David Bashevkin on Orthodox Jews and the American Religious Revival
Release Date: 02/21/2025
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...
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J.J. Kimche on Paul Johnson’s Legacy of Philo-Semitism
The Tikvah Podcast
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...
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Ari Heistein on the American War on the Houthis, and the Israeli One
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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...
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Michael Doran on Donald Trump's Middle East Policy
The Tikvah Podcast
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...
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Benedict Kiely on Pope Francis and the State of Jewish-Catholic Relations
The Tikvah Podcast
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....
info_outlineA 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.