The Tikvah Podcast
The Tikvah Podcast explores Jewish ideas, history, and politics through conversations with top thinkers. Host Jonathan Silver engages the most important writers, rabbis, historians, policymakers, and educators on the central questions facing the Jewish people and the West. The Tikvah Podcast is a project of Tikvah, a philanthropic institution committed to advancing Jewish excellence and Western civilization through education and ideas. With its educational programs and institutions, Tikvah shapes the rising generation of Jewish, Zionist, and American leaders. And through its media ventures, academic press, and wide array of conferences and events, Tikvah offers the most serious thinking about the great challenges facing the Jewish people. You can learn more about Tikvah's work at tikvah.org.
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Tal Fortgang and David E. Bernstein on Defending Jewish Civil Right on Campus: How the government can fight anti-Semitism effectively and legally
07/25/2025
Tal Fortgang and David E. Bernstein on Defending Jewish Civil Right on Campus: How the government can fight anti-Semitism effectively and legally
This week, Columbia University reached a $200 million settlement with the Trump administration to resolve multiple federal civil-rights investigations. The deal—which the White House characterized as the largest anti-Semitism-related settlement in U.S. history—will also release hundreds of millions of dollars in suspended federal grants that had been withheld from Columbia as the administration sought to guarantee the rights of Jewish students and faculty at an institution that has become, since October 7, a hotbed of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activism. Since taking office, the Trump administration has acted aggressively against anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism at America's elite universities—taking aim at some of the most storied names in higher education: Harvard, Penn, Brown, Columbia. And this effort shows no signs of slowing down. What are the legal tools that the executive branch departments and agencies—especially the Departments of Justice and Education—have at their disposal to protect the rights of Jews on campus? Is there a tension between the protection of Jewish civil rights, on the one hand, and the free speech of students and the academic freedom of faculty, on the other? Last December, just before the new administration took office, Mosaic published an important by the lawyer Tal Fortgang, asking how the incoming Trump team could vigorously protect Jewish civil rights. Later that month, Tal joined the legal scholar David E. Bernstein of George Mason University for a conversation about his essay, which was originally made exclusively available to Mosaic subscribers. Today, as the Trump administration implements some of the very principles and strategies that Tal raised in the pages of Mosaic, we are pleased to share that discussion with you. You can also read the transcript . Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
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Rabbi J.J. Schacter on the Jewish Meaning of Memory: What does it mean to remember the destruction of the Temples?
07/18/2025
Rabbi J.J. Schacter on the Jewish Meaning of Memory: What does it mean to remember the destruction of the Temples?
We are now in a period in the liturgical calendar of the Jewish people known as the Three Weeks, which begins on the seventeenth day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, and continues through the ninth day of the month of Av. It is a period of mourning and commemoration of many experiences of tragedy and sorrow in the Jewish past, and it culminates on the Ninth of Av, or Tisha b’Av, because on that day, in the year 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar’s forces destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem. It was also on that day, in the year 70 CE, that Roman forces destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem. These events the Jewish people, together, as a nation, remember at this time of year. But how can a person remember an event that he or she never experienced? That is the organizing question that the rabbi and historian Jacob J. Schacter asks in his eight-part video course, “The Jewish Meaning of Memory.” That course, like all of Tikvah’s video courses, is available free of charge at courses.tikvah.org. This week, to elevate our study during the Three Weeks, we are broadcasting its first episode.
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Robert Satloff on Revitalizing Middle East Studies: A new graduate program promises to restore scholarly integrity to a debased field
07/11/2025
Robert Satloff on Revitalizing Middle East Studies: A new graduate program promises to restore scholarly integrity to a debased field
October 7th exposed to everyone what many in and around the academy have known for years: American universities—not all, but many—are failing catastrophically to educate the next generation about the history, cultures, and politics of the Middle East. Instead of producing students versed in the region’s complexities, these institutions have become factories for ideological activism. And nowhere is this truer than in the case of Israel and its history: Zionism in the modern university classroom is rarely examined as a movement of national liberation but instead as a caricature of colonialism, racism, repression, and occupation. And outside of the classroom, we’ve seen the most prestigious campuses in the United States transform into nodes of anti-Israel activism and Jew hatred. These are immense and long-standing problems. But instead of just diagnosing their sources and discussing their perils, today we’re going to talk to someone who’s actually done something about it. Robert Satloff saw this crisis clearly. Having published back in 2001 the eminent historian Martin Kramer’s short volume on the corruption of Middle East Studies, Ivory Towers on Sand, Satloff has spent decades watching the field drift toward anti-Israel political advocacy. As the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, he decided to stop complaining and found his own professional master’s program. Working with Pepperdine University, the Washington Institute has established a completely new graduate program designed to train policy professionals with rigorous scholarship and historical accuracy, without anti-Israel bias. The program offers full scholarships, accepts no foreign funding, is fully accredited, and will convene its inaugural cohort in Washington, DC this fall.
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Yuval Levin on American Renewal
07/03/2025
Yuval Levin on American Renewal
This week, America celebrates 249 years of independence. As the countdown begins to our 250th birthday, our semiquincentennial, it is natural to ask what citizenship means to us as Americans, and as American Jews. How do we fulfill our obligations not just to preserve what we’ve inherited, but to renew it for future generations? These aren’t just political questions—they’re moral ones, rooted in how we understand our responsibilities to one another and to the institutions that shape our common life. To address those questions, this week’s podcast is going to do something a little different. Rather than host a conversation, we bring you a speech by one of the great teachers of American civics: Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. Speaking at the 2024 Jewish Leadership Conference, Levin offered a meditation on what we can learn from the biblical figure of Nehemiah—drawing on the story the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls to understand how we must approach the renewal of American culture today. His central insight is striking: just as Nehemiah’s workers rebuilt Jerusalem with “a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other,” we too must simultaneously rebuild and defend our institutions. This is a speech that bridges ancient biblical wisdom to the challenges of American society, showing how the Hebrew Bible speaks directly to our moment of cultural dissolution and the opportunity for renewal. If you’re inspired by this kind of discussion—the intersection of Jewish ideas and public life—you might want to consider attending this year’s Jewish Leadership Conference, featuring Herzl Prize laureates Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, and Dan Senor. You can find information about the 2025 conference at .
