Rachel Fish on the Corruption of Jewish Studies
The Tikvah Podcast
Friends of Israel and enemies of Israel both commit the same mistake when they assume that, in American colleges and universities, the faculty hired to teach Jewish subjects are, in their own way, supportive of the Jewish state. The assumption is a reasonable one, and each side’s error mirrors the other. The friends of Israel naturally suppose that academic scholars of Jewish history, Jewish thought, the history of Israel, and the arts and letters of Hebrew are there to offer context and support and are both capable of and inclined to explain Israel’s case on campus. That doesn’t mean...
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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...
info_outlineFriends of Israel and enemies of Israel both commit the same mistake when they assume that, in American colleges and universities, the faculty hired to teach Jewish subjects are, in their own way, supportive of the Jewish state. The assumption is a reasonable one, and each side’s error mirrors the other. The friends of Israel naturally suppose that academic scholars of Jewish history, Jewish thought, the history of Israel, and the arts and letters of Hebrew are there to offer context and support and are both capable of and inclined to explain Israel’s case on campus. That doesn’t mean that they would be expected to support any particular Israeli policy or Israeli politician or each and every maneuver of the Israeli military, but that they support Zionism in some fundamental sense. And Israel’s enemies think that same thing, but of course from the opposite point of view, seeing in the entire enterprise of Jewish studies and all of its related fields and disciplines a vehicle for propaganda. It turns out that both are wrong. There’s a good chance that an average member of a faculty of Jewish studies, Israel studies, Hebrew studies, or Holocaust studies holds a documented public position against Israel. Nearly four in ten of the professors specifically teaching Jewish civilization on American campuses are on the record as being hostile to Israel.
Those data come from newly released findings of the largest audit yet undertaken of the views of professors of Jewish civilization in America, published recently by the Ronn Torossian Foundation and a publication called The Olam. The audit’s own headline number is higher still—better than half, and past 70 percent at the Ivies—but that figure blends named professors together with institutional listings and petition tallies. The number above is the most important: faculty individually identified as teaching these subjects, and what they’ve put on the public record.
To think through what this means, Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic and host of the Tikvah podcast, is joined by Rachel Fish. Fish is a scholar of modern Israel, Zionist thought, and contemporary anti-Semitism, and the incoming CEO of the Israel Institute. They discuss not just these numbers, but how a discipline built to study Jewish civilization on serious scholarly terms ends up, in a meaningful share of cases, working against that civilization’s national survival. We talk about what it means for the pipeline that produces the next generation of professors: graduate admissions, dissertation topics, and the hiring committees that decide who gets to teach. And I ask her about what a Jewish family sending a child to campus in the coming weeks needs to understand before that student walks into the classroom.