Joshua Berman on How the Exodus Story Turns Egyptian Imagery on Its Head
The Tikvah Podcast
There is an irony set at the cornerstone of Jewish memory. The very texts that proclaim the Jewish people’s liberation from Egypt—the Song of the Sea, the Haggadah that we recite at the Passover seder—borrow their most evocative imagery from the propaganda of our Egyptian oppressors. For instance: the phrase “mighty hand and outstretched arm,” which the Torah uses to describe God’s miraculous deeds, appears hundreds of times in the royal inscriptions of the Egyptian New Kingdom, applied to the pharaoh himself. The Torah doesn’t just recount the Hebrew slaves’ deliverance...
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Hussain Abdul-Hussain on the Arab Case for Israel
The Tikvah Podcast
From the moment of its founding, and, in truth, before its founding, the State of Israel has faced the determined opposition of the Arab world. The armies of five Arab nations invaded Israel the day after it declared independence in 1948. In 1967, after a similar attempt again failed, the Arab League met at Khartoum and issued the famous three no’s: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel. Terrorism, war, and boycott followed across the decades—the PLO, the intifadas, the missile campaigns, and the Iranian proxy network that exploited Arab...
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Yonah Jeremy Bob on the Mossad’s Secret War on Iran
The Tikvah Podcast
On February 28, 2026, Ali Khamenei was assassinated. He was killed in a joint American and Israeli airstrike, in a bunker so deep the elevator took five minutes to reach it, at a meeting with senior advisers whose location intelligence services had tracked for months. The infrastructure that made this targeted assassination possible—the human networks engaged in the patient penetration of one of the most hostile intelligence environments on earth—had been built over more than two decades. Today, Yonah Jeremy Bob joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to delve into how the Mossad build...
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Mike Pompeo and Michael Doran on the Iran War
The Tikvah Podcast
At 1:15 in the morning on February 28, more than 200 Israeli Air Force jets took off from bases across the region, bound for Iran. They were soon joined by American B-2 and B-1 bombers and the full weight of U.S. air and naval power in the Middle East. Not long after in Tehran, the Iranian supreme leader was dead, along with dozens of the seniormost figures in his government. Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion had begun. Five days later, the Iranian missile arsenal is measurably degraded, the regime is in a succession crisis, Hizballah has entered the war from Lebanon, Kurdish forces have...
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Bill Drexel on Narendra Modi’s Visit to Israel
The Tikvah Podcast
On February 25th, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India became the first Indian head of government to address the Knesset. It was a moment that, years ago, would have been difficult to imagine. India and Israel established full diplomatic relations only in 1992. For most of the preceding decades, India had been among Israel’s harshest critics—a reflexive supporter of the Palestinian cause, a country whose leaders looked on the Jewish state with suspicion or contempt. Something has changed. And Prime Minister Modi’s speech in Jerusalem made clear just how much. Standing before...
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Yehoshua Pfeffer on the Causes of the Bnei Brak Draft Riot
The Tikvah Podcast
Israel has operated in the skies above Tehran. It has struck nuclear facilities near Baghdad and dominated the airspace of its enemies across the region. But according to a newsletter that the Israeli journalist Amit Segal sent out earlier this week, there is one city in the Middle East where the IDF cannot move freely. That city is a fifteen-minute drive from Tel Aviv, and is called Bnei Brak. On February 15, two female soldiers from the IDF’s Education and Youth Corps arrived in this densely populated haredi city for a routine visit to a draftee ahead of his induction. A local...
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Meir Soloveichik and Carlos Campo on Strengthening Religious Freedom in America
The Tikvah Podcast
Recently, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Carlos Campo, president of the Museum of the Bible, joined the CEO of Tikvah, Eric Cohen, for a conversation about cherishing and strengthening America’s heritage of religious freedom. They were convened by the Levy Forum for Open Discourse, now in its fourth season, an initiative that is sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, generously funded by Paul and Karen Levy, and hosted by the Palm Beach Synagogue. More information about Levy Forum programs and video recordings can be found at . This week, we’re sharing a...
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Rod Dreher on the American Right’s Anti-Semitism Problem
The Tikvah Podcast
In November 2025, Rod Dreher published an essay in the Free Press, based on an earlier Substack post he’d written, about anti-Semitism on the American right. Dreher had just returned from Washington, where he'd spent several days speaking with young conservatives working in think tanks and in government. What he discovered was that a significant portion of young men on the right, perhaps as many as 30 or 40 percent, expressed sympathy for Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist podcaster who denies the Holocaust and openly attacks Jewish institutions and Jewish people. The trigger for...
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Russ Roberts on the Return of Ran Gvili
The Tikvah Podcast
On January 26, 2026, after 844 days, the body of Ran Gvili was brought home to Israel for burial. Of the hostages taken on October 7, his remains were the last still kept in Gaza. And when you factor in the hostages taken to Gaza before October 7, Gvili’s return marked the first time since 2014 that no Israeli hostage or hostage remains are being held captive, to torture and torment Israelis, in the Gaza Strip. The operation to recover him involved hundreds of soldiers, excavators, and dentists who examined hundreds bodies in a Gazan cemetery. When they found him, the soldiers gathered and...
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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_outlineLast week, Michael Smuss died at age ninety-nine. Born in 1926, he was the last surviving fighter of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. His passing marks the end of an era, and brings to a close a chapter of living memory. Now the responsibility to tell this story passes fully to us.
In the spring of 1943, against impossible odds and with almost no weapons, a small group of young Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw staged a revolt that would reverberate through history. This was not just a military engagement, but a story of Jewish resistance, dignity, and moral choice under unimaginable circumstances.
Before the war, Warsaw was home to nearly 400,000 Jews—the largest Jewish community in Europe. This was a vibrant, diverse Jewish population: workers and intellectuals, religious and secular, Yiddish-speakers and Polish-speakers. Jews published daily newspapers, ran theaters, fielded soccer teams. They were 40 percent of Warsaw’s population.
Then came September 1939. Within weeks, Warsaw fell to the Germans. Over the next year, the Nazis systematically stripped Jews of their rights—blocked bank accounts, forced them to wear special armbands, and conscripted them into slave labor. In November 1940, they sealed 400,000 Jews into a ghetto of just two square miles, then forced in 150,000 more from nearby towns and cities. With official rations of just 184 calories per day and no heating, 100,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. But 80 percent stayed alive through extraordinary resourcefulness—smuggling food, establishing soup kitchens, creating underground factories. This too was resistance.
In July 1942, the Germans began mass deportations to Treblinka, where most were murdered upon arrival. Over seven weeks, they sent 300,000 Jews to the gas chambers, with the help of a Jewish police force. By September, only 60,000 remained.
At that point, something shifted. Survivors asked why they hadn’t fought back. The shame and anger became a catalyst. Between September and April, the ghetto prepared. They built 750 bunkers with electricity, water, and food stocks. When the Germans came on April 19, 1943, expecting to round up the Jews with no resistance, they were met with gunfire, grenades, and mines. The Germans thought it would take three days. It took 27—because the entire community had transformed the ghetto into a network of underground revolt.
To tell this story, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Professor Samuel Kassow of Trinity College. They discuss the courage of the fighters as well as the resistance of those who built the bunkers, who preserved cultural life, who maintained their dignity in ways that have largely been forgotten. They also confront difficult questions about heroism, survival, and how to fulfill the sacred obligations of remembering.