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What the War Reveals about Providence and Jewish History with Meir Soloveichik
06/27/2025
What the War Reveals about Providence and Jewish History with Meir Soloveichik
On June 22, American B-2 bombers dropped hundreds of tons of explosives on three nuclear sites in Iran—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Right after President Trump announced that the pilots were out of Iranian air space, the world started to learn the details of Operation Midnight Hammer, the extraordinary American mission to neutralize Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. News coverage started immediately—and some of the most incisive and careful analysis appeared outside of the legacy media. Some of the best news coverage in English could be found at the Free Press, the Daily Wire, and the Call Me Back podcast. Rather than bring on the guests who’ve already offered up their analysis in those venues, we thought it would be valuable to have a series of conversations on dimensions of this war—not only Operation Midnight Hammer, but the last two weeks beginning with the Israeli airstrikes on Iran—that take up some of the deeper, less immediate concerns. War is violent and bloody. But war is also a teacher, and it reveals things about the nations who wage it. “Living Through History: Learning from the Twelve-Day War” is a series of conversations from the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic and featuring its host, Jonathan Silver. These include a discussion with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik on what the war reveals about providence and Jewish history; with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour about what the war reveals about the clash of civilizations; with the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, about what the war reveals about the U.S.- Israel relationship at this moment in Zionist history; and with Victor Davis Hanson about what the war reveals about the American interest. Today you can listen to the first, with Rabbi Soloveichik.
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Jay Lefkowitz on New York City’s Democratic Primary
06/20/2025
Jay Lefkowitz on New York City’s Democratic Primary
On June 24, members of New York City’s Democratic party will select their nominee for the mayoral election that is scheduled to take place in November of this year. As of last year, 56 percent of registered voters in New York were Democrats, but even that number doesn’t fully express the extent of the Democratic party’s hold over the city’s affairs. Democrats hold a supermajority on the city council and control the three major citywide offices—mayor, comptroller, and public advocate—and all three of New York City’s congressional representatives are Democrats. New York is a Democratic city, and it is widely believed that the winner of the Democratic primary will be heavily favored in the fall vote. Even though the official election isn’t until November, the most important element in that election will be determined next week. Because New York remains the most important Jewish city in the United States, next week’s primary election will have outsized consequences for more Jews than any other municipal election. To discuss the candidates and to explore the Jewish questions that are going to be put before the next mayor, Jonathan Silver is joined by Jay Lefkowitz, a senior partner at Kirkland and Ellis, an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, and a member of Tikvah’s board of trustees. Lefkowitz also served the George W. Bush administration as the United States envoy on human rights in North Korea and the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy.The conversation touches on anti-Israel and anti-Jewish violence, domestic terror, and education and funding in haredi schools—all of which are election issues in way or another—and on what matters most to Jewish voters. The conversation touches on anti-Israel and anti-Jewish violence, domestic terror, and education and funding in haredi schools—all of which are election issues in way or another—and on what matters most to Jewish voters.
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Sadanand Dhume on Israeli Arms and the India-Pakistan Conflict: How two democracies found common cause
06/13/2025
Sadanand Dhume on Israeli Arms and the India-Pakistan Conflict: How two democracies found common cause
On April 22, 2025, Islamist terrorists struck Indian civilians in Kashmir. Twenty-six people were killed, most of them Hindu tourists. This attack would trigger what analysts now call the “88-Hour War”—a brief but intense conflict between India and Pakistan that ended only after American diplomatic intervention. This four-day war revealed a shift in the strategic landscape that only decades ago would have been unthinkable. When Indian forces engaged Pakistani positions, they deployed Israeli-made drones. When diplomatic support mattered, Israel stood unambiguously with India. Meanwhile, Pakistan relied heavily on Chinese weapons and Turkish diplomatic backing. The conflicts of the Middle East were being played out on the Indian subcontinent. On this week’s podcast, Jonathan Silver is joined by Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a June 4 article in the Wall Street Journal titled “.” In it, Dhume explains that India—once among Israel’s harshest critics and a reflexive supporter of the Palestinian cause—has become Israel’s largest arms customer, accounting for 34 percent of Israeli weapons exports. That story about arms exports then opens up onto a larger story about how two democracies, each seeing themselves as ancient civilizations facing modern terrorist threats, have found common cause. Silver and Dhume discuss the transformation of Israel-India relations from cold-war hostility to strategic partnership, by focusing on the arms trade between them.
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Jeffrey Herf on the Transformation of Radical Speech into Violence
06/06/2025
Jeffrey Herf on the Transformation of Radical Speech into Violence
On April 13, 2025, an arsonist set fire to the residence of the governor of Pennsylvania. When apprehended, he told law-enforcement officers that he did so using Molotov cocktails. The attack took place just hours after the governor, an American Jew, and his Jewish family, had concluded their Passover seder. The next month, a far-left activist murdered two members of the Israeli embassy staff in the name of Palestine, having gone to a Jewish venue hosting a Jewish event in order to hunt down and kill Jewish people. Not long after, on May 28, a Michigan man was apprehended outside of a Jewish preschool, after threatening Jewish parents and children. It was later discovered that he had attempted to acquire firearms and had planned to kill members of the school. Then there was the most recent news. On June 1, an Egyptian national came to a solidarity walk for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado. There, he threw Molotov cocktails and used a homemade flamethrower in order to burn the attendees. While hurling the explosives, he was recorded yelling “Free Palestine,” and other like phrases. A new season of violence has descended upon the Jews of America. Or, perhaps, one ought to say that a new season of violence has descended upon America with the Jews as its central of target, revealing for all to see the dangers of domestic terrorism. The historian and analyst of anti-Semitism Jeffrey Herf, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, joins Jonathan Silver to discuss this spike in domestic terrorism. It is his contention that the phenomenon has an antecedent in the 1960s radical movements that, then as now, transformed leftist ideas into violent action. The slogan “globalize the intifada,” has been a hallmark of campus and leftist protest since October 7, but it has slipped the bounds of speech and resulted in violence, with deadly results. Drawing on the work of the writer Paul Berman, Herf goes on to argue that if history is any guide, violence against Jews is likely to increase. He laid this out in he published in the Free Press just hours after the Boulder attack.
