The Tikvah Podcast

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Latest Episodes:

Diana Mara Henry and Gabriel Scheinmann on One Jew Who Fought Back against the Nazis Feb 14, 2025

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.

Cynthia Ozick on "The Conversion of the Jews" (Rebroadcast) Feb 07, 2025

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).

Amit Segal on Israel’s 60-Year-Old Prisoner Dilemma Jan 31, 2025

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 one of those discussions 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.

Ross Douthat and Meir Soloveichik on the State of American Belief Jan 24, 2025

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.

Michael Doran on Jimmy Carter and the Middle East Jan 17, 2025

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 August 10, 2018 episode of the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic). This week, he applies this framework to the presidency and post-presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Brad Wilcox on Americans without Families Jan 10, 2025

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.

Our Favorite Conversations of 2024 Dec 27, 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 began the year with a four-part introduction 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 Tikvah.org/support to invest in this program and everything that we do at Tikvah.

Terry Glavin on Anti-Semitism in Canada: How progressivism turned a polite, liberal country into a bastion of anti-Jewish hatred Dec 20, 2024

About 120,000 Jews live in Toronto, a city of about three million residents. Eight out of every ten hate crimes in this city involve what local officials call an “anti-Jewish occurrence.” Then there is Montreal, with its 90,000 Jews and its total population of about 1.8 million. There, in the three months following October 7, 132 hate crimes were directed at Jews, which is ten times the number of total reported hate crimes as during the entire year of 2022. In fact, there has been, across Canada, a 670-percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents since October 7. This is in a nation of about 40 million, of which just 350,000 are Jewish. These data come from a blockbuster article by Terry Glavin, published last week. In Canada, hardly a week goes by, it seems, where synagogues are not vandalized, burned, or shot at. Moreover, the conventions that predominate elite institutions, government, media, and NGOs all hold as an orthodoxy that Israel is a unique evil, guilty of every modern sin. How did liberal, polite Canada become such a menacing place for its Jewish citizens?

Terry Glavin, a columnist with the National Post and a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his recent article in the Free Press, “The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada.” This article tells the story of how a liberal country collapsed into progressive ideological commitments, which, when applied to immigration policy, and laced with the intersectional logic of a racialized social doctrine, lost the capacity to resist institutional capture by the activists who most hate the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on the Fall of Syria and the Death of Baathism: How Arab intellectuals understand the latest ideological revolution Dec 13, 2024

On March 8, 1963, the Baath party overthrew the government of Syria, and since then the Assad family has ruled the country—until last weekend, when the son of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad, fled to Russia. The 60-year Baathist domination of Syria came to an end, deposed by a Sunni Islamist organization called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Whereas many current conversations are, appropriately, focused on the military and political revolution that Syrians are now living through, the ideological revolution deserves equal consideration. There is no way of knowing how long the current government in Syria, or the Syrian state as we know it, will endure. We don’t know if the new regime will be just and serve its people well, or whether it will be corrupt and tyrannical. We don’t know how Syria will relate to the West, to America, or to Israel. But by recovering the ideological genealogy of Baathism, from which Syria’s present rulers fought to free their country, we can begin to try to understand Arab politics the way that Arab intellectuals do. To that end, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a writer, student of the modern Middle East, and senior fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.

Bella Brannon and Benjie Katz on Anti-Semitic Employment Discrimination at UCLA Dec 05, 2024

Over 33,000 undergraduates are enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, known universally by its acronym, UCLA. It’s one of the most competitive schools in the country, accepting less than 9 percent of its applicants. Among the current undergraduate student body, Hillel International estimates that there are about 2,500 Jewish students.

The story of informal discrimination against Jewish students on prestigious campuses is, by now, a sad and familiar story. And in fact, that story is not foreign to Jewish students at UCLA. Worse still, an undergraduate Jewish leader on campus, Bella Brannon, has recently filed a motion with the student government alleging not informal, social discrimination, but formal employment discrimination against Jewish students.

Here some background is necessary. UCLA has an active student government: the Undergraduate Students Association Council, known by itsacronym, USAC. USAC is organized in various offices and commissions, one of which is the Cultural Affairs Commission, or CAC. According to CAC’s website, it is “meant to ignite conversation regarding current events” and “facilitate exhibitions of creativity.” It supports dance, art, music, culinary festivals, poetry readings, and tours of culturally significant areas of Los Angeles.

An elected member of the student body is charged with administering each of these commissions, and receives from the university a modest honorarium or payment of some kind for that service as well as a budget to hire fellow students to manage the commission’s many programs. Because UCLA is a public university, a good deal of that money comes from California taxpayers.

Brannon’s motion claims that the current CAC commissioner has made explicit a policy to disqualify Jewish students, described as Zionists, from employment at the commission. Her motion was recently described in an article in UCLA’s Jewish newspaper, Ha’Am, by the undergraduate writer Benjie Katz. This week, these two students, Bella Brannon and Benjie Katz—who are both leaders of the campus Tikvah chapter—join Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss their experiences.

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.

Ari Lamm on the Biblical Meaning of Giving Thanks Nov 29, 2024

Modeh ani l’fanekha, I thank you, are the first words uttered by observant Jewish women and men every day of their waking life. The first conscious thought is one of gratitude. The impulse to give thanks is a natural human sentiment, as we are reminded during this American season of thanksgiving.

How does gratitude appear in the biblical text, and how does the Hebrew Bible’s moral teaching instruct the natural impulse to gratitude? On this week’s podcast the CEO of Bnai Zion, the rabbi and scholar Ari Lamm—who has thought deeply about the biblical text, its drama, and its cultural and religious significance—discusses these questions with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

Maury Litwack on the Jewish Vote in the 2024 Elections Nov 22, 2024

Jewish Americans have been loyally voting for Democratic presidential candidates since the early decades of the 20th century. And a very great many Jews supported Vice-President Harris in the election earlier this month. But the exit-poll results reported by most news outlets—that 79 percent of the Jewish voting public cast their ballots for Harris—are, at the very least, open to some very serious questions, and probably altogether unrepresentative.

The poll that generated the figure of 79-percent Jewish support for the Democratic nominee, it turns out, does not include results from the states of New York, New Jersey, and California—three states that contain some of the most densely populated Jewish voting districts, and that are homes to those Jewish subpopulations that are a great deal more likely to support Republican policies and Republican candidates. A poll that excludes the most populous Jewish cities, and that excludes most Orthodox communities, is a poll that necessarily will reveal a distorted picture that privileges Jewish populations that tend to vote for Democrats.

Fortunately, other information is available. Maury Litwack is the founder and CEO of Teach Coalition, a lobbying organization active in at least seven states that aims to make it easier for religious parents to send their children to religious schools. He and his team conducted their own exit poll of Jewish voters, looking at places that tend to have a higher concentration of Jewish citizens—the swing state of Pennsylvania and the swing Congressional districts in New York State. The Teach Coalition poll found that Harris did not win more than 50 percent of the Jewish vote in those districts.

On this week’s podcast, Litwack joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his analysis of these data. He does not see evidence that all Jews are becoming Republican, or that they all support President Trump, or that all Orthodox Jews are doing so. There are certainly trends that point in that direction, but they’re not sustained by the findings of this poll. What is sustained by the findings of this poll is that the Jewish vote is up for grabs—and that both parties ought to be competing for it. Thus the Democratic party that has the most to lose if it believes that it still has the Jewish vote in its pocket—an unfounded belief that is reinforced every time the figure of 79 percent is repeated.

Jon Levenson on Understanding the Binding of Isaac as the Bible Understands It (Rebroadcast) Nov 15, 2024

This week, in their liturgical recitation and study of the Hebrew Bible, Jewish communities all over the world will relive the terrifying moment when God commands Abraham to take his son, his beloved son, who was to be his heir and fulfill his deepest dreams for family transmission and ancestry, Isaac, and sacrifice him.

What is this passage all about? What does it mean? What can be learned about Abraham, about Isaac, or about God by reading it carefully? Joining Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss these questions on this week’s podcast (originally broadcast in 2023) is Jon D. Levenson, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School and frequent Mosaic contributor. Levenson has written about this episode in several books, including The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son published in 1993 by Yale University Press, and also in Inheriting Abraham, published in 2012 by Princeton University Press.

Akeidat Yitzḥak, the binding of Isaac, as the Jewish people traditionally refer to this episode, has a long afterlife in Christian and Muslim traditions; it is also a centerpiece of philosophical reflection among modern thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard. Reading the text now in the aftermath of those later reflections, it’s difficult to retrieve its original meaning. The temptation is overwhelming to propose moral justifications for Abraham and for God, to excuse or at least to try to soften the drama of Genesis 22. To hear what the text of the Hebrew Bible really might have to say in response to that temptation requires undoing some modern assumptions—a task that Levenson and Silver take up.

Mark Dubowitz on the Dangers of a Lame-Duck President Nov 08, 2024

America has just elected a new president, or rather, a new-old president. Donald Trump will be the first American president since Grover Cleveland to be elected to non-consecutive terms. All transitions between presidential administrations have an awkward aspect, felt especially during the months between the election and when the incumbent takes office. This period, when the successor has already been named by the electorate but does not yet have any official power, is when a lame-duck session of Congress meets, and the president himself is called a lame-duck president.

