—entailing not only a financial burden, but a moral burden as well.

In this podcast, Eric Cohen speaks with Cato Institute policy analyst Jason Bedrick to delve into this issue and the larger question of what possible role the government might play in alleviating the financial burden to families of parochial school. Their conversation centers around Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” which argues that school vouchers promise both efficiency and freedom for families in the education arena. Bedrick and Cohen discuss the history of parochial schools in America, school choice options like vouchers and tax credits, and what these options mean for the Jewish community. What has the establishment of ostensibly “public” schools meant for the religious freedom of families and communities of faith, and what role might government assume in ensuring the blessings of liberty for all its citizens?

As part of the Tikvah Fund and Hertog Foundation’s Advanced Institute, “Is Israel Alone?,”Roger Hertog sat down with syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer to revisit Dr. Krauthammer’s legendary article for the fiftieth anniversary of Israeli independence. Published in The Weekly Standard, “At Last, Zion,” described the achievement of Israel’s founders within the full scope of Jewish history, arguing that the Jews had traded the vulnerabilities of Diaspora life—assimilation and discrimination—for new vulnerabilities, namely that the security threats arrayed against the new nation state risked a new kind of extermination. Though much has changed in the nearly two decades since Dr. Krauthammer’s essay, Israel still faces extraordinary security risks. Its demise would constitute the greatest tragedy yet in Jewish history.

In this conversation, Dr. Krauthammer surveys Israel’s many threats, from Iran’s nuclear program to the European embrace of BDS. With his characteristic wit, Dr. Krauthammer analyzes the strategic choices for the United States, Israel, and the American Jewish community. In particular, Dr. Krauthammer devotes much of the discussion to the unique forces in the politics of American Judaism: Jewish leftism, pro-Israel evangelicals, charges of dual loyalty, intermarriage, and the like. The discussion ends on a theological note, as Dr. Krauthammer reflects on the moral obligations of Zionism and on his own theology of trembling doubt.

The conversation was recorded before a small group of Americans and Israelis on December 18, 2015.

The election of 2016 has few if any precedents in American history. After the transformational presidency of Barack Obama, much is at stake. Hillary Clinton could solidify and build upon his achievements. A Republican candidate could chart a new course. But each party is witnessing a populist insurgency that threatens to reshape American politics. In Jerusalem, Weekly Standardeditor William Kristol surveyed the scene. What is beneath all this turmoil? What does it mean for American democracy? What will it mean for Israel?

The event was recorded on January 14, 2016.

During last month’s Advanced Institute in Jerusalem, “God, Politics, and the Future of Europe,” Tikvah hosted a conversation on “Modernity, Religion, and Morality” to discuss the decline of Western Civilization and to probe some of the reasons behind it. What happens when faith in the God of the Bible deteriorates? How does that affect faith in reason and are the values of liberalism enough to sustain a society?

The panel featured prominent intellectuals, George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Yoram Hazony, President of the Herzl Institute. The evening’s discussion was moderated by Daniel Johnson, founder and editor of Standpoint Magazine.

Joshua Mitchell is a professor of political theory in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, he left the U.S. capital to teach the great books of Western political thought to university students in Qatar and Iraq. The students there, he found, differed in dramatic ways from those in the U.S. They were beset with anguish over the value of individualism, and they felt their allegiance to traditional roles in family and society strained in ways that made them question the promises of modernity. Professor Mitchell realized that the social forces at play in the contemporary Middle East were much the same as those Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 19^th-century America.

As part of 2015 Tikvah Advanced Institute “Tradition and Freedom,” Professor Mitchell shares how those in the Arab Gulf seek to navigate the challenges that come with more isolation within their communities and increased connectedness with the rest of the world. Paradoxically, it is the great analyst of democracy in America that sheds the most light on the social and psychological experience of the contemporary Middle East.

Joshua Mitchell speaks with Tikvah Fund Director of Academic Programs Jonathan Silver, and answers questions from the audience.  This event took place on June 16, 2015  at the Tikvah Center in New York City. More of Professor Mitchell’s reflections on these subjects can be found in his 2013 book Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age.

Through his leadership of the Tzohar Rabbinical Organization, Rabbi David Stav has been at the forefront of debates over the relationship between religion and state in Israel, pushing for reforms in the State's handling of marriage, conversion, and kashrut. Why is Tzohar focused on these issues? And how does he think about government's role in religious life?

Rabbi Stav discussed his vision for Tzohar and the relationship between religion and the public square with the Tikvah Fund’s Rabbi Mark Gottlieb during the 2015 Tikvah Summer Fellowship. In this wide-ranging conversation, Rabbi Stav explains how pivotal events in his life and in Israel's history, from the euphoria of victory after the Six-Day War to the horror of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, have shaped his mission of trying to bridge the secular-religious divide.

The event was recorded on July 6, 2015 at the Tikvah Center in New York City.

The Tikvah Fund once again had the privilege of learning from prize-winning novelist Dara Horn at our recent week-long seminar Jewish Thought, Jewish Literature, Jewish Politics. After leading university students in a stimulating study of love, sexuality, and family guided by readings from the Book of Genesis, S.Y. Agnon, and Sholem Aleichem, Horn opened up about her own life and literary career. Over the course of the lively conversation, moderated by the Tikvah Fund’s Senior Director Mark Gottlieb, she described being raised in a household that resembled “a creative collective,” how mentor Ruth Wisse inspired her to think deeply about the moral force of Yiddish literature, and how historical and theological themes intertwine in her fiction. The always-entertaining Horn also shared with the group a memorable account of her family’s singularly elaborate Passover Seder.