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Judge Matthew Solomson on Orthodox Judaism and American Public Service: A conversation with one of the highest-ranking observant Jews in the federal judiciary
05/30/2025
Judge Matthew Solomson on Orthodox Judaism and American Public Service: A conversation with one of the highest-ranking observant Jews in the federal judiciary
It’s not uncommon, to put the matter lightly, to find Jewish Americans well represented in the legal field. But the conventional storybook narrative of how Jews rise to occupy positions of promise and prestige in the law tends to emphasize the gradual softening or quieting of religious observance in favor of a broader, more secular American identity. I remember back in 2010 when Elena Kagan had been nominated by President Obama to serve on the Supreme Court. In response to a question from Senator Lindsay Graham about a domestic terrorist event that took place on December 25, 2009, Elena Kagan—then dean of Harvard Law and since 2010 a Supreme Court justice—explained that, on that day, “like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” It was funny and charming and played perfectly to the room and the cameras looking on. But Elena Kagan’s remark also illustrates, to me at least, precisely the sort of culturally Jewish secular sensibility that you wouldn’t be surprised to find in elite positions like the ones she’s held. There are, of course, religiously observant Jewish lawyers, some of them extremely accomplished and some of them having contributed greatly to the American constitutional order. Matthew Solomson is not only a lawyer but a federal judge who represents a different model and different sense of identity, one in which deep Orthodox commitment and distinguished public service not only coexist but reinforce one another. Judge Solomson was elevated to the federal bench in 2020, and last month the president designated him as the chief judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims. Rather than abandoning his Jewish observance and religious devotion in the name of secular citizenship, Judge Solomson is staking out a different path, and his example suggests that America is strengthened when its citizens bring their deepest commitments—including religious commitments—to bear on public service. In conversation with Jonathan Silver, he addresses the questions his career raises about the very nature of American democracy, the meaning of Jewish life in America, and the possibilities for religious citizens to serve the United States in an increasingly secular age.
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Yossi Melman on Israel’s Most Famous Spy: What we learn from the Eli Cohen files
05/23/2025
Yossi Melman on Israel’s Most Famous Spy: What we learn from the Eli Cohen files
In 2019, Netflix released a six-episode miniseries starring the English comedian and actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Cohen played an Israeli spy, Eli Cohen. The latter Cohen was a Jewish immigrant from Egypt who, once in Israel, was recruited and trained by the Mossad. He then assumed the identity of Kamel Amin Thaabet, a wealthy Arab businessman who, having eventually moved to Damascus, became a backer and confidant of key officials in the Baath party. From his home in Syria, Cohen as Thaabet dispatched vast quantities of military and political intelligence to the Israelis throughout the early 1960s. Viewers of the Netflix show, The Spy, see all of this dramatized, as they also see Cohen’s eventual capture, torture, and hanging. The Netflix series, and the story it brings to a new generation of viewers, is true. Eli Cohen is celebrated as one of Israel’s great intelligence agents, one of its great mistaravim, or those who assume the identity of Arabs to carry out their missions. There are streets and institutions and many children and even, in the Golan, a town in Israel named after Eli Cohen. For 60 years the Israeli government has tried to persuade, bribe, cajole, and if necessary steal the Syrian government’s Eli Cohen file. During the rule of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, they could not get them. With the fall of the Assad regime, and with a new regime in Damascus looking to curry favor with the United States and the West, earlier this week the Syrians handed over some 2,500 documents from Syria’s Eli Cohen file. This week, Yossi Melman—a Haaretz reporter, journalist, and author of some eight English-language books on Israeli intelligence—joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to talk about Eli Cohen, what Israel has reclaimed, and why this story remains so important some six decades on.
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J.J. Kimche on Paul Johnson’s Legacy of Philo-Semitism
05/16/2025
J.J. Kimche on Paul Johnson’s Legacy of Philo-Semitism
Born in 1928 in Manchester, Paul Johnson was a British Catholic who while at the helm of the New Statesman liked to boast that he had met every British prime minister from Churchill to Blair and every American president from Eisenhower to George W. Bush—the latter of whom awarded Paul Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006. After publishing a fascinating, spanning history of Christianity, Paul Johnson grew ever more curious about Judaism, Christianity’s elder brother in faith. That fascination led, in 1987, to the publication of his A History of the Jews, which until now is perhaps the best paced, best written single-volume history of the Jewish idea in English. It was sometimes quipped that it was given as a gift to half the bar mitzvahs in America. Paul Johnson died at the age of ninety-four in January 2023. Shortly after Johnson’s death, the Jewish historian J.J. Kimche published an A History of the Jews. Kimche provokes some very fascinating questions, including why this lifelong Catholic took such a sympathetic view and lively interest—theological, historical, social, cultural—in the Jews. What does such a non-Jew see in Jewish history, and what can we, as Jews, learn from his external perspective on our own past? Kimche joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss these questions. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
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Ari Heistein on the American War on the Houthis, and the Israeli One
05/09/2025
Ari Heistein on the American War on the Houthis, and the Israeli One
On May 4, 2025, a ballistic missile traveling up to sixteen times faster than the speed of sound struck ground close to the terminal at Ben-Gurion airport, halting flight traffic and leaving a crater at the point of impact. It was the first time that the airport buildings themselves have been so close to a successful missile attack. This particular missile was fired from a distance of 1,300 miles, from Yemen, the Arab nation situated to the south of Saudi Arabia, whose coastline opens up to the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the crucial Bab al-Mandab Straight, a narrow chokepoint in global shipping that allows ships to travel from India and points east through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean. The missile was shot by the Houthis, a Shiite Islamist organization that is supported by, and operates in coordination with, Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They have been firing rockets at Israel for many months. Back in July 2024, they successfully struck an apartment building near the U.S. embassy’s Tel Avi branch. And since October 2023, they have been targeting commercial naval craft in the Red Sea. Since March 2025, the United States has been conducting a campaign of air and naval strikes against the Houthis. But after the Ben-Gurion airport attack of May 4, the Israelis took matters into their own hands. On May 5, some 30 Israeli military aircraft attacked targets in Houthi-controlled Yemen, including the al-Imran cement factory and the Hodeidah port. On May 6, the Israelis destroyed the airport in Sana’a. This week, we focus on the Houthis, their place in Yemen, their relationship to Iran, and the threats they pose towards global shipping and Israel. Discussing these topics with us is Ari Heistein, who works in business development in Israel, is a close intellectual collaborator with the former Israeli chief of defense intelligence Amos Yadlin, and until recently served as chief of staff at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. This podcast was recorded on Tuesday morning, May 6, 2025. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