During this period, the president—while retaining all of his constitutional authority—nevertheless tends to diminish in the power hierarchy of Washington. Presidential power is based, to a very large degree, on the possibility of promising something in the future, and lame-duck presidents don’t have a future in which they can fulfill any promises. It can also be a period when, unconstrained by the need to run for office again, a president can put executive orders and other kinds of policies in place without worrying about their political consequences. So it can be a period of troublemaking.

Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), fears that a lame-duck Biden administration might decide to target Israel with executive action in very damaging ways. Dubowitz has spent decades working on financial warfare and sanctions in and out of government, and he is an expert on Iran’s nuclear program.

In order to follow this conversation, there are a couple of things it helps to know. First, in December 2016, during President Obama's lame-duck period, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2334, which conveyed that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem are illegal. The U.S. could have vetoed the resolution, but instead abstained.

The second is Executive Order 14115, which President Biden signed back in February, which gives the State and Treasury Departments authorization to sanction individuals and entities who undermine peace and security in the very areas Security Council Resolution 2334 determined Israelis may not live in. Sanctions have already been levied against some Israelis—some of whom genuinely do undermine peace, and some of whom do not. Dubowitz joins Jonathan Silver to warn of the danger that the president will use the last weeks of his term to take accelerated action under these authorities.

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.

Matthew Levitt on Israel’s War with Hizballah: How the terrorist group continues on despite its catastrophic losses. Nov 01, 2024

On October 25 of this year, Israel carried out a series of retaliatory strikes on military targets in Iran. The Iranian supreme leader has made public pronouncements ordering his military to prepare a series of counterstrikes, though, as of this recording, those counterstrikes have not yet commenced. The prospect of a continued exchange of aerial attacks between Israel and Iran has captured the world’s attention, and for good reason: Iran is a nuclear-threshold state operating in close coordination with Russia.

This shift in attention has taken media coverage away from Lebanon, but in fact, the Israeli military’s operational successes in that country over the last month raise some very important questions. Hizballah has been degraded significantly—its arsenal diminished, its leadership eliminated, its command structure disrupted, its lines of communication fractured, its decision-making process broken, its finances destroyed.

How, in light of this, does Hizballah continue to operate? And how does Israel leverage these impressive tactical successes into a strategic victory that will allow the citizens of the Galilee and the Golan to return to their homes?

Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury Department senior official and the author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, discusses these questions and others with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

Meir Soloveichik on the Meaning of the Jewish Calendar Oct 16, 2024

The Zionist writer Ahad Ha’am famously remarked that more than the Jewish people kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jewish people. There is a deep truth that is embedded in the organization of time, the ritualization of communal ceremonies of remembrance and praise, and the recapitulation of the traumas and triumphs of the past: that the calendar can function as a source of national solidarity. Living in rhythm with the Jewish calendar and all that entails is what makes Jews, Jews. The calendar is the instrument that the Jewish people developed to teach our children Jewish history and the fundamental principles of Judaism, and it is what sustains and reinforces those principles throughout the span of a person’s life. It serves, you might say, as a strategy for national cohesion. Jewish nationhood depends on the organization of Jewish hours, days, weeks, and months.

In this episode of the Tikvah Podcast, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver speaks with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who has just published a new book that interprets each of the Jewish holidays in light of how it contributes to Jewish national belonging. Rabbi Soloveichik leads Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue; is the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University; and is the impresario of the website MeirSoloveichik.com, where you can find all of his writing along with his many video courses and podcasts, including his daily commentary on the Hebrew Bible, Bible365. His new book Sacred Time was published in 2024 by Koren.

Elliott Abrams on Whether American Jewry Can Restore Its Sense of Peoplehood Oct 11, 2024

That the Jews have survived is one of the great mysteries of history, and for some theologians, Jewish survival is even an indication of God’s providence. The stronger the force against the Jews, the more miraculous their resilience and endurance.

But that mystery has another dimension to it–because in America, the Jewish community is not doing well at all. And that’s not because America is like Egypt or Spain or Germany–in fact it’s precisely because America is so decent, so good, and so welcoming that the Jewish community finds itself contracting and growing shallower.

There is a powerful countertrend among the Orthodox subpopulations of American Jewry. Their rates of generational retention and inmarriage are high. Jewish education is advanced, and even flourishing. The U.S.-Israel relationship tends to be a salient issue in their approach to public affairs. But the Orthodox segment of American Jewry is very small. What about the other 85 or 90 percent?

Elliott Abrams, the chairman of Tikvah and a distinguished foreign-policy expert, is the author of a new book addressing these topics, If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century. Abrams takes comprehensive stock of the available data on American Jewish communal life and then poses a question. The Orthodox Jews of America have a formula that works. But what can be done to strengthen the Jewish attachments and Jewish identities of the non-Orthodox? What do the data tell us? Abrams joins Mosaic‘s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss If You Will It.

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.

Assaf Orion on Israel’s War with Hizballah Sep 27, 2024

From exploding pagers to airstrikes and a possible ground invasion, what are the IDF’s goals in Lebanon?

Everyone knows that on October 7, Hamas perpetrated a horrible, genocidal attack on Israel. In response to that attack, Israel committed itself to neutralizing the military threat from Gaza. On October 8, not wanting to seem any less committed to the eradication of the Jewish state, the Lebanon-based terror group Hizballah began to shoot rockets and missiles into Israel’s northern territories. Nearly a full year later, Israeli towns and villages within Hizballah rocket range remain empty, and many tens of thousands of Israelis live as evacuees in hotels and apartments.

Week after week, month after month, the rockets from Lebanese territory have not stopped. Israel has conducted occasional defensive operations, but about one week ago, the Israelis unmistakably increased the tempo and intensity of their own attacks, taking the fight to the territory of the adversary rather than continuing to bear its missile barrage.

The retired Israeli brigadier general and defense strategist, Assaf Orion, joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss this situation. Assaf is the Liz and Mony Rueven International Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and a prolific author and thinker not only on the security architecture of the Middle East and Israeli military planning and strategy, but also on China and great-power competition.

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.

Abe Unger on America's First Jewish Classical School Sep 20, 2024

A few weeks ago on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a new school opened its doors and welcomed its inaugural classes of students. Emet Classical Academy is America’s first Jewish classical school and a project of Tikvah. It’s designed for 5th- to 12th-grade students, and is an animated by a vision of the importance of Western civilization, the responsibilities of American citizenship, high standards of excellence in classical languages, math and science, and the power of music, poetry, and the visual arts. Joining that is a full curriculum in the Hebrew language, the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, and the history, politics, and meaning of modern Israel.

The establishment of Emet is even more significant given the current cultural, political, and ideological moment. Many of its pillars are deemed irrelevant, if not shameful, at the country's elite, ideologically charged private schools, many of which were abandoned by students in Emet’s first classes. To discuss all this, Emet’s founding head of school, Abe Unger, joins host Jonathan Silver. Together, they talk about Emet’s founding, the cultural and educational questions to which Emet holds itself forth as an answer, and what it’s like to learn in Emet.

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.

Marc Novicoff on Why Elite Colleges Were More Likely to Protest Israel Sep 13, 2024

The academic year of 2023-2024 was an annus horribilis for Jewish students on American campuses. But, for all the attention paid to the likes of Columbia and UCLA, one can zoom out and ask whether the protest activity was evenly distributed across American colleges and universities, or whether it was concentrated at certain kinds of schools?

Marc Novicoff, the associate editor of the Washington Monthly and a freelance writer, asked that question in June, and found that the protests and encampments were correlated with the tuition price, the level of student-body wealth, and the prestige of the university. As the school year begins once again, Marc sits down with host Jonathan Silver to explain his findings, and describe how he tested the proposition that elite colleges are much more likely to be the home of pro-Hamas, anti-Israel demonstrations.

Liel Leibovitz on What the Protests in Israel Mean Sep 06, 2024

For a while after October 7, the war produced an atmosphere of national solidarity in Israel, quieting some of the tensions that had divided Israelis from one another with a special intensity throughout the previous year. That quiet now seems to be ending.

There was always bound to be a tension between two of the Israeli government’s primary war aims: that of rescuing the hostages, and that of defeating Hamas until total victory. The government insists that it is pursuing both of these aims, but many Israelis don’t believe it. Many of them are persuaded that Prime Minister Netanyahu is prolonging the war and foregoing opportunities to secure the hostages’ freedom because the war keeps his political coalition together and that keeps him in power. Tens of thousands of Israelis, mapping more or less onto the tens of thousands of judicial-reform opponents seen last year, are now in the streets protesting.

Then when, last weekend, the bodies of six more murdered hostages were retrieved from Rafah, the anger overflowed its bounds and spilled out onto the streets. In the protestors’ view, it was Netanyahu who could have prevented these horrible deaths. Netanyahu could have gone along with Hamas’s cease-fire terms. Netanyahu could have patriotically apologized and resigned.

Liel Leibovitz, the editor-at-large of Tablet, thinks otherwise. Host Jonathan Silver speaks this week with Leibovitz about a recent essay analyzing the roots and effects of the protests themselves, "'Bring them Home’ Is Bringing Us to the Brink.” In it, Leibovitz looks at the protesters’ motivations, at a style of politics he thinks has been imported from America, and deeper questions raised by the Israelis marching against their government. In their conversation, Silver and Leibovitz try to peer a little more deeply into the ongoing drama of modern Zionism and the meaning of modern Israel.

