Joshua Berman on How the Exodus Story Turns Egyptian Imagery on Its Head
Release Date: 03/27/2026
Rabbi Mark Dratch on Jews’ Obligations to Christians in Israel
The Tikvah Podcast
Visitors to Jerusalem’s Old City see a marvelous religious diversity that is unique in the contemporary Middle East, and made possible by Israeli sovereignty. For most of Jewish history, the Jewish people have lived at the mercy of other nations, and the security of Jewish communities depended on the Christian or Muslim rulers in whose lands Jews lived. But in the Old City of Jerusalem, one walks around and sees so many religious sites, Christian and Muslim, of immense theological significance, all protected by the laws and law-enforcement officers of the Jewish state. Israel’s commitment...
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John Bursch on the Freedom to Pray at Home
The Tikvah Podcast
Traditional Jews pray in a minyan, a quorum of ten men who form the communal setting in which an individual Jew prays as a part of the Jewish people. In January of 2021, a man named Daniel Grand sent an email to some of his friends, seeing if he could organize a minyan at his home. He lives in University Heights, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, too far from his synagogue to walk on Shabbat and holidays when driving is forbidden by Jewish law. A neighbor saw the invitation and complained to the mayor’s office, after which the city sent Grand a cease-and-desist letter. Praying with...
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Dan Schueftan on Israel’s Doctrine of Preventive Violence
The Tikvah Podcast
For half a century, Israel treated its adversaries as if their intentions could be tracked and might change according to circumstances. With the states surrounding it, that assumption largely held: Egypt, for instance, signed a peace treaty and kept it, whatever else occurred in the region. But with the radical forces that Iran built around Israel in the years before October 7, that same assumption proved catastrophic. Hamas, Hizballah, the Houthis, and the militias in Syria and Iraq do not vary in their commitment to Israel’s destruction. What varies is only their capability. And so Israel...
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Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin on the Legacy of Masada
The Tikvah Podcast
In the spring of the year 73, after Jerusalem had already fallen to Roman forces, 960 Jews atop a desert fortress chose death by their own hand rather than surrender. We know the story because of Josephus, the 1st-century Jewish historian and former rebel commander who turned chronicler of the very revolt he had once been a part of. Yesterday was Tisha b’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the two Temples. Josephus records another catastrophe: Masada, the last stand of the Sicarii, the most militant faction of the Jewish rebels, against Rome, and a mass suicide that Jewish tradition...
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Ari Lamm on Chosenness
The Tikvah Podcast
This week, Rabbi Ari Lamm joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss the biblical idea of election or chosenness. Rabbi Lamm has argued that Genesis itself is a long sequence of choosing and rejection—Adam over the animals, Abel over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau—and that the Bible never once tells us why. We learn how God assesses a life after the fact; we are never shown the reasoning behind the choice itself. One midrash even imagines Abraham chosen by lottery. Rabbi Lamm suggests that this silence is deliberate: chosenness is a mystery, an acknowledgment of the...
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George Deek on Israel’s Relationship with the Christian World
The Tikvah Podcast
In April of this year, Israel’s Foreign Ministry created a position that had never before existed: special envoy to the Christian world. The appointment came after a string of incidents that have strained Israel’s standing with Christian communities: an IDF soldier destroyed a statue of Jesus in Lebanon; during the war with Iran, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pizzaballa, was barred for safety reasons from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; a nun was assaulted in Jerusalem; and videos of Jewish Israelis despicably spitting on Christians have gone viral on social...
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Michael Doran and Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on Power, Ideology, and Understanding the Middle East
The Tikvah Podcast
When students begin to study international politics, they meet some very old and well-established schools of thought. These approaches disagree about a fundamental question: what is the most important kind of information to acquire? One school of thought recommends studying power: who holds the weapons, and who fears whom. From that, the thinking goes, you’ll be able to map the hierarchies and relationships that tell you everything essential that you need to know. Another recommends studying the cultures and dominant ideas that constitute the spirit of a given regime—to try to...
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David Arnovitz on the Tanakh of the Land of Israel
The Tikvah Podcast
Today’s conversation is about a publishing project: the . The concept of the series is that it takes the books of the Hebrew Bible and sets them back down in the world that produced them—in the Land of Israel, and in the economic, political, theological, and cultural setting of the ancient Near East. Around each verse it gathers what is known about that world: its archaeology and geography, the languages and the treaties and the pantheon of gods of the tribes and nations and empires among whom Israel was situated. In its modest form, the claim behind all this is one almost no one...
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Mike Pence and Eric Cohen on What It Means to Be Endowed with Natural Rights
The Tikvah Podcast
This week we bring you a conversation between Eric Cohen, president and CEO of Tikvah, and the former vice-president of the United States, Mike Pence. The conversation was recorded before a live audience at the Fund for American Studies, and we are grateful to our friends at TFAS for the invitation and for the work they do: forming young leaders in the principles of individual liberty, free markets, and honorable leadership, and sending them out to advance the cause of a free society in their communities and around the world. The conversation opens where so much American reflection on these...
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Mark Gottlieb and Shilo Brooks on Why Reading Matters
The Tikvah Podcast
In 2024, the Atlantic ran a splashy feature titled “The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books.” Professors at the Ivy League and at other elite universities reported that their students, among the most credentialed young people in the country, could no longer make their way through a whole book. One Columbia professor described his bewilderment when a student told him she had never once been assigned a full book in high school. At Tikvah we work with hundreds of educators, and they have observed that it’s not only the skill of reading that is in decline; it’s also the...
info_outlineThere 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 from Egypt. The Torah took Egyptian language, Egyptian symbols, and even Egypt’s greatest military triumph, and turned it all inside out.
This is the argument that the Bar-Ilan University Bible professor Joshua Berman has been developing for years, including in the pages of Mosaic. And that insight now resides at the center of his new Haggadah, lavishly illustrated with hieroglyphics, photos, and sketches that situate the Passover seder in the historical setting from which the Hebrew slaves escaped. Rabbi Berman joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss the book, and the argument that underlies it.
This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin and family. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.