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Michael Doran on Donald Trump's Middle East Policy
05/02/2025
Michael Doran on Donald Trump's Middle East Policy
President Trump and his team came into the White House determined to reverse the course of American foreign policy. Most every president does. It’s what President Obama wished to do vis-à-vis President Bush, President Trump vis-à-vis President Obama, and President Biden vis-à-vis President Trump. Where Biden was for, Trump would be against; where Biden was left, Trump would be right; where Biden was blue; Trump would be red. Every question of foreign policy with any relevance whatsoever to the cut and thrust of domestic American politics would henceforth be set in the opposite direction. In the Middle East, President Trump thought that his predecessor was too acquiescent to Iran, too squeamish about empowering the Israelis to protect themselves, and too untroubled by Houthi attacks. For President Trump and many of his supporters, the quintessential act of the Biden administration was the withdrawal from Afghanistan in the fall of 2021—a symbol of American weakness, incompetence, fecklessness, and delusion. With the start of his second term as president, Donald Trump set about restoring the maximum-pressure campaign on Iran. He confronted—with aggressive military force—the Houthis. He restored the American supply of materiel to Israel. And yet, these decisions do not tell the whole story of the Trump administration’s conduct of American foreign policy during its first hundred days. The foreign-policy record, the disorder, the personnel, and some possible future steps of the administration seem confused. To bring forth some clarity from this confusion, and to shed light on the murky picture of the Trump administration’s approach to the Middle East, Michael Doran joins this week’s podcast. Doran is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, contributor to Mosaic, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and the Free Press, and the co-host, with Gadi Taub, of a new podcast called Israel Update. This conversation was recorded live for an audience of members of the Tikvah Society. If you’d like to learn more about supporting our work, and joining the Tikvah Society, please visit . Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
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Benedict Kiely on Pope Francis and the State of Jewish-Catholic Relations
04/25/2025
Benedict Kiely on Pope Francis and the State of Jewish-Catholic Relations
The Catholic cardinal Jorge Mario Bergolio ascended to the papacy in 2013. In honor of Saint Francis of Assisi, he chose as his papal name Francis. For a dozen years he was the head of the Catholic Church and a major figure in the moral and cultural life of the West. After a prolonged illness, Pope Francis died on April 21 of this year. There are over 1.4 billion Catholics in the world, and they play a significant role in the production of Western culture and Western opinion. The foundational structures of Europe are derivative of, or inseparably woven into, the history of the Catholic Church. And whether the pope strengthens or undermines the moral confidence of Western nations matters: it mattered during the papacy of John Paul II during the cold war; it mattered in the confrontation with jihadist terror during the papacy of Benedict XVI; and it cannot but be a factor in the horizons of Western civilization. This podcast focuses on a particular dimension of the late Pope Francis’s legacy, namely, how he engaged the Jewish people, Israel, and the Middle East. To discuss the legacy of Pope Francis, the Church’s engagement in the Middle East, and who might be the next Catholic pope, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver sat down with Father Benedict Kiely. Kiely was born in London, ordained a Catholic priest in Canterbury, and has spent most of his ministry in the United States. In 2014, he founded Nasarean.org, a charity that supports persecuted Christians around the world, and especially in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. One of his aims is to see the church grow closer to its Middle Eastern roots, and that means, in some grand spiritual way, closer too to its Jewish roots. For Catholics, the question of the Church’s attitude toward Zionism and Israel is not perhaps among the most pressing of ecclesiastical priorities. One would not expect it to weigh heavily on the Vatican’s conclave in the election of the next pope. This conversation thus takes the perspective of an outsider. Moreover, there are very deep theological matters that will always divide the Catholic Church from the Jewish people. And some of those very deep theological matters also shape the way that Catholics tend to think about Zionism and the modern state of Israel. The Jewish people are animated by a belief in covenantal chosenness, and a sense of sacred obligation to uphold God’s ways in their actions, in their families, and in their nation. That obligation is structured by tradition and law, and it is expressed nationally in the people of Israel, which, after a long hiatus in exile, again has a sovereign state in the land of its fathers. For Catholics, of course, the Church is the new Israel, and despite very welcome and laudable developments since the promulgation of Nostra Aetate in 1965, that is an unbridgeable theological chasm. Nonetheless, friendship between Christians and Jews is essential to revitalizing our shared civilization and passing it on to future generations. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
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Leon Kass on How Exodus Created the Jewish National Narrative
04/17/2025
Leon Kass on How Exodus Created the Jewish National Narrative
This week the Jewish people is not just celebrating, but reenacting the Exodus from Egypt that our ancestors undertook many generations ago. The complex, ritualized retelling of this story can be found in the Haggadah, the text that structures the Passover’s ceremonial meal, or seder. But of course the defining telling of this story is to be found in the book of Exodus itself. In 2021, the great Jewish thinker Leon Kass published a searching, on that book called Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus. Not long after, he sat down with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to record a video course based on his commentary, consisting of eight, roughly hour-long episodes. This week, we’re bringing you the audio version of episode two, focusing on the national narrative created in the text. The episode addresses the character of Moses, the nature of Egyptian society, the purpose of the plagues, and the essence of awe and reverence, all against the backdrop of the Exodus’s three defining components: the promulgation of a national story, a law to structure society, and an elevated national aspiration that provides the Jewish people with a mission. You can watch the entire video course, free of charge, by enrolling , and you also explore as well.