Gary Saul Morson on Alexander Solzhenitsyn and His Warning to America Aug 30, 2024

On June 8, 1978, Harvard University invited the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to deliver a major commencement address. Solzhenitsyn was, by this time, a world famous figure who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Some two and a half decades earlier, while serving in the Soviet army during World War II, he was arrested and sent to the Gulag for criticizing the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in a private letter. He was imprisoned there for nearly a decade, during which he underwent a profound spiritual, religious, philosophical reorientation and awakening, eventually reflecting on his experiences in a major study of Soviet Gulag system, The Gulag Archipelago.

In time, he was freed from the camp but exiled from the Soviet Union. He settled in America, and there, was thought perhaps to be a valuable critic of the Soviet system. But the fact that he was a critic of Soviet repression and the soul-deforming debasement that Russians were forced to endure did not necessarily mean that he would endorse the American system in which he had found his freedom.

When Harvard invited Solzhenitsyn to address their graduating classes that year, probably weren't expecting so thoroughgoing a critique civic, philosophical, and moral as the one he delivered, warning Americans about deep-seated tendencies of mind that could lead their nation into the very sort of societal sickness from which he had just escaped. This week, as students return to campus, Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of America’s vulnerabilities may still be relevant. To think about that, host Jonathan Silver here speaks with the literature scholar Gary Saul Morson, author of a recent essay called “Solzhenitsyn Warned Us".

Adam Kirsch on Settler Colonialism Aug 23, 2024

Israel’s critics today like to argue that the country is illegitimate because it is the product of what they call settler colonialism. They consider non-Jewish Arab peoples the native inhabitants of the land—inhabitants who were displaced by the appearance of Jewish immigrants over the last 150 years. The great colonial moment was capped in 1948, when the Jews established political sovereignty in the state of Israel; then, subsequent wars, including and especially the Six Day War of 1967, further expanded and entrenched that moment.

According to this sort of analysis, Israel is always and forever illegitimate. Much the same is seen as true of America, which was not only illegitimate at the moment it seized native lands, but is still illegitimate, and will always be illegitimate. This dynamic is captured in a comment by Patrick Wolfe, a frequently quoted Australian scholar of settler colonialism: “invasion is a structure, not an event.”

This worldview establishes a moral hierarchy, draws political alliances, establishes political adversaries, and has been at the root of the ideological assault on Israel and its allies. It’s an idea that the critic and writer Adam Kirsch explores in his new book, On Settler Colonialism, published recently by W.W. Norton & Company. Here he joins host Jonathan Silver for a discussion of his book and the controversy around Israel.

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.

Raphael BenLevi, Hanin Ghaddar, and Richard Goldberg on the Looming War in Lebanon Aug 16, 2024

Right now, over 50,000 Israelis from the northern reaches of the country are not living in their homes. The intensity of rocket fire from Hizballah, arrayed across the Lebanese border, is too dangerous. For that reason and several others relating to Hizballah's patron, Iran, a war to Israel's north looms. In April of this year, the Israeli security analyst and IDF reserve intelligence officer Raphael BenLevi published an essay in Mosaic that explains the history of Israel’s northern border security, and what Israel can do now to restore it. To discuss that essay and its arguments, Mosaic’s editor and the podcast's host Jonathan Silver convened a conversation with the Lebanese writer Hanin Ghaddar and the Iran expert Richard Goldberg.

This week, given the intensification of concern toward Israel's north, brings the audio of that conversation in podcast form: as good a place as any to start thinking about the dangers that Hizballah poses in the larger conflict between Iran and Israel.

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.

Josh Kraushaar on the Democratic Party’s Veepstakes and American Jewry Aug 08, 2024

Earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she’d invited the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, to be her running mate in this fall’s presidential election. Walz has pretty conventional views of Israel for a Democrat: he believes in Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself, he has previously spoken at an AIPAC gathering, he condemned Hamas after October 7, that Hamas is not representative of the Palestinian people, that Israel is guilty of allowing too much civilian harm and civilian casualties in Gaza, that there must be a two-state solution, and that Israeli settlements are a barrier to that political outcome. That's what any number of other candidates on the vice-presidential shortlist also think, including Arizona senator Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.

For that matter, until the announcement, Shapiro was widely thought to be the front-runner by virtue of his popularity in what's expected to be the most important swing state in the election. Why didn't Harris select him? Over the last week, there’s been an enormous amount of speculation about the reasons. One of the most foreboding possibilities is that Shapiro is a religious Jew, and among the activist class of the Democratic party, being an Israel-supporting religious Jew is now a liability. Of course, no one from the campaign or any Democratic official has said that Walz's selection had to do with that liability. But many of America’s Jews—Democratic and Republican alike—took it that way, and so did many of America’s anti-Semites.

To disentangle the role that such factors may have played in the Harris campaign’s decision, host Jonathan Silver speaks here with the longtime political reporter and editor of Jewish Insider, Josh Kraushaar. Together, the two look at what the activist opposition campaign looked like, and how that campaign interpreted the selection of Walz as a validation and a victory.

J.J. Schacter on the First Tisha b'Av Since October 7 Aug 02, 2024

On the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av in the year 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian forces destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Since then, Tisha b’Av has served as a day of commemorating Jewish tragedy, a day when Jews remember those killed for being Jews and recite kinnot, elegies recounting the sacrifice and suffering that is an inescapable part of the Jewish past.

Tisha b’Av this year, taking place on August 12-13, will be the first since the October 7 attack on Israel, and its arrival raises a number of questions. To examine them, host Jonathan Silver is joined here in conversation by the rabbi J.J. Schacter, who for decades has led important Tisha b’Av services and has reflected deeply on questions of kinnot and memory as both a professional historian and a communal leader and teacher. (He recently delivered a free online video course on the meaning of Jewish memory accessible at memory.tikvahfund.org.)

Together, they explore how the liturgy of Tisha b’Av might be expanded to address October 7, how rabbis decide to commemorate specific events with their own fast days and when are they instead subsumed under the rubric of Tisha b’Av, and what elegies Jews will sing this year and in the future to weave October 7 into the religious consciousness of the Jewish liturgy.

Noah Rothman on Kamala Harris’s Views of Israel and the Middle East Jul 26, 2024

Suddenly, Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic party’s candidate for president. She’s been in the public eye for much less time than Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and much less is known about her views on many subjects—including on the U.S.-Israel relationship or America’s posture in the Middle East.

For instance, as Israel’s war in Gaza ramped up earlier this year, Harris became an outspoken critic of it, and a champion of a ceasefire arrangement between Israel and Hamas on the grounds of humanitarian concern for Palestinian civilians. But it’s possible that these attitudes were a product of her role in the Biden administration, that she was assigned the role of bad cop to the president’s good cop.

So what does Harris really think about the subject? What role might her Jewish family members play in her views? How does she understand the politics of the U.S.-Israel relationship? To answer those questions, host Jonathan Silver speaks here with Noah Rothman, a senior writer at National Review and the author of a recent essay there called “The Left Thinks It’s Getting an Anti-Israel Radical in Kamala Harris.” Together, the two also survey the wide coalition of the Democratic party—its elected officials, its voting base, its NGOs and operatives—and try to understand the pressures, the points of leverage, the incentives, and the political vulnerabilities to avoid on questions related to Israel.

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.

Avi Weiss on the AMIA Bombing 30 Years Later (Rebroadcast) Jul 19, 2024

In April 2024, a court in Argentina ruled that the 1994 bombing of the AMIA, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, was directed by Iran and carried out by Hezbollah. It was an official government acknowledgement of what was long thought to be true, and certainly the conclusion that the Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman had arrived at prior to being assassinated the day before he was due to testify.

Today, July 18, on the thirtieth anniversary of the AMIA bombing, Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, announced his intention to prosecute Iranian leaders involved in the attack. To commemorate the anniversary, we’re rebroadcasting this week a conversation from 2019 that Jonathan Silver had with the rabbi Avi Weiss, author of a Mosaic essay on the subject from the same year.

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.

Melanie Phillips on the British Election and the Jews Jul 12, 2024

This month, Keir Starmer was elected prime minister of the UK. He is something of a reformer in the Labor party, which, before him, had been led by Jeremy Corbyn. The two have a different public temperament and different public persona. They have a different attitude toward the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Corbyn normalized a degree of anti-Semitism within mainstream Labor politics that was so odious it forced ideologically committed Labor members who are Jewish to leave the party. Since Starmer took over, the party has made a conscious effort to put forward a different, more welcoming face toward Jews.

And what about beneath the surface? Is Starmer different in practice and policy toward Israel and the Jewish people? To answer that question, host Jonathan Silver speaks here with British journalist Melanie Phillips, who wrote an essay on the subject recently called "All Change."

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.

Mark Cohn on the Reform Movement and Intermarriage Jul 05, 2024

For years, the Reform movement in America has allowed marriage between a Jewish and non-Jewish spouse, as long as the couple commits to raising their children as Jews. But a cultural taboo against intermarriage remained for Reform clergy, a taboo reinforced by admissions and ordination standards at the Hebrew Union College, the movement’s main seminary. Applicants who were in a long-term relationship with a non-Jewish partner were denied, on the grounds that modeling a Jewish home was expected of rabbis.

