Tal Fortgang and David E. Bernstein on Defending Jewish Civil Right on Campus: How the government can fight anti-Semitism effectively and legally
The Tikvah Podcast
This week, Columbia University reached a $200 million settlement with the Trump administration to resolve multiple federal civil-rights investigations. The deal—which the White House characterized as the largest anti-Semitism-related settlement in U.S. history—will also release hundreds of millions of dollars in suspended federal grants that had been withheld from Columbia as the administration sought to guarantee the rights of Jewish students and faculty at an institution that has become, since October 7, a hotbed of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activism. Since taking office, the Trump...
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Rabbi J.J. Schacter on the Jewish Meaning of Memory: What does it mean to remember the destruction of the Temples?
The Tikvah Podcast
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...
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Robert Satloff on Revitalizing Middle East Studies: A new graduate program promises to restore scholarly integrity to a debased field
The Tikvah Podcast
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...
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Yuval Levin on American Renewal
The Tikvah Podcast
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...
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What the War Reveals about Providence and Jewish History with Meir Soloveichik
The Tikvah Podcast
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...
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Jay Lefkowitz on New York City’s Democratic Primary
The Tikvah Podcast
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...
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Sadanand Dhume on Israeli Arms and the India-Pakistan Conflict: How two democracies found common cause
The Tikvah Podcast
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,...
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Jeffrey Herf on the Transformation of Radical Speech into Violence
The Tikvah Podcast
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...
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Judge Matthew Solomson on Orthodox Judaism and American Public Service: A conversation with one of the highest-ranking observant Jews in the federal judiciary
The Tikvah Podcast
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,...
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Yossi Melman on Israel’s Most Famous Spy: What we learn from the Eli Cohen files
The Tikvah Podcast
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...
info_outlineJimmy 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.