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Dara Horn on Her New Graphic Novel
04/10/2025
Dara Horn on Her New Graphic Novel
Later this week Jewish families all over the world will sit down at the seder table and, guided by the text of the Haggadah, recapitulate in a highly ornate and ritualized form the Israelite redemption from oppression in Egypt. The text of the Haggadah itself is fascinating, not only because of its sources and composition and what it emphasizes and how, but also because it references itself. There are discussions of previous seders within the seder. It is a document that structures a holiday designed to help us remember. Memory and the presence of the past is the great theme of the Haggadah, and it is the great theme of Dara Horn’s new graphic novel for middle-grade readers, One Little Goat. Dara Horn is the author not only of One Little Goat but also of , A Guide for the Perplexed, and three over novels, as well as her celebrated volume of reporting and essays, . This week, she joins the podcast to discuss this theme—the inescapability of the past, the formative nature of the past, the obligations imposed on us as memory-bearing creatures and as a memory-shaped people—and why it is woven into all of her work, including her most recent book.
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Tevi Troy on How Republican Administrations Argue about Israel
04/04/2025
Tevi Troy on How Republican Administrations Argue about Israel
Is the Trump administration pro-Israel? There’s a great deal of evidence to believe it is. It’s given Israel the armaments and rhetorical support it needs to fight on until total victory in Gaza. It has targeted the Houthis in Yemen. It has a record of taking action—economic, diplomatic, and military—against Iran and so has a degree of credibility in countering Israel’s greatest external threat. The president has put champions of the U.S.-Israel relationship in key roles: the secretary of state, the national security advisor, and the secretary of defense are all on the record advocating even closer relations between Washington and Jerusalem. President Trump invited the Israeli prime minister for an extensive, private meeting in the Oval Office, the first such meeting of his second term. The Republican convention last year was perhaps the greatest single spectacle of American Zionism aired in prime time. And yet, there are some who see in the Trump administration an equal measure of signs and portents that it will not strengthen but weaken the U.S.-Israel relationship. There is a current of isolationism within the administration and among its key supporters, combined with a strategic concept that weighs American investment in the confrontation with China against American investment in the Middle East. In senior and subcabinet appointments, as well as in the Trump coalition’s media environment, these voices have a significant presence as well. In addition, there has been a welling up of genuinely anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist passions and enmities from rightwing social media and from Trump-aligned populist figures with large online followings. So what is it? Is the second Trump administration’s conception of an America-first foreign policy pro-Israel or isn’t it? The answer is that the administration contains both of these elements, and it’s the president’s job to manage the tensions between them. That tension—between those who see Israel as an asset to American interests and those who see it as a liability—has been present in every Republican administration since Israel was established in 1948. To discuss what that debate has looked like in the past, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the presidential historian Tevi Troy. Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute, a senior scholar at the Straus Center at Yeshiva University, and a former deputy secretary of HHS. His most recent book is The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.
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Micah Goodman on What He’s Learned about Israel in the Past Year-and-a-Half
03/27/2025
Micah Goodman on What He’s Learned about Israel in the Past Year-and-a-Half
In the months leading up to the October 7 attacks, Israel was bitterly divided along the tribal lines that had been hardened by the government’s effort to reform the country’s judiciary. There were major protests, acts of civil disobedience, and boycotts, coupled with enormous frustration, distrust, anger, and resentment among Israelis. Then, as you might expect after suffering so grievous and unprovoked an attack as Israelis suffered on October 7, the country responded by unifying, displaying great civic strength. The invisible filaments that hold a society together were pulled taut by the war. Most everyone was a part of it and most everyone was together: volunteering, cooking, babysitting, working, cleaning, helping, schlepping, driving, organizing. When Israel’s men returned to the reserves and left their families, their businesses, their startups, and their careers, friends and neighbors became family and kept each other going. Now, nearly eighteen months into this war, that momentary unity seems like a distant memory. The war continues, and Israeli society is again divided. To discuss these civic tensions, the writer and teacher Micah Goodman joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver. Goodman is the author of seven books, most recently The Eighth Day: Israel After October 7, and in the course of the conversation he speaks about what he has learned in the last year-and-a-half about Zionism, the Israeli people, and the precious, resilient state that they’ve built. This conversation was recorded live in Jerusalem in front of an intimate audience of students attending Tikvah’s , a program that overseas students studying in seminaries and yeshivot in Israel can use to supplement their religious study, as well as of members of the .
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Mark Gottlieb and Anna Moreland on Judaism, Christianity, and Forgiveness
03/20/2025
Mark Gottlieb and Anna Moreland on Judaism, Christianity, and Forgiveness
To expect women and men of flesh and blood to live lives of ethical perfection is to expect too much. Lapses in judgment, ignorance, vice, and sin are inescapable parts of the human condition. Each year, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, we recite the Al Het prayer, enumerating over 40 sins that we have committed. Sinning is natural, or, as the poet Alexander Pope famously put it, “to err is human, to forgive divine.” And there’s a deep truth to that, for while error and vice are natural to the human condition, religion has introduced into the moral landscape the human imitation of God’s compassion that releases us, and allows us to release one another, from the crushing burden of guilt and vice. That religious innovation is forgiveness, and it plays a central role in the ethical life of Jews and Christians. A society without forgiveness, in which moral stain can never be wiped away, in which no mechanism for absolution exists, is a society that will grow fearful, fragmented, feeble, and frail. A society that is properly calibrated to the inescapable truths of human sin, and also has an instrument that absolves the sinner and and enable him or her to rejoin society, is resilient. A few years ago, American was bound up in a spate of so-called cancellations in which public figures stood accused of some wrong action, wrong statement, or wrong thought, and were deemed unfit for employment or standing in society. And, in the progressive circles that led these efforts to purify the public arena, no apology would suffice. No cleansing was sufficient to remove the stain: once a bigot, always a bigot. It was around that time that a group of Jewish and Christian theologians began meeting to discuss the idea of forgiveness. Over the course of several years of study, reading, and discussion, a statement emerged. “Forgiveness: A Statement by Jews and Christians” was published in the February 2025 issue of First Things magazine. But of course, something of civilizational significance happened while this group convened, and that was the October 7 Hamas attacks, and the adulation of the attackers by American and European activists. In the face of such evil, could forgiveness be offered? Should it be? What are the limitations on forgiveness and what are the moral obligations on the part of the penitent seeking forgiveness? Two of the statement’s signatories, Tikvah’s chief education officer Rabbi Mark Gottlieb and the Villanova University professor Anna Moreland, join Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss these and related themes.