That changed this year. “Moving forward,” a recent letter from the president, provost, and board chair of the seminary announced, “the religious identity of a student’s or applicant’s partner will no longer disqualify students for admission or ordination.” The letter goes on to explain that this decision is the result of a process of internal deliberation, and that it brings what’s expected of the clergy in line with the reality of the broader Reform community.

In reaction, the longtime Reform rabbi Mark Cohn took to the Times of Israel with an article, called “The Anguished Dilemma of a Reform Rabbi,” lamenting the decision. In today’s conversation, Cohn joins Jonathan Silver to discuss the Reform movement’s attitude toward interfaith couples, the relation between clergy and congregation, the purpose and nature of religious leadership, and in this case, who is leading whom, why this decision was made, and what it could mean for the future of Reform clergy in America.

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.

Jeffrey Saks on the Genius of S.Y. Agnon Jun 28, 2024

Shmuel Yosef Agnon is one of the masters of modern Hebrew fiction, who helped to spark the revival of modern Hebrew literature in Israel and around the world. His work is not only beloved, but also profound, laden with many allusions to the vast canon of traditional Jewish text that shaped his literary imagination: one hears in Agnon’s work echoes of the siddur, the Hebrew Bible, and an astonishing array of rabbinic literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1966.

Yesterday, Tikvah released a five-part, online video course introducing students to S.Y. Agnon’s short stories, novels, and anthologies—writing that strengthened the Jewish people in those pivotal 20th-century years when the state of Israel was reborn. The course is taught by Rabbi Jeffrey Saks, director of research at the Agnon House in Jerusalem, series editor of the S.Y. Agnon Library at the Toby Press, editor of the journal Tradition, and the founding director of the Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions in Jewish Education – ATID. This week, we bring you the audio from the first episode of Rabbi Saks’s forthcoming video course on the writings of Shay Agnon. To register for the course, go to tikvahfund.org/agnon.

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.

Shlomo Brody on What the Jewish Tradition Says about Going to War Jun 20, 2024

Last month, host Jonathan Silver spoke with the rabbi Shlomo Brody about Jewish military ethics. They spoke, in particular, about the Jewish ethical tradition’s conception of right conduct once a war has begun: how one ought to calibrate the force of a maneuver to the threat it is meant to neutralize, how one ought to balance collateral damage and civilian casualties with force protection, and other related questions. This week, Brody joins Silver once again to discuss the reasons nations go to war—that is, to discern in Jewish history, Jewish text, and the drama of modern Zionism, the ethical parameters of thinking about going to war in the first place. As with their previous conversation, this conversation is informed by Brody’s recently published book, Ethics of Our Fighters.

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.

Chaim Saiman on the Roots and Basis of Jewish Law (Rebroadcast) Jun 14, 2024

Jewish communities have just concluded the celebration of Shavuot, a pilgrimage festival in times of the Temple and the moment when, fifty days after the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt, God revealed the Ten Commandments to Moses. Those commandments form the foundation of the many rules and obligations inflected throughout the Jewish tradition. Indeed, after thousands of years of Jewish history, observant Jewish lives continue to be structured by what is known as halakhah, Jewish law.

What is halakhah? In 2018, the rabbi Mark Gottlieb sat down to answer that question with Chaim Saiman, one of the world’s foremost scholars of Jewish law and the author of a then newly published book called Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law. This week, in honor of the Jewish holiday that celebrates lawgiving, we bring you a rebroadcast of their discussion.

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.

Elliott Abrams on American Jewish Anti-Zionists Jun 07, 2024

Since the attacks of October 7 and since the Gaza war began, a small but vocal segment of American Jews have joined in with the anti-Israel protests convulsing American cities and campuses. What are their ideas and where do they come from?

Elliott Abrams is the author of If You Will It, a book coming this fall on Jewish peoplehood. Also the chairman of Tikvah and a regular Mosaic writer, he’s been an observer of American Jewish life for a long time. In his view, the Jewish turn against Israel in America today is vastly different than the usual critiques one hears every Shabbat in every synagogue across the country. In other words, it’s not that these Jews don’t like the Israeli prime minister or other members of his governing coalition, or certain policies of the government or trends in Israeli culture. It's that they see Israel as a moral encumbrance on the Jewish conscience, and imagine that the Jews would be better off without statehood altogether. He recently developed this argument in an essay in Fathom called “American Jewish Anti-Zionist Diasporism: A Critique,” and here elaborates on it with host Jonathan Silver.

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.

Andrew Doran on Why He Thinks the Roots of Civilization Are Jewish May 31, 2024

Traditional readers of the Hebrew Bible, reinforced by rabbinic commentary, condemn the bloodlust, cruelty, exploitation of the weak, and exaltation of the strong that is on display in the Amalekite attack on Israel in the book of Exodus. But it’s not the Amalekites, the nomadic enemies of the Israelites, who are shocking for their sacralized violence; it’s the Israelites who are shocking for their ability to quiet that darker, natural impulse, and live out a different moral code.

That is the thought that frames a recent essay called “Civilization Is from the Jews,” written by Andrew Doran, a senior research fellow with the Philos Project. Here, with host Jonathan Silver, Doran discusses his contention that what we think of as “civilization” came into the drama of human history in no other way than through God’s covenantal promise with Abraham and his children.

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.

Haisam Hassanein on How Egypt Sees Gaza May 24, 2024

A stable if somewhat cold peace has endured between Egypt and Israel for nearly fifty years, a peace that includes serious diplomatic and security cooperation. Much of that has to do with Gaza. After Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel and Egypt jointly imposed a blockade and began to control its borders, since each had its own reasons to fear Hamas. Hamas was, after all, an outgrowth of the very Muslim Brotherhood that threatened the Egyptian government’s rule.

Since October 7, Egypt has catapulted itself into a role as a key mediator between Israel and Hamas. The country’s leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has seen the crisis as a lever he could use to grow his country’s economy and restore some of its diminishing political clout. Has that worked?

Haisam Hassanein is an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In this podcast, he joins host Jonathan Silver to think through how Cairo assesses the war on its border, how it sees its own interests there, and what lasting consequences Israel’s war with Hamas may have on the future of Egypt’s relations with the Jewish state.

In the last few days, it's been widely reported that Egyptian mediators were responsible for surreptitiously changing the terms of a recent hostage negotiation between Israel and Hamas, thereby deceiving the American and Israeli negotiators. That news broke after the two recorded their conversation, and so while they won’t discuss it explicitly, this news can be better understood in light of how Hassanein describes how Egypt understands its own national interests.

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.

Asael Abelman on the History of “Hatikvah” May 17, 2024

Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” has a long and poignant history that traces back to a poem originally written by Naftali Herz Imber called “Tikvateinu.” This week, to mark the 76th anniversary of Israel’s founding, the historian and author Asael Abelman joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to investigate that history. Together, they look at the biblical sources and national aspirations of the poem, examine some of the contemporary discussion surrounding it, and take stock of some of its mysteries and paradoxes. Foremost among those paradoxes is the fact that the state of Israel’s anthem is a song of longing for the day that there will be such a thing as a state of Israel.

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.

Shlomo Brody on Jewish Ethics in War May 09, 2024

After a long delay, the Israeli military’s advance into Rafah, the city in southern Gaza that is the last stronghold of Hamas’s fighting force and that now also hosts many civilian refugees from the rest of Gaza, may now be underway. Many in the U.S. are concerned that an Israeli push into Rafah will incur high numbers of civilian casualties. How does and should Israel think about that possibility?

The rabbi and scholar Shlomo Brody is the author of a new volume on Jewish military ethics, Ethics of Our Fighters. It is traditional in the intellectual and philosophical field of just-war theory to draw a distinction between the ethics of going to war and the ethics of fighting in war. Here, Brody and host Jonathan Silver discuss the latter subject—ethics in war—as it is seen through the Jewish tradition and the historical experience of the Israeli military.

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.

Ruth Wisse on the Explosion of Anti-Israel Protests on Campus May 03, 2024

Anti-Israel campus activism has never been more popular or unpleasant than it is right now. In years past, much of this activism was mixed up with nods to the desire for peace and a two-state solution that would allow for Palestinians to enjoy their own sovereignty alongside a secure Israel. That isn’t happening now. It certainly isn’t what is meant by the chants, now common at the most prestigious universities in the United States, that call for the globalization of the intifada or that give voice to the delusion that Israel can be unborn.

To analyze the protests, the protestors, and their slogans, Ruth Wisse, the scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literature and history, and the author of books including Jews and Power, joins Jonathan Silver.

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.

Meir Soloveichik on the Politics of the Haggadah Apr 19, 2024

Next week, Jewish families will sit at their seder tables and relive the drama of Jewish liberation from Egyptian oppression. The text used, the Haggadah, is one of the most widely read works of the rabbinic tradition. It has an inescapably national aspect, and its main themes, when seen in the right perspective, suggest to the rabbi Meir Soloveichik that it can be understood as a preeminent work of Jewish political thought: tackling themes of freedom and oppression, covenant and constitution, state and society, the nature of law and the dreams of a people.

Soloveichik discusses that and more here, in the first lecture in his eight-part course, “The Haggadah: A Political Classic,” which is available in full at meirsoloveichik.com.

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.

Yechiel Leiter on Losing a Child to War Apr 12, 2024

Yechiel Leiter is a distinguished Israeli public servant and thinker. A scholar of political philosophy, the head of the international department of the Shiloh Policy Forum, the former chief of staff to then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he is also the father of seven children—including five of whom are serving in Israel’s current war with Hamas. His oldest son, Moshe Leiter, himself a father of six children, fell in battle on November 10.

