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Mike Pence and Eric Cohen on What It Means to Be Endowed with Natural Rights

Release Date: 06/12/2026

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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The conversation opens where so much American reflection on these questions begins, with George Washington’s letters to the Jews of Newport and Savannah—the promise of religious liberty on the one hand, and the vision of America as a providential, almost-chosen nation on the other. Those two ideas do not sit together easily, and Cohen and the vice-president think together about what they mean and how they relate: the biblical sources of the founding, the place of Scripture in American education, the case for school choice and the renewal of the universities, and the meaning of federalism in the conservative project.

At the heart of this conversation is a fascinating discussion about American expressions of Christianity. Cohen, speaking as a religious Jew, believes that the strengthening of American Christianity is the surest hope for American renewal, and he also warns that a strain of anti-Semitism now gathering strength on the political right would turn that Christianity to perverse ends. To these comments Vice-President Pence adds his reflections about religious culture, and together, Cohen and Pence arrive at a description of a Hebraic Christianity and a Hebraic America—a country that understands the Hebrew Bible not as an atavistic relic, but as the foundation it has in fact always been.

This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jessica and PJ Heyer. 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.

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