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Ronna Burger on Reading Esther as a Philosopher (Rebroadcast)
03/13/2025
Ronna Burger on Reading Esther as a Philosopher (Rebroadcast)
Today, as Jews celebrate the holiday of Purim, they’ll also study the book of Esther, named for the young queen whose Jewish identity was unknown to her husband—Persia's king—and his court. The book of Esther tells the story of how she and her cousin Mordechai outwitted the king's second-in-command, the vizier Haman, who sought to destroy the Persian Jews. Beloved among children and adults, the story has also been read by some as a manual for Jewish political survival in the Diaspora. Ronna Burger of Tulane University, a professor of philosophy, also sees in Esther a commentary on the sources of human success: do humans accomplish their aims through sheer luck, divine help, or careful decision-making? In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, she walks through Esther, demonstrating how each of these elements—chance, providence, and prudence—emerge from the biblical text.
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Reihan Salam on Rebuilding Urban Conservatism
03/07/2025
Reihan Salam on Rebuilding Urban Conservatism
New York City in the 1970s and 1980s was, to put it lightly, not a very safe or nice place to live. Drugs, crime, and public-sector mismanagement made it dangerous and unpleasant, and even the very wealthy were not entirely immune from the disorder. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the city rebounded in an incredible way, and a great deal of that civic revitalization found its roots in the policy research of a small think tank focused on urban affairs, the Manhattan Institute. Utilizing new approaches to law enforcement and other governance matters that scholars at the Manhattan Institute incubated, Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg restored and improved New York. Then came a wave of politicians in city hall and in Albany who forgot the hard-won lessons of the 90s revival, and the city in the last fifteen or so years has experienced a resurgence of crime, drug abuse, untreated mental illness, homelessness, and violence, along with the tell-tale signs of urban decay and disorder. In all of this, as ever, the Jewish community of New York served as the canary in the coal mine, and a spate of anti-Semitic violence preceded and then coincided with the general unraveling. To discuss how this breakdown of order can be halted and reversed, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the irrepressible policy entrepreneur and conservative visionary, the fifth president of the Manhattan Institute, Reihan Salam. Together they address the civic health of New York, the most Jewish city in America; what it takes to re-moralize the culture; what urban conservatism is; and why Salam believes that the work he and his colleagues are doing at the Manhattan Institute could lay the groundwork for New York’s next come back. This conversation was recorded live in Manhattan, in front of an intimate audience of members of the , so you may hear sirens and street sounds—the soundtrack of New York. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on Why the End of Palestinian Nationalism Can Bring Hope to Palestinians
02/28/2025
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on Why the End of Palestinian Nationalism Can Bring Hope to Palestinians
Last February, the Egyptian-American intellectual Hussein Aboubakr Mansour wrote an article in which he considered the possibility of a new idea of Palestinian nationalism. The IDF was destroying Hamas. The remnant of the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy and trust among the frustrated Palestinians—already weak—was decaying at an accelerated rate. The grotesque complicity of UNRWA in Hamas’s crimes might yet deal enough of a blow to the international Palestine-human-rights complex that Mansour could allow himself to hope that the old idea of Palestine might be susceptible to being replaced by something different, something more constructive. A consequence of Hamas activating a series of events that led to war and defeat and destruction might also lead to an opportunity to re-found Palestinian nationalism on healthier foundations. One year later, after watching Palestinians in Gaza cheering the remains of the Bibas children, murdered in Gaza and then kept as monstrous ransom, Mansour recently revised the possibility of a renewed Palestinian nationalism, and in light of all that has transpired, came to a different conclusion altogether. Today, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy and contributor to Mosaic, joins Jonathan Silver to discuss his essay, “” published on his Substack, the Abrahamic Critique and Digest.
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David Bashevkin on Orthodox Jews and the American Religious Revival
02/21/2025
David Bashevkin on Orthodox Jews and the American Religious Revival
A few weeks ago, this podcast featured a between Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, moderated by Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver. The subject was Douthat’s new book, Believe, a work of monotheistic apologetics, which argues that everyone should be religious. Among the many topics discussed was the remarkable revival of spiritual energy in America. At present we are living through a kind of religious awakening, one that shares some features with the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, despite some fundamental differences. Previous surges in American religious life were, to put it plainly, much more conventionally Christian. This one is a great deal more complicated, and it is fractured in the same way that our culture is fractured. Some forms of Christianity are indeed growing, while many traditional Christian confessions continue to shrink. A good deal of the spiritual energy in America is not channeled into any recognizable Christian form: wellness culture, identity politics, occultism, and other phenomena have all taken on some aspects of religion, and are accorded sanctity by their devotees. This week, we turn that general question to the Jewish community, and in particular, to American Orthodox Judaism. To what extent do the trends of American religious life and American spiritual dynamics affect Orthodox communities? What are some of the sociological, communal, liturgical, and institutional changes that are taking place there? How has October 7 affected the religious consciousness of American orthodoxy? To explore these questions, Jonathan Silver speaks with Rabbi David Bashevkin, the director of education for NCSY, the youth movement of the Orthodox Union; a professor at Yeshiva University; and the founder and host of the Jewish media company and podcast, 18Forty. American Orthodoxy is itself remarkably diverse, and this conversation focuses mostly on modern or centrist Orthodox institutions, whose limits and contours Rabbi Bashevkin helps to dimension.