Here, he joins host Jonathan Silver to mark six months of the war, to talk about the obligations of Israeli citizenship, Zionism, and Judaism, to remember his son Moshe, and to share how he and the nation have mourned their lost children.

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.

Yehoshua Pfeffer on Haredi Service in the Israeli Military Apr 05, 2024

Whether or not haredi Jews should be required to serve in the IDF is a perennial question of Israeli politics, one that has caused political parties to form and disband, governing coalitions to rise and fall. It was the subject of a 2021 episode of this podcast with the haredi judge, editor, and rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer. This question has taken on a new intensity lately, as the October 7 attacks and Israel’s war in Gaza have unified most of the country in a belief that the haredi draft exemption is unsustainable, unwise, and unjust.

This week, Pfeffer joins Jonathan Silver again to talk about how the matter now looks from within the haredi community. They discuss how Israeli haredim reacted to the October 7 attacks, the experience of the small number of haredim who have been serving in military operations since the war began, and what Pfeffer thinks they should do. Notably, he argues that, as a matter of Jewish belonging, haredi men ought to enlist and help to protect their country.

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.

Joseph Lieberman on American Jews and the Zionist Dream (Rebroadcast) Mar 29, 2024

Nearly twenty-five years ago, at the turn of the new millennium, America came very close to selecting not only a Jewish vice president, but a proudly religious, Shabbat-observing, kosher-eating Jewish vice president: Joe Lieberman, senator from Connecticut.

Lieberman, who died this week, epitomized a certain spirit in American public life, when the great debates over the conduct of American foreign policy and the management of domestic affairs still admitted heterodox disagreement. He was also a key figure in the U.S.-Israel relationship, articulating as well as anyone in public life why the widespread support that Americans feel toward the Jewish state also had a strategic value in serving American interests.

In October 2019, Lieberman, by then retired from the Senate, was in Jerusalem, where he addressed the Herzl Conference on Contemporary Zionism. In that speech—later published in a suitably edited form in Mosaic—he took a retrospective tone, looking back at the initial impulses that led Theodor Herzl’s ideas to take concrete form in modern Israel. He looked at the effect that Israel has had on American Jewry. And he honestly examined growing political trends that troubled him.

Today, we rebroadcast a 2019 conversation that Jonathan Silver had with Lieberman in which they discuss that speech and his career.

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.

Seth Kaplan on How to Fix America's Fragile Neighborhood Mar 22, 2024

Neighborhoods have always played a distinctly important role in American public life. The neighborhood is the most intimate public setting outside of the home, the place where mediating institutions of common life—schools, stores, gyms, houses of worship—connect citizens to each other. American neighborhoods, however, have lately grown fragile and unhealthy, reflecting the nation's loneliness epidemic, its underwhelming public education system, its demoralized society.

Seth Kaplan is the author of Fragile Neighborhoods, a new book that diagnoses these dilemmas and that offers practical steps to nurse neighborhoods back to health. He joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss how Jewish neighborhoods might serve as models that could inspire other communities in the United States.

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.

Timothy Carney on How It Became So Hard to Raise a Family in America Mar 15, 2024

In 21st-century America, the formation of families has become less common, and when people do get married and have children, they have fewer of them. According to demographers, for a population to reproduce itself, each family in it must on average produce at least 2.1 children. Americans are now reproducing at well below that number, a trend that comes with economic, social, political, spiritual, and moral consequences.

It's possible that government initiatives and financial incentives can encourage this number to rise. But in general there are mixed results when governments try to incentivize childbirth. This may be a sign that the forces undermining family formation are not primarily legal or economic, and that they are instead cultural attitudes and norms of behavior.

That possibility is what today's podcast guest, Timothy Carney, addresses in a new book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. In looking for examples of communities that have developed healthy family cultures, his reporting took him to an Orthodox suburb of Washington, DC, where he spent Purim and Shabbat, and to Israel.

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.

Jonathan Conricus on How Israeli Aid to Gaza Works Mar 08, 2024

During Israel's war against Hamas, it has provided direct aid to Gazans, and it has allowed for the distribution of foreign aid. Hamas has accused Israeli soldiers of intentionally targeting Palestinians as they gather to receive food, most recently on February 29. The Israeli military released video evidence to the contrary, but by the time they did so, international impressions were already set, and Israelis now wonder why they’re volunteering the wellbeing of their own soldiers, and their own resources, only to be met with international condemnation. To explain the historical and strategic context of the aid to Gaza that Israel gives and facilitates, Jonathan Conricus joins Mosaic editor and podcast host Jonathan Silver. Conricus served in the Givati Brigade of the IDF when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Since then, he's served as a combat commander, military diplomat, and IDF international spokesman, and has been acting as a spokesman in the months since October 7. 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.

Vance Serchuk on Ten Years of the Russia-Ukraine War Mar 01, 2024

One day after this phase of the war began, on February 25, 2022, the writer, former Senate staff member, Navy reservist, and executive director of the KKR Global Institute Vance Serchuk joined Mosaic‘s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss what was happening in real time. Two years later, he joins the Tikvah Podcast again to step back and ask some basic questions, and to offer his considered judgment on the state of the war.

What are its causes? On what basis can one decipher the truth from the conflicting narratives about the war in Europe, in Ukraine, in Russia, and in the United States? What have we learned about the deployment of novel military technology? What sorts of alliances have emerged or been strengthened, and what can we learn from them? Has the invasion of Ukraine helped the West relearn the necessity of military force, and chastened some of the most idealistic discourse about human rights and multilateralism? How does the war in Ukraine shed light on the state of U.S.-Russia relations and competition?

Serchuk recently returned from the Munich Security Conference, where he spoke with foreign officials about the state of the war. And, this August, he’s teaching a specialized seminar on U.S.-Russia Relations as a part of the Security Studies Program at the Hertog Foundation in Washington, DC. If you’re an advanced undergraduate, a recent college graduate, or a young professional working in national security, foreign policy, or related fields, you might consider applying to study with Mr. Serchuk. Applications are available at hertogfoundation.org, and they are due on March 4.

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.

Yehuda Halper on Maimonides the Physician Feb 22, 2024

The outstanding rabbinic authority and philosopher of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, was also a physician. After writing The Guide of the Perplexed, his great philosophical treatise, he turned his attention to composing works of medicine. He produced ten: On Hemorrhoids, On Cohabitation, On Asthma, On Poisons and Their Antidotes, Regimen of Health, On the Causes of Symptoms, Extracts from Galen, Medical Aphorisms, a Commentary on Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, and a Glossary of Drug Names.

In all of these, Maimonides is preoccupied with organizing, clarifying, simplifying vast expanses of text into usable guidelines. That’s one reason why the production of and instruction in aphorisms was so important for him—they were designed to be easy for physicians and their patients to remember. And there was a lot to remember. According to Maimonides, a doctor must know all about anatomy, symptoms, the health and sickness of the body and its parts, how to restore health when a person is sick, and food and diets, medicines, bathing, bandaging, and the various instruments that a medical doctor would need to use.

To get a sense of all this, the Maimonides expert Yehuda Halper sits down with host Jonathan Silver to focus on one particular medical work, Maimonides’s Commentary on Hippocrates’ Aphorisms. Many now will be familiar with Hippocrates because the popular Hippocratic oath that inducts physicians into their profession is attributed to him. But in Maimonides’ time, medical research often took the form of commentary on the ancient writings of Hippocrates. One of Hippocrates earliest and most authoritative commentators was Galen, an ancient Roman doctor, and in his commentary, Maimonides applies his reason and empirical experience in the medical field to both of them. Along the way, Halper, in the fourth and final episode in their mini-series on Maimonides, explains how Maimonides thinks about the nature of authority, about the role and also the limits of tradition, and about the domain of reason and observation in human life.

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.

Cynthia Ozick on the Story of a Jew Who Becomes a Tormentor of Other Jews Feb 15, 2024

In the 1850s, when a young Italian Jewish boy named Edgardo Mortara fell ill, his family’s Christian maid had secretly baptized him in hopes that he would be restored to health, or that if he died, his soul would be saved.

This meant that when Edgardo survived and his baptism was revealed, the church saw him as a Christian child, not a Jewish one—and it was forbidden by Canon law for a Christian child to be raised by Jewish parents. So Edgardo, then six years old, was removed from his family against their wishes by the pope, and brought to Rome where he was instructed in the Catholic faith and eventually became a priest.

This is the background to a new work of short fiction, “The Story of My Family,” written by the great American Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick and published in the March 2024 issue of Commentary. In it, Ozick retells the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara as it is remembered by Edgardo’s nephew’s daughter who, by the time of the story, has moved to America. From there, she reflects on the way that Edgardo’s life and priesthood haunted his nephew, that is, her own father.

To discuss her new story, Ozick joins Mosaic’s editor and podcast host Jonathan Silver this week. Together, the two investigate the meaning of a tale about a Jew who becomes a tormentor of the Jews, and how such theological disturbances can rattle 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.

Yehuda Halper on Guiding Readers to "The Guide of the Perplexed" Feb 08, 2024

This week, the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic returns to the towering intellectual and religious sage of medieval Judaism, Moses Maimonides, the Rambam. In two previous conversations about his work, the professor of Judaism Yehuda Halper and podcast host Jonathan Silver focused on Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, his code of law.

