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_outlineEvery year on Shavuot, many Jews have the custom of reading the book of Ruth. The holiday commemorates the giving of the Torah at Sinai—the moment when the Jewish people gathered at the foot of the mountain and declared, “we will do and we will listen.” The rabbis paired Sinai with Ruth for a reason. Sinai is the national conversion story, in which the whole people, swept up in thunder and fire, accept the covenant. Ruth is a more intimate counterpart: a tale of one woman, at the lowest possible moment, with every worldly reason to return to the clan of her birth, who decides instead to join the same covenant. “Your people shall be my people,” she says to Naomi, “and your God shall be my God.” Ruth was not drawn toward the Jewish people at their moment of triumph but in her and her chosen family’s hour of despair.
That tension, between being drawn to Judaism and being pushed toward it, between choosing a people and being chosen, is at the heart of today’s conversation with the Daily Wire reporter and video journalist Kassy Akiva, who converted to Judaism in April 2023. In an essay in the October 2024 issue of Commentary—written while she was a Tikvah Krauthammer fellow—Akiva reflected on the long road that brought her to Judaism: the hate mail, the death threats, the stalker who went to federal prison, the years of traveling to Israel before she was Jewish, the beit din, the seminary in Jerusalem, the mikveh. The essay, titled “Anti-Semitism Helped Make Me a Jew,” was composed in the immediate aftermath of October 7, not long after a visit to the Gaza border. The intensity of that moment was bound up with her conversion.
We are now a few years further on. The vicious anti-Israel activism that followed in the wake of Hamas’s attack on southern Israel has not dissappeared, but it has, for many, settled into something less acute. In that context, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Siliver has invited Akiva to return to that essay and its argument, and to discuss whether anti-Semitism was the engine of her Jewish life or merely the road sign that pointed her toward it, what ordinary Jewish life looks like now that the adrenaline of that first year has either deepened or faded, and what she makes of the convert’s particular vantage point—as someone who, only a few months into being a Jew, was asked by people who had been Jewish their whole lives how to handle the anti-Semitism she had already been forced to learn how to carry.
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.