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Diana Mara Henry and Gabriel Scheinmann on One Jew Who Fought Back against the Nazis
02/14/2025
Diana Mara Henry and Gabriel Scheinmann on One Jew Who Fought Back against the Nazis
On February 8, 2025, three hostages ascended from the dungeons of Hamas and returned to freedom in Israel: Eli Sharabi, age fifty-two; Or Levy, age thirty-four; and Ohad Ben Ami, age fifty-six. They had been held captive for sixteen months. When the three men were first seen, and their images instantly projected onto social media and news sites and television sets across the world, many viewers had a similar reaction. They were so gaunt, so emaciated, so frail, that they reminded Israeli government ministers, news analysts, even the president of the United States, of Holocaust survivors. Survivors of the Nazi war against the Jews were, upon their liberation in 1945, indeed often starved and skeletal, and when we think of the women and men who endured the miserable slavery of the concentration camps, we think of their suffering. There are vanishingly few survivors of the Shoah still alive with us now some 80 years after the camps were liberated. And of course we who are their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren have an obligation to redeem their suffering with life, with holiness, and with strength. Even so, alongside and among the suffering victims, the prisoners, the Jews who were oppressed by the Nazis and their collaborators, there were countless examples of Jewish resistance, of Jewish heroism and courage that tell a very different story about the Shoah. Today’s podcast traces the life and defiant wartime story of Joseph Scheinmann, born in Munich in 1915, who fled with his family to France in 1933, where he was assigned a new identity and a new name. From that moment on, Joseph—now Andre—would work to undermine, sabotage, subvert, surveil, and debilitate the Nazis. Andre, the name he kept even after the war, the name he used to build a life in America, is the grandfather of Gabriel Scheinmann, a foreign-policy analyst and the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society. He joins the podcast alongside Diana Mara Henry, the author of a new book about Gabriel’s grandfather, I am Andre: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy, based on Andre’s own recollections and memoir. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
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Cynthia Ozick on "The Conversion of the Jews" (Rebroadcast)
02/07/2025
Cynthia Ozick on "The Conversion of the Jews" (Rebroadcast)
In July of the year 1263, the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani met to debate Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, sometimes known as Nahmanides, to discuss whether Jesus was the messiah, and thus whether Christianity or Judaism had a greater claim to truth. They conducted this debate in the court of King James of Aragon, who famously guaranteed the rabbi’s freedom of speech, allowing Nahmanides to advance even arguments that, being regarded as heretical by Christian clergy, would have otherwise caused him to be imprisoned or worse. These proceedings are known, famously, in history as the Disputation of Barcelona. To understand fully the context of this debate, one has to know something more about the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani: he was not born Pablo Christiani. In fact, he was born as a Sephardi Jew with the birth name of Saul. Only later in life, having lived as a Jewish man and having been exposed to some Jewish learning, did he convert to Catholicism. Joining the Dominican order as a friar, Saul—newly dubbed Pablo—dedicated his life to converting the Jews, possibly with argument and persuasion—he liked to use statements from talmudic texts as evidence for Christian theology—but also through the threat of violence and force. What is it that would so compel a person to turn against his own family, his own teachers, his own neighbors, his own religion—and not as a matter of indifference but as a matter of revenge on the sources of his own formation? That is one of the questions that runs underneath a new story by the legendary essayist, novelist, and short-story writer Cynthia Ozick. This work is called “The Conversion of the Jews,” and it was published in Harper's in May 2023. Ozick’s “The Conversion of the Jews” follows a twenty-four-year-old scholar of words and languages named Solomon Adelberg, as he, in the early 1930s, attempts to discover how and why Christiani undertook his conversion. These questions lead Adelberg to a hollowed-out monastery in the Judean desert, through the occult world of mysticism and magic, and eventually to attempting a séance with the icon of a saint in his Lower East Side apartment. To discuss that story, and the many ideas, themes, and questions it raises, Cynthia Ozick joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver on our podcast (originally broadcast in 2023).
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Amit Segal on Israel’s 60-Year-Old Prisoner Dilemma
01/31/2025
Amit Segal on Israel’s 60-Year-Old Prisoner Dilemma
On January 15, Israel and Hamas agreed to a temporary cease-fire. About 30 Israeli hostages would be released, each one in exchange for some 30 to 50 convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Of course, this is a controversial arrangement that sets a terrible precedent to incentivize future hostage-taking. At the same time, imagine if your mother or father or daughter or friend were among the hostages. Then you wouldn’t really care about that future risk when confronted with the chance to return your own loved one to safety. As many have said, it is a very bad deal, and it is easy to understand why Israelis would support it, even in full knowledge of the risk. There have by now been many discussions and analyses of this deal and what it means. I recently hosted with the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and the former American special representative for Iran, Elliott Abrams. Today’s conversation is meant to be a little different. It takes a broader, more capacious historical view of how Israel has dealt with this tragic dilemma over the last five decades. Israel for many years has insisted that it would not negotiate with terrorists. It said that when planes full of Israeli hostages were taken in the late 1960s and it has developed a reputation for this tough-minded, hard-headed position. At the same time, it has always negotiated with terrorists, starting with the planes full of hostages taken in the late 1960s. In this its rhetorical position and its actions have always been at odds and remain so today. That’s the messiness of practical, prudential judgment in a democracy when the lives of citizens are at stake. To understand this history, and unpack the dilemma at its heart, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the Israeli journalist Amit Segal, who can be seen on Israel’s Channel 12 and whose work can be read in the pages of Yedioth Ahronoth.
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Ross Douthat and Meir Soloveichik on the State of American Belief
01/24/2025
Ross Douthat and Meir Soloveichik on the State of American Belief
Ross Douthat occupies one of the most fascinating roles in the religious life of the American public. He is a serious Christian, a devout Catholic, a learned student of American religious history, and a perspicacious observer of the spiritual drives that are an inescapable aspect of the human condition. But what makes his role so fascinating is that he is also an opinion columnist at the New York Times. And readers of the New York Times tend to be considerably less religious, and if religious, then considerably less traditional in their religious habits and beliefs, than Douthat. So there are times when he stands on the fault line between two different epistemological universes, called on to explain the world of faith to progressive America. In a couple of weeks he will publish Believe, a new book that takes notice of the longing for spiritual transcendence among non-religious Americans, people who look to exercise regimens, or astrology, or claims of extraterrestrial life to engage in a kind of spiritual play. To them, Believe has an arresting argument, which is that in light of what we now know about the universe, the claims of religion—not of occult and supernatural paganism but traditional, monotheistic religion—are a great deal more persuasive. Believe is a form of contemporary, monotheistic apologetics. Earlier this week, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver hosted Ross Douthat together with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik for a keynote discussion at the Redstone Leadership Forum. Rabbi Soloveichik is the leader of Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. The Redstone Leadership Forum is Tikvah’s flagship gathering of some 100 student delegates from our college chapters at over 30 campuses. This week, we bring you the recording from that live event.