This week, the two turn from the Mishneh Torah to Maimonides’s philosophical magnum opus, Moreh ha Nevukhim, known in English as The Guide of the Perplexed. Whereas the Mishneh Torah leaves one with the impression that philosophy and law can be reconciled within the covenantal structure of an observant Jewish life, the emphasis in The Guide of the Perplexed is on the tensions, difficulties, and apparent contradictions between philosophy and law.

The Guide is one of the great books of Jewish philosophy, and it requires some preliminary introduction before anyone can seriously engage its questions. So this discussion is an orientation to the kind of study, the kind of person, and the kind of life that the Guide is written to instruct.

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.

Ray Takeyh on What Iran Wants Feb 02, 2024

Since October 7, there have been more than one hundred attacks by Iran-backed militias against American forces in the Middle East. On January 28, a drone strike, probably launched by Iran’s most powerful proxy in Iraq, killed three and injured more than 40 American soldiers. Iran-supported Houthis have launched dozens of attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea. Iran’s most important proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, sustains a low-grade confrontation with Israel. And, of course, 130 Israelis remain captive to Iran-backed Hamas as hostages in Gaza.

In other words, there is a war, sometimes hot, sometimes cool, happening across the entire Middle East between Iran, Israel, the U.S., and various other smaller actors. What does Iran want out of this war? Is it achieving its objectives? What is it concerned about?

To answer these and other questions, Ray Takeyh here joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver. Takeyh is a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs, and the author, just last week, of a New York Times opinion piece called “Why Iran Doesn’t Want a War.”

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.

Yehuda Halper on Maimonides and the Human Condition Jan 26, 2024

Recently, the Israeli professor of Jewish philosophy Yehuda Halper joined Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss Maimonides, the Rambam, perhaps the most significant medieval rabbinic sage and Jewish philosopher. They discussed Maimonides’s life and the main genres of his work—his commentary on Jewish law, his codification of Jewish law, his elaboration of philosophic mysteries that he believed are laden within the biblical and rabbinic corpus, his writings on science and medicine, and his views on the laws pertaining to Torah study.

Halper now returns for another conversation about Maimonides. This week, they look at “Hilchot De’ot,” a section of the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides’s great work on Jewish law, pertaining to the laws of character traits. In “Hilchot De’ot,” Maimonides introduced a portrait of the human condition, suggesting a moral psychology that can be assessed, trained, and elevated, and a description of the human person as an embodied being with a physical presence. There are profound philosophical and religious questions raised explicitly in this work, and even more profound ones residing just under the surface of the text.

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.

Hillel Neuer on How the Human-Rights Industry Became Obsessed with Israel Jan 18, 2024

1948 was a landmark year in international politics. It saw the establishment of modern Israel. And it saw the General Assembly of the United Nations adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That document, recognized today as a foundation stone of international human-rights law, gives voice to a range of fundamental rights meant to honor human freedom and dignity.

At the time, many of the proponents of human-rights statements and organizations were not only Jewish but proud Zionists. In the seventy-five years since, those two sorts of commitments seem to have grown in different directions, so that now, most people who work in the human-rights industry do not support but actively oppose the foundational premises and practical necessities of Jewish national freedom.

Hillel Neuer is the executive director of UN Watch, a human-rights organization based in Geneva. Together in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he asks several pressing questions about this history, which he wrote about as a chapter in the new volume Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, published by Wicked Son. How did the human-rights movement and Israel start together? How did they grow apart? Can the human-rights movement change course, so that it can still highlight violations of human-rights law without falling prey to the obsession with Israel that today undermines its credibility?

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.

Yehuda Halper on Where to Begin With Maimonides Jan 12, 2024

2024 marks 820 years since the death of Maimonides in the Egyptian city of Fustat. The main focus of his writing falls in three categories. There's his commentary on the Mishnah and his code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, a monumental contribution to Jewish jurisprudence. His Guide of the Perplexed is a magnum opus of theological and philosophical puzzles and reflection. And his writings about science, health, and medicine are an expression of the expertise he developed in his career as a court physician in Egypt.

Today's episode is the first of a multi-episode mini-series on Maimonides featuring Yehuda Halper of Bar-Ilan University, among the most distinguished scholars today of medieval Jewish philosophy and medieval Islamic philosophy, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver. This week, they begin the series by looking at passages from the Mishneh Torah which describe the purview of Torah study.

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.

Our Favorite Conversations of 2023 Jan 05, 2024

In 2023, host Jonathan Silver convened 47 new conversations probing some of the most interesting and consequential subjects in modern Jewish life, from theological and religious themes to political and military ones. He spoke to scholars, visual artists, rabbis, writers, soldiers, strategists, and generals. Now that 2023 has come to an end, he's looking back at a number of representative excerpts from the year past in hopes that, as we plan 40 or 50 more conversations in 2024, you’ll return to the archive and listen to some of the most fascinating conversations from this year.

In this episode, we present selections from some of our favorite 2023 conversations. Excerpts include the podcast host and president of Shalem College, Russ Roberts; the great American writer, Cynthia Ozick; the Hebrew calligrapher, Izzy Pludwinski; Peter Berkowitz and Gadi Taub debating judicial reform; Ran Baratz on the roots of Israel's rifts; Michael Doran comparing October's Hamas attacks with the Yom Kippur War; Meir Soloveichik on Jewish martyrs; and, discussing Mosaic's November essay on the Palestinian predicament, the scholar Shany Mor, the journalist Haviv Gur, and the intellectual Hussein Aboubakr.

Finally, this episode ends on a note of hope, sounded by the historian Rick Richman, whose book of biographical portraits, And None Shall Make Them Afraid, turns out to have been the book we most needed this year.

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.

Matti Friedman on Whether Israel Is Too Dependent on Technology Dec 28, 2023

Israel is known for its advances in military technology, from the helmet-mounted displays of the newest fighter jets to the Iron Beam anti-missile defense system. (See this recent discussion with the military strategist and author Edward Luttwak about his new book on the subject, or this discussion with the entrepreneur Alon Arvatz about the cyber-specific dimension of Israeli defense.)

But as with everything, there are always tradeoffs to technology. Those tradeoffs are the concern of the Israeli writer Matti Friedman, who recently published an essay in the Atlantic called “Israel Is Dangerously Dependent on Technology.” Here, he speaks with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver about that essay, and the tradeoffs for Israeli planners and politicians that have recently arrived.

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.

Ghaith al-Omari on What Palestinians Really Think about Hamas, Israel, War, and Peace Dec 22, 2023

Earlier this month, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research released a poll of Palestinian attitudes—attitudes towards Israel, towards Hamas, towards the Palestinian Authority, about the Hamas attacks of October 7, about the conduct of the war since that time, and more.

The findings are eye-opening. Asked if the October 7 attacks were the right thing to do, in light of all that’s happened since, 72% of Palestinians think they were. A further 85% said that they have not seen the videos of the October 7 attacks, and the vast majority do not believe that Hamas committed the atrocities that the videos show. Meanwhile, 66% of Palestinian respondents do not support the idea of a two-state solution. Approximately the same number, 63% of Palestinian respondents, believes that armed struggle is the best means of achieving, in the words of the poll, “an end to the occupation and the building of an independent state.”

Ghaith al-Omari is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the former executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine, and served as an advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team during the 1999–2001 permanent-status talks (in addition to holding various other positions within the Palestinian Authority). Here, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he breaks down some of this data and offers historical and political context for it.

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.

Alexandra Orbuch, Gabriel Diamond, and Zach Kessel on the Situation for Jews on American Campuses Dec 15, 2023

This week, Mosaic editor and podcast host Jonathan Silver steps into the arena of campus conflict. Alexandra Orbuch is a junior at Princeton, while Gabriel Diamond is a senior at Yale and the co-author of an essay in the New York Times entitled “What is Happening on College Campuses is Not Free Speech.” Zach Kessel recently graduated from Northwest and is a fellow at National Review as well as at Tikvah. The three come from different places in the country, have different kinds of religious practices, study different subjects, and none intended to become college activists. Yet all three have found themselves caught up in what they all see as a deteriorating climate for young American Jews.

Do arguments over messages scribbled in chalk on the sidewalk or the presence or absence of posters on message boards matter? These three think they do, and ably explain why. The attitudes that are crystalizing in American universities, particularly elite ones, have a disproportionately large impact on American culture by virtue of the disproportionately large power of their graduates. In other words, questions of chalk messages and posters become proxy expressions of power.

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.

Roya Hakakian on Her Letter to an Anti-Zionist Idealist Dec 08, 2023

In the summer 2023 issue of Sapir, Roya Hakakian, an Iranian Jewish refugee to America, published an essay titled “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Idealist." Its form echoes some of the most important arguments in modern times: Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution was written as a letter, as was perhaps the foremost Zionist polemic in English, Hillel Halkin’s Letters to an American Jewish Friend.

In it, Hakakian acknowledges the misgivings that her correspondent—a benighted, well-intentioned, kind-hearted, idealist—has about Israel, and confronts that point of view with her own gratitude for Israel. And by examining the different judgments at which she and her correspondent have arrived, she is also able to shed light on the effects that America has had on Zionism in general.

