Johnnie Moore and Meir Soloveichik on Jews, Evangelicals, and Israel
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah has campus chapters at many colleges and universities throughout the United States, and earlier this week we welcomed over 100 delegates from over 40 chapters to our annual college conference, the Redstone Leadership Forum. The closing session at that conference brought Reverend Johnnie Moore together with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik to discuss evangelical Christians, Israel, and the Jews. Moderating their discussion was Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic. A recording of that live conversation is our broadcast this week. This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously...
info_outline
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on Why Saudi Arabia Is Moving Away from Israel
The Tikvah Podcast
On June 22, 2025, the U.S. air force sent B2 bombers to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites. Five days before that, on June 17, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, observing the extent of Israel’s military operations inside of Iran and its destruction of Iran’s proxy network, published an in Mosaic with a counterintuitive argument: Israel’s devastating strikes on the Islamic Republic would not lead to an Arab embrace of the Jewish state. Most observers assumed the opposite, that weakening Iran would accelerate normalization and that gratitude and commercial interests would drive the...
info_outline
Aaron Rothstein on the Medical Aid in Dying Act
The Tikvah Podcast
In December 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul reached an agreement with the New York state legislature to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act, which would legalize what proponents call “death with dignity” and what critics call physician-assisted suicide. About a dozen other states already permit doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients who request it. The state of Oregon pioneered this practice in 1994 and it has since spread across the Western world. Now, there are people who have an ailing parent or grandparent or, God forbid, a child who is genuinely...
info_outline
Our Favorite Episodes of 2025
The Tikvah Podcast
In 2025, we convened about 40 new conversations, taking up the great questions of modern Jewish life—questions of war and peace, providence and civilization, memory and meaning. This year, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver spoke to military strategists, scholars of religion, writers, historians, rabbis, one Catholic priest and two Catholic theologians, and professors whose students have become soldiers. The conversations ranged from urgent tactical questions facing Israeli commanders to the enduring theological debates that have shaped Western civilization. The most dramatic event of...
info_outline
Ruth Wisse on Norman Podhoretz
The Tikvah Podcast
Norman Podhoretz, z”l, died on December 16 at the age of ninety-five. For more than three decades, he served as editor of Commentary, transforming it into what Irving Kristol deemed the most influential magazine in Jewish history. He was a literary critic, a political essayist, and one of the fathers of the orientation toward public affairs that came to be known as neoconservatism. In 2004, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. What fueled these accomplishments —his books, his essays, his editing —was a commitment to tell the truth, however...
info_outline
Rabbi Ben Elton on Australian Jewry after Bondi Beach
The Tikvah Podcast
On the evening of December 14, 2025—the first night of Hanukkah—Rabbi Benjamin Elton was driving home from performing a wedding, looking forward to lighting candles with his family. Then his phone began to explode with messages. There were gunmen at Bondi Beach. His wife and children were in lockdown at a nearby event. Names of the dead were coming through—colleagues, community members. For several terrible minutes, he couldn’t reach his wife. And he wondered whether he was going to come home to find that he had lost his family. By the time the shooting stopped, fifteen people were...
info_outline
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik on the Enduring Power of the Psalms
The Tikvah Podcast
On October 6, 2023, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik sat at his desk facing a deadline for his monthly column. Israel’s citizens were then furiously debating judicial reform, but he’d already had his say on that matter. He decided to write about something else instead: a Jeopardy episode where three educated contestants stared blankly when asked to identify the source of this line: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” This, among the most famous images in all of Western literature, comes of course from Psalm 23. And none of the contestants knew it. ...
info_outline
Walter Russel Mead and Elliott Abrams on Navigating the New Middle East
The Tikvah Podcast
It’s now December, and thus a natural time to look back and think about all that’s changed in 2025. What did the Middle East and the world look like at this time a year ago? President Biden was in the Oval Office and President Trump was both the former president and the president-elect. Hamas still held hostages taken on October 7. Iran's regional proxies, though weakened, still threatened both Israel and American interests across the Middle East. Fast forward to today, and the landscape looks dramatically different. Israel has achieved stunning military victories. The United States Air...
info_outline
Josh Tolle on the State of Hillel on Campus
The Tikvah Podcast
For many Jewish parents and grandparents, Hillel holds a special place in their memories of college life. Founded in 1923 above a barbershop at the University of Illinois, Hillel grew into a leading Jewish campus organization, now present at hundreds of colleges. For generations, it was where Jewish students found community, celebrated Shabbat, and felt at home as Jews while navigating the challenges of university life. But today, Hillel faces a crisis. That’s the view of the writer and former Krauthammer fellow Josh Tolle. Now Tikvah’s associate director of university programs, Tolle...
info_outline
R.J. Snell on Modern Expressions of the Marcionite Heresy
The Tikvah Podcast
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast might be the first dedicated entirely to Christian theology. Why would a Jewish podcast devote so much attention to a theological debate that took place among Christians in the 2nd century? First, because it contributed to the canonization of Christian scripture and defined forever the Christian attitude toward the Hebrew Bible. But more importantly, because we are witnessing today the reemergence of some of the very ideas that the Church fathers of that time declared heretical. The figure at the center of this conversation is a Christian thinker name...
info_outlineOn July 29, Gallup published a new poll showing American support for Israel’s military action in Gaza at a historic low. But a strong majority (71 percent) of Republicans say they approve of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and that is up from 66 percent in September. Of Israel’s military action in Iran, 78 percent of Republicans approve. And 67 percent of Republicans have a favorable opinion of Israel’s prime minister. Even as the broader American public continues to cool on Israel, Republican support for Israel’s conduct of the war isn’t just holding steady—it’s actually strengthening. Earlier this week, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, visited Judea and Samaria, and had dinner with the prime minster in the biblical city of Shiloh.
Here’s what makes Gallup’s findings so remarkable: if you spent any time on right-wing social media over the past months, you’d expect to see Republican support for Israel cratering. But peer beneath the surface of the online discourse, and a more complicated picture emerges. Republican voters not only remain steadfast but are actually becoming more supportive, even as influential voices—influential especially with the young—are striking out in a very different direction. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a reliable Trump ally, now calls the Gaza war a genocide. Tucker Carlson’s social-media engagement spikes whenever he advances an anti-Israel narrative, hosts an anti-Israel guest, or moots anti-Israel conspiracy theories. Even some longtime pro-Israel voices from the right have made themselves unwitting tools of Hamas and Iranian propaganda.
Our guest this week is the Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Doran, and our subject is Israel and the American right. Of course, the disjuncture between Republican voters and the most prominent and loudest voices in Republican media is not a new story. When you train your eyes on that fact, the entire Trump era, from his 2016 campaign forward, has seen the emergence of a new media elite whose views simply do not convey the attitudes of their base as well as the president himself does.
But of course the Trump era will end in a few years, and the contours and debate within the post-Trump right over attitudes toward Israel is being shaped right now.