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Michael Doran on Jimmy Carter and the Middle East
01/17/2025
Michael Doran on Jimmy Carter and the Middle East
Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia on October 1, 1924. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy and serving in the Navy, he returned to his home state, where in 1971 he was elected governor. He became president of the United States in 1977 and remained in office until 1981. His legacy on matters relating to the U.S.-Israel relationship is ambiguous and contested. He famously presided over the Camp David Accords, signed by the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in 1978 and 1979. This peace agreement with the very country that had been Israel’s most dangerous military adversary for the first three decades of its existence has been rightly celebrated as a monumental diplomatic accomplishment. Some historians, including today’s guest, see it however as primarily an accomplishment of Sadat and Henry Kissinger, the powerful secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, Carter’s predecessors. But the image of President Carter and his aides playing chess and secretly negotiating with the Israelis and Egyptians late into the night at Camp David continues to hold a powerful grip on the popular imagination. When Carter was defeated in the presidential election of 1980 by Ronald Reagan, he became a very young former president. Over the next four-plus decades, he would write distorted, savage, strange, tortured books about Israel and the Palestinians, finding virtually everything about Jewish sovereignty and the defense it requires repugnant. President Carter was a devout Baptist, and he often criticized Israel and its leaders in theological terms. On today’s podcast, we look back on President Carter’s view of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and how he understood the essential qualities of the Jewish state. To discuss this topic we have invited the historian and analyst Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. The background to this conversation is Doran’s 2018 essay “The Theology of Foreign Policy,” which appeared in First Things magazine. Therein, Doran argues that in order to understand American views about Israel, you have to understand the deeper theological argument inside American Protestantism between modernist and fundamentalist approaches to Scripture. (Doran discussed this topic on the of the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic). This week, he applies this framework to the presidency and post-presidency of Jimmy Carter.
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Brad Wilcox on Americans without Families
01/10/2025
Brad Wilcox on Americans without Families
The holidays are always times for Americans to come together with their families. Anyone can summon archetypal images of a dining table with three generations—grandparents, parents, and children—together with siblings and the extended family they bring with them—cousins, aunts, and uncles. But family formation has been growing less common in America over time, and at some point in the last decade the number of American adults, aged eighteen to fifty-five, who are married with children, and the number of American adults who are single and childless, converged. Since 2010, the percentage of American adults who are married with children has continued to diminish, and the percentage of the single and childless—known as kinless—has grown. In 2023, demographers estimate that compared to only 32 percent of adults who are married with children, America now has a higher percentage, 38 percent, who are kinless. This finding has vast social consequences for the country and its society, even for those Americans who are married and who do have children. It has consequences for families who not only have the 2.1 children each family must produce for the population to remain constant from generation to generation, but even and especially for those families who have considerably more than 2.1 children. Inevitably, the shared assumptions, convictions, cultural attitudes, and orientations toward tax policy, real estate, and government service of those with large families will drift farther and farther from those of the kinless. The sociologist Brad Wilcox, author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, and the coauthor of a December article in Deseret, titled “Home Alone for the Holidays,” joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to probe these consequences and explain how we got here.
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Our Favorite Conversations of 2024
12/27/2024
Our Favorite Conversations of 2024
In 2024, we convened 42 new conversations, taking up some of the great questions of modern Jewish life, questions of war and peace, of Israel’s security and Israel on the global stage, and of Jewish survival and flourishing in the diaspora. This year Mosaic’s editor and the podcast’s host, Jonathan Silver, spoke with military officials, activists, scholars, reporters, rabbis, theologians, institution builders, students, and in one poignant conversation a father grieving for his son who fell in battle defending Israel and the Jewish people. Because 2024 marks 820 years since the death of the great medieval sage Moses Maimonides, the Tikvah Podcast with a - to his work and his legacy. This was also a presidential election year in the United States, and as the fall campaign wound down, and in its immediate aftermath, we examined some of the political questions that would determine the future of American policymaking and the role of the Jewish people in American politics. From large, enduring questions to focused, timely ones, each week we’ve aimed to sustain the great Jewish conversation in depth. Of course, the most significant Jewish story of 2024 was Israel’s military operation to defeat its enemies, secure its borders, and protect the millions of citizens threatened by the ring of fire that Iran had constructed around the Jewish state. Israel’s military planners and operations have not been without their mistakes and miscalculations this year—no human enterprise is. But one year ago, in December 2023, it did not seem possible that, by December 2024, the IDF would have crippled Hamas and Hizballah and neutralized much of Syria’s arsenal, that the Syrian government would have been defeated and replaced, and that Iran’s defensive missile shield would be practically destroyed. As of the day of this recording, the Israeli air force is attacking military sites in Yemen. And all of this without the scale of civilian damage and loss of life that one could reasonably have expected in the Israeli homeland. There are still over 100 hostages in Gaza, a number of Americans among them—we do not forget about them for even a minute. But it must be said that the success of Israeli intelligence and the IDF over the course of the last months is historic. That, in one way or another, has been an ongoing focus in our conversations this past year. As 2024 is coming to an end, we’re looking back at a number of clips from the past year. These include conversations with the celebrated author Cynthia Ozick, Rabbi J.J. Schacter, the director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer, the former Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, Rabbi Mark Cohn, the political scientist Yechiel Leiter, Rabbi Shlomo Brody, the journalist and intellectual Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, the former IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus, and the author and journalist Timothy Carney. As we plan 40 or 50 more conversations in 2025, we hope you’ll return to our archive and listen to some of the most fascinating conversations that we’ve already recorded. In order to help us, please consider supporting our work at the Tikvah podcast, and visit to invest in this program and everything that we do at Tikvah.
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