This week, she joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss her letter, the fervor that now surrounds the subject, and the resurgent presence of the anti-Zionist idealists to whom Hakakian addresses herself.

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.

Edward Luttwak on How Israel Develops Advanced Military Technology On Its Own Dec 01, 2023

Compared to the United States and other great military powers, Israel has been relatively weak, relatively poor, and relatively embattled, without much space or time to incubate sophisticated military technology. Yet it has somehow become an innovator in that field. How is it that Israel has been able to turn its many limitations into assets that have helped it develop some of the most advanced defense technology on the planet?

Edward Luttwak is a distinguished military strategist and historian, who, together with Eitan Shamir, has just published a new book called The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israel Defense Forces. Luttwak joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver here to discuss the history of Israeli military-technology innovation, and the political, economic, and cultural factors that make it possible.

Shany Mor, Hussein Aboubakr, and Haviv Rettig Gur on the Palestinian Predicament Nov 23, 2023

On October 7, Hamas terrorists recorded themselves in a state of joyous excitement to document their murder of so many Jews. But over the ensuing weeks, that emotion has given way to another emotion: pity for the Palestinians as passive victims of Israeli aggression. The men instigated this war are now seen as victims of this war, occupied, displaced, not murderers but among the murdered. That transformation is our focus of this episode of the Tikvah Podcast.

As it happens, that transformation is not unique to the Hamas attacks of October 2023. It is a pattern of Palestinian transformation that can be observed throughout the history of Israel. This is one of the distinguishing features of the Palestinian predicament, according to the Israeli writer Shany Mor, and it’s one of the core themes of a big essay he wrote for us atMosaic in November 2023, called “Ecstasy and Amnesia in the Gaza Strip.”

On November 15, Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver convened a discussion of Mor’s essay, along with the Egyptian-American writer Hussein Aboubakr, and the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur. This week’s podcast brings you that conversation.

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.

Assaf Orion on Israel's Initial Air Campaign in Gaza Nov 16, 2023

After the Hamas massacre of October 7, the Israeli military took three weeks before it responded with a ground invasion of Gaza, a span longer than most outside observers seemed to expect. What was happening? In that time, Israel’s air force was softening the ground for that incursion, and giving Palestinian civilians time to vacate the battlefield. Assaf Orion, a retired IDF brigadier general and defense strategist, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver this week to explain how Israel staged its air campaign, why it would help the ground phase, whether the air force's objectives were met, how bombs and missiles can penetrate subterranean targets, and how hostage fatalities could be avoided. Their conversation amounts to a preliminary retrospective on the earliest phase in Israel’s response.

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.

Bruce Bechtol on How North Korean Weapons Ended Up in Gaza Nov 10, 2023

When Israeli officials examined shells and munitions that have been fired into Israel recently by Hamas, they realized that they look like they were not made in Gaza. Similarly, when IDF inspectors looked at some of the rocket launchers Israel captured near the Gaza border, they discovered units with the word Bang-122 written on them in Korean. Bang is evidently an abbreviation of the Korean phrase bangsapo, which means “multiple rocket launcher,” and 122 is thought to indicate the caliber—122 millimeters.

It turns out that North Korean arms dealers have been supplying Hamas with rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, laser-guided anti-tank missiles, and more. North Korean engineers, meanwhile, have taught Hamas how to design and build the many tunnels that underneath Gaza.

Bruce Bechtol, a political scientist at Angelo State University and a former Marine, is the author of the recent article “Hamas Is Using North Korean Weapons Against Israel” at the website 19fortyfive.com, and the book, North Korean Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa, published in 2018. Here he joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss how Hamas connected with North Korea, what weapons are involved, and what each side gets out of the arrangement.

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.

Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak on Whether Hamas Doomed Israeli-Turkish Relations Nov 03, 2023

After years of acrimony, several recent meetings between Israeli and Turkish leaders seemed to suggest the possibility of a gradual thaw in relations between the two most powerful nations in the Middle East. Such a reconciliation, combined with a growing relationship with the Arab states in the Gulf, might have firmed up an alliance structure in the region powerful enough to deter Iran and its many proxies.

The Hamas massacre on October 7 has thrown a wrench into that possibility. Senior Hamas operatives live in Turkey and operate there under its protection. On October 11, Erdogan criticized the “shameful methods” that Israel used to strike Hamas targets. On October 25, he disputed the idea that Hamas is a terrorist organization at all, calling them instead mujahadeen—soldiers engaged in jihad. On October 27, he called Israel a war criminal and a pawn of the West. Ambassadors in both nations have been recalled.

Are relations doomed to degrade further? Can they be rescued? Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak is a longtime observer of Turkey based at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and also at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. In June 2022, he wrote an essay in Mosaic looking at Israeli-Turkish relations. Here, he speaks with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to look at that question in the wake of October 7.

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.

Michael Doran on Israel’s Wars: 1973 and 2023 Oct 26, 2023

On October 6, 1973, on Yom Kippur, the forces of Egypt and Syria invaded Israel and launched the Yom Kippur War. Fifty years and one day later, Hamas terrorists invaded southwest Israel, killed some 1400 Israelis, took some 200 hostages, and, in so doing, opened up a new front in the simmering conflict that pits Iran and its supporters—China and Russia among them—against Israel and its chief supporter, the United States.

After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, an Israeli board, known as the Agranat Commission, issued a report investigating the failings of the IDF leading up to the war. No commission has yet been established to investigate the intelligence and operational failures that allowed the October 7 massacre to take place. But there are clearly some echoes and similarities between the two attacks. To explore them, Michael Doran joins Mosaic editor and Tikvah Podcast host Jonathan Silver for a discussion.

Doran is the author of the October essay at Mosaic, “The Hidden Calculation behind the Yom Kippur War,” which argues that Israeli leaders made a conscious choice not to preempt the Egyptians and take the initiative, as they had so successfully in the 1967 Six Day War, because they were thinking about the U.S. Israel relationship. They didn't know that war was looming, exactly, but they knew that something might happen. They certainly didn't know the intensity of the offensive campaigns against Israel, or about the proficiency or tactical deployment of anti-aircraft missile technology layered into Egyptian defenses—much the same as, this year, they didn't know about Hamas's ability to use drones and gliders.

Doran is also the instructor of a free new online course on the same subject, which can be found at yomkippurwar.tikvahfund.org.

The conversation took place on a live broadcast on October 18 to subscribers of Mosaic /and to Tikvah's online course supporters, who also got the chance to ask 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.

Ethan Tucker on the Jewish Duty to Recover Hostages Oct 19, 2023

Pidyon shvuyim, the redemption and release of captives, is an old and urgent task that Jewish communities are obliged to meet. It is an obligation derived from the Hebrew Bible, developed in the writings and reflection of the rabbinic sages, and deepened and explicated in the work of Jewish medieval thinkers whose communities were situated inside Christian and Muslim host cultures. At the moment when these laws were conceived, the buying and selling of human lives was common; thankfully, slavery of that kind is rare today. Then, since persons had a market value, the Jewish community often had to raise the funds necessary to purchase the freedom of their hostages. This led to much debate about the practice. Did meeting the demands of the captors incentivize further hostage-taking? If the hostage’s family was wealthy and eager to pay any price for release, did they nevertheless have an obligation not to, lest they increase the price for the rest of the community? These questions are not merely historical any longer. There are 203 Israelis captive and bound in Gaza. Some of them are young children. Some of them are elderly. Some of them have disabilities and handicaps. The current situation introduces new questions, too. In the times before the modern state of Israel, Jewish communities did not have a sovereign state to act on their behalf, nor did they have a military. And today's captors do not seem to want money, as their predecessors did. They aim instead at a different sort of currency: leverage, shame, and power. What can and should be done to secure the freedom of Israel's hostages? This week, the rabbi Ethan Tucker, president and rosh yeshiva of Hadar, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss the history and development of pidyon shvuyim. Together, they try to uncover the roots, the extent, and the limits of the obligation at a moment that presents a difficult set of moral tradeoffs. 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.

Meir Soloveichik on What Jews Believe and Say about Martyrdom Oct 13, 2023

Jews typically honor the dead by saying the phrase zikhrono livrakha, “may his memory be a blessing.” But when a Jew is murdered because he is a Jew, he is considered a martyr, and his name is then honored by the use of a different phrase, hashem yikom damo, "may God avenge his blood." Today, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his 2018 essay in Commentary on this subject, and to share his first thoughts on one of the worst weeks in modern Jewish history.

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.

Yascha Mounk on the Identity Trap and What It Means for Jews Oct 06, 2023

Sixty years ago, outlawing racial segregation was a dominant civil rights priority of liberals. Today, in the name of racial equality, many progressive thinkers and activists champion policies and actions that promote segregation. The story of how that moral transformation took place is one of the central preoccupations of the professor Yascha Mounk, the author of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.

In that book, released last month, Mounk plots the relevant intellectual history, from the postmodern philosophy of Michel Foucault to the post-colonial writing of Edward Said to early expressions of critical race theory in the work of Derrick Bell and to the articulation of the governing idea of intersectionality in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw. Mounk explores how the architects of what he calls “the identity synthesis”—his term for what alternatively goes by identity politics or wokeness, terms that he avoids because he believes they are overly polemical—are not accidentally but conscientiously opposed to the race-blind aspirations of their liberal predecessors.