The event took place August 6th, 2015 at the Tikvah Center in New York City. 

As part of its ongoing series on “Jewish Ideals & Current Dilemmas in Contemporary Zionism,” the Tikvah Overseas Seminars hosted two of Israel’s leading rabbinic activists to discuss recent legislation regarding marriage and conversion in Israel. Rabbi David Stav, chairman of theTzohar Rabbinic Organization, and Rabbi Dr. Seth Farber, founding director of ITIM, have worked together to promote bills that will allow greater numbers of municipal rabbis to register couples for marriage and perform conversions under the auspices of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. While heralded by some as an opportunity to prevent intermarriage by increasing the number of Israelis recognized as Jews, these initiatives have been criticized by others as further entrenchment of the Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly over marriage and conversion.

What problems might this legislation solve and what tensions will remain? Can broader solutions be provided by the rabbinic establishment—inside or outside of the Chief Rabbinate—or does the problem more fundamentally stem from the incompatibility of Orthodox Jewish law with the modern ethos? While Rabbis Stav and Farber worked together on these particular bills, their conversation highlights disagreements regarding civil marriage in Israel, conversion standards, and the ability of Jewish law to evolve. More broadly, their positions reflect different approaches toward reducing the tensions between the Jewish and democratic characters of the State of Israel.  

The program was moderated by Rabbi Shlomo M. Brody, director of the Tikvah Overseas Seminars, who introduced the program with a brief history of Israeli legislation on these topics.

The event was recorded in Jerusalem on Feb 6, 2015. 

Dara Horn has won acclaim for her imaginative novels and for the richness of their Jewish foundations. As part of the 2014 Summer Fellowship, Horn sat down to discuss Yiddish literature, American Judaism, her writing process, reactions to her work (from Jews and non-Jews alike), and her life as the mother of four children. In one of the most fascinating parts of the interview, Horn describes the relationship between the Jewish tradition and her own work at length. She tries "to write in English as if English were a Jewish language." By this she means that the language of her stories is drawn from Judaism's sources. By using Yiddish stories, Biblical parables, Hebrew idioms, and much else, she helps to furnish an authentic American Jewish culture. 

The event was recorded on August 6, 2014.

Elliott Abrams has served two presidents, working on issues in Latin America, the Middle East, and human rights. In the service of his country, he has always been unabashedly Jewish. Was there ever a tension? How did his Jewish upbringing and Jewish pride shape him for a life in American politics and diplomacy? Abrams talks about the Soviet Jewry movement and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor and Ronald Reagan, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations under George W. Bush, and much else. Questions from the audience spark reflections on President Barack Obama’s strategy in the Middle East.

The event was recorded on December 9th, 2014.

As part of Tikvah’s advanced institute “The Case for Nationalism,” the participants heard from the great Jewish dissident, thinker, and statesman, Natan Sharansky. Sharansky discussed the ideas of his book, Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy; the problem of a world with “nothing to die for,” to quote John Lennon; and the complementarity of the democratic desire to be free and the particularist desire to belong. Audience questions prompted Sharansky to analyze the source of the threats facing the Jews of Europe, the decline of Jewish identity in America, the so-called “Jewish state” bill then under discussion in Israel, and much else.

The event was recorded in Jerusalem on December 9, 2014.

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove wrote a provocative article in 2007 titled “Where Have All the Theologians Gone?” This is the question Shearith Israel rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Mechon Hadar rabbi Shai Held begin with: Why is there so much less public argument about Jewish theology than there was in the middle of the last century? What does this say about contemporary Jewish life? About our synagogues? About our universities? About our interfaith relations? The conversation moves from the sociology of theology to Jewish theology itself. Soloveichik and Held each reflect upon a theologian whose ideas have been a fixture of their own work: Michael Wyschogrod for Soloveichik and Abraham Joshua Heschel for Held. Audience questions then move the discussion through topics metaphysical and political.

The event was recorded on July 30, 2014.

Weekly Standard editor William Kristol spoke with Israeli alumni of Tikvah Fund programs in Jerusalem last month about his life in the arena of American politics. The first half of the conversation was largely autobiographical. He talks about his upbringing—including his Jewish upbringing—as the child of Irving Kristol, “the godfather of neoconservatism,” and the legendary historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. How did he go from being a professor of political philosophy to the vice president’s chief of staff? What did he learn from his time in government? The second half of the event gave Kristol a chance to assess the astounding crises and contentious debates in America and the world. What will happen with the new Republican Congress? What can be done about the economic stress facing the American middle class? What kind of problem is immigration? How will the Obama administration’s foreign policy be remembered? And what does this all mean for Israel? 

The event was recorded on December 15, 2014 and was moderated by Ran Baratz.

In 1993, the late Samuel Huntington described Islam as having “bloody borders.” But what does this observation have to do with Islam as a religion or set of ideas? How much of the violence in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Gaza or the uncertainty in Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, the Gulf states, Indonesia, or Turkey has to do with Islamic ideas? Is the Islamic State a new geopolitical challenge or an ancient one? What would a better understanding of Islam tell us about these state and non-state actors’ strategic priorities? And how much can we really extricate religion from politics? During our two-week advanced institute, “Jews and Power,” we thought it valuable to glance at the two poles that are of most concern to Jewish power in our world: the United States and the Islamic nations. To take a look at political Islam—both as politics and as Islam—we invited two scholars of Near Eastern politics, Michael Doran and Hillel Fradkin, both of the Hudson Institute, to take up these questions and more.

This event was recorded on December 11, 2014.