All this he discusses this week with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver. The two also turn to the question of what this revolutionary moral transformation has to do with the Jews. Does the very notion that Americans should be categorized and evaluated in political, civic, and educational settings on the basis of race—and that, moreover, Jews are often fit into the racially white, oppressor category—mean that logic of the identity synthesis tends toward anti-Semitism? Does the legitimating of racial categorization give ammunition to white supremacists to reject the whiteness of Jews, and indulge their own Jew-hatred? And what does all this mean for the central goal of Jewish education—to teach children to assume responsibility for and pride in the Jewish tradition?

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.

Alon Arvatz on Israel's Cyber-Security Industry Sep 28, 2023

Israel's success in military cyber-operations and cyber-security, from disrupting Iranian nuclear development to covert intelligence gathering, is well known. It has given birth to a cluster of companies that have made Tel Aviv a global hub for cyber-security.

Alon Arvatz is CEO and co-founder of PointFive, a new cybersecurity start up based in Tel Aviv, and the author of a new book, The Battle for Your Computer: Israel and the Growth of the Global Cyber-Security Industry. With Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he talks here about some of the factors that make Israeli companies so competitive in cybersecurity, how military and intelligence applications of cyber technology have changed over time, how he thinks they will change in the future, how these technological capabilities relate to policy and politics, what kind of regulatory oversight is appropriate for the industry, and much else.

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.

Daniel Rynhold on Thinking Repentance Through Sep 22, 2023

“When a man or woman shall commit any sin that men commit, to do a trespass against the Lord, and that person be guilty; then they shall confess their sin which they have done: and he shall make restitution for this trespass in full.” So reads chapter 5 from the book of Numbers. Repentance is on the Jewish mind these days. The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is called the Ten Days of Teshuva—the Ten Days of Repentance—and during it observant Jews engage in prayer and penitence.

What is repentance? How does it operate? What’s actually happening in the mind of the penitent?

Daniel Rynhold is dean of the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and professor of Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University. He has thought and written much about repentance and sees it as a way to illustrate some of the most interesting contrasts between medieval and modern philosophers. Joining Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver here to discuss the subject, he focuses on three major thinkers, two from within the Jewish tradition and one outside of it.

The first is Rabbeinu Yonah, the 13th-century author of the rabbinic work The Gates of Repentance. The second is Joseph B. Soloveitchik, known as the Rav, who was perhaps the central intellectual figure of post-war Modern Orthodoxy. The third is the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a famous critic of the Enlightenment, of liberalism, and of modernity. The last two are the focus of his book, written with Michael Harris, Nietzsche, Soloveitchik, and Contemporary Jewish Philosophy, published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press.

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.

Jon Levenson on Understanding the Binding of Isaac as the Bible Understands It Sep 14, 2023

Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah, when Jewish communities celebrate the new year and, as part of this celebration, read chapter 22 of Genesis. This contains the famous story in which God asks Abraham to take his son Isaac to a mountain and offer him there as a sacrifice.

What is this passage all about? What does it mean? What can be learned about Abraham, about Isaac, or about God by reading it carefully? Joining Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver today to discuss these questions is Jon D. Levenson, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School and frequent Mosaic contributor. Levenson has written about this episode in several books, including The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son published in 1993 by Yale University Press, and also in Inheriting Abraham, published in 2012 by Princeton University Press.

Akeidat Yitzḥak, the binding of Isaac, as the Jewish people traditionally refer to this episode, has a long afterlife in Christian and Muslim traditions; it is also a centerpiece of philosophical reflection among modern thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard. Reading the text now in the aftermath of those later reflections, it’s difficult to retrieve its original meaning. The temptation is overwhelming to propose moral justifications for Abraham and for God, to excuse or at least to try to soften the drama of Genesis 22. To hear what the text of the Hebrew Bible really might have to say in response to that temptation requires undoing some modern assumptions—a task that Levenson and Silver take up.

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.

Yonatan Jakubowicz on Israel's African Immigrants Sep 07, 2023

Last Saturday, supporters and opponents of Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki, confronted one another in violent clashes. Yet rather than in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital city, this confrontation took place in the streets of south Tel Aviv. In the second half of the 2000s, east African migration to Israel began to accelerate. Since then, in part due to changes in labor policies and law enforcement and in part to a barrier wall erected along the Egypt-Israel border, the number of new east African migrants has fallen precipitously. Nevertheless, although statistics are hard to come by with great precision, there are probably around 40,000 non-Jewish African migrants living in Israel today.

What brings these mainly Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Sudanese immigrants to the cities and towns of Israel? And how does and how should Israel distinguish between those seeking humanitarian asylum and those looking for work opportunities and social benefits?

These questions have become major points of debate in Israel. Some argue that the state must act in the world as a corrective to the Jewish experience of statelessness in history—that since Jews have so often been migrants and refugees and dependent on the help of others, Israel must help others in need when it can. Others argue that Israel—the political answer to the problems of Jewish statelessness—has an overriding moral obligation to welcome and to secure the lives and liberties of Jews—that it has a special obligation to pursue the ingathering of the Jewish diaspora and so to make a distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants.

To discuss these issues, Yonatan Jakubowicz, formerly an advisor to Israel’s Minister of Interior, and a founder of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver.

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.

Mordechai Kedar on the Return of Terrorism in the West Bank Aug 31, 2023

Podcast: Mordechai Kedar on the Return of Terrorism in the West Bank

Since the end of the second intifada nearly twenty years ago, and the attendant calming of the West Bank, the main source of violence against Israel has been the Gaza Strip. That's involved fewer terrorists blowing themselves up in Israeli cafes and more rockets fired across the border. But over the last year the pace of terrorism from the West Bank is once again accelerating, with two attacks in Israel just this week.

Mordechai Kedar is a scholar of Arab politics and a retired lieutenant colonel in the IDF, where he specialized in military intelligence, focusing on Syria, Arab political discourse, Arab media, and Islamism. Today, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he shares his assessment of what’s happening in the West Bank.

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.

Ran Baratz on the Roots of Israeli Angst Aug 25, 2023

Starting in January of this year, there have been popular protests each week in Israel. On Saturday night, when Shabbat comes to a close, hundreds and thousands of people go into the streets protesting the government and its policies, chief among them judicial reform. Yet it was plain from the beginning that the protests were about more than judicial reform—that the lens of judicial reform isn't adequate to fully understand the deeper emotions on all sides of this civil crisis.

Ran Baratz is the founding editor of the Israeli magazine Mida and a regular contributor to the conservative newspaper Makor Rishon. Speaking here with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he tries to understand what’s really happening now in Israel. If the events of the last six months are not just about judicial reform, then what are theyabout? And how can any deeper sources of Israeli animosity be understood and addressed? For those who support the protestors, here’s a chance to learn how some Israeli conservatives actually think. For those who oppose the protestors, here’s a chance to think about their motivations sympathetically. Both endeavors are fitting for democratic citizens of the same nation, and their friends around the world.

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.

Dovid Margolin on Kommunarka and the Jewish Defiance of Soviet History Aug 18, 2023

In the period between 1936-1938, now known to historians as the Great Terror, Joseph Stalin oversaw the murder of over 700,000 Soviet subjects. Some of them were political rivals. Some of them held heterodox views. Some of them were merely accused of holding heterodox views. Nearly 30,000 of them were executed at two mass gravesites, Kommunarka and Butovo. Today’s podcast guest recently journeyed to Kommunarka to pay homage to one of these victims, his great-grandfather.

Dovid Margolin is senior editor at Chabad.org and the author of a new essay, “The Jews in Defiance of History” in the September 2023 issue of Commentary, that looks at Stalin’s Great Terror through his own family’s legacy. Margolin is a Lubavitcher Hasid, and remarks on the fact that under so much pressure to assimilate—even to the point of persecution and death—the Jews of the Soviet Union did not disappear. That fact leads him to note one of the reasons that the Communist understanding of history cannot be true: because the existence and perpetuation of the Jews disprove it. Here he speaks to Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver about that idea, about his journey, and about his family.

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.

Shlomo Brody on Capital Punishment and the Jewish Tradition Aug 10, 2023

On October 27, 2018, a gunman burst into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, armed with a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and three Glock .357 semi-automatic pistols. He executed eleven Jews at prayer. When police arrived, they shot the gunman multiple times, but he survived and was taken into custody. Earlier this month, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection.

How does Judaism look upon capital punishment? Does this killer still bear the image and likeness of God and possess a dignity that is irreducible, such that he could be punished but should not be killed? Or did he surrender that moral standing by the act of murder? Do resources from within the Jewish tradition suggest that capital punishment has a deterrent effect on other potential criminals?

To think about these questions, Rabbi Shlomo Brody, the director of an organization dedicated to helping Jews navigate choices regarding aging, end-of-life care, and organ donation, joins the podcast. In 2021, he wrote an analysis of the death penalty for terrorists as seen by Jewish law. That essay, published in a volume entitled Hokhma LeShlomo, frames the conversation he has here with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

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.

Dara Horn on Why People Love Dead Jews (Rebroadcast) Aug 04, 2023

The celebrated novelist Dara Horn's new book People Love Dead Jews has an arresting title, one designed to make the reader feel uncomfortable. That's because Horn makes an argument that tries to change the way people think about the function of Jews in the conscience of the West.

In the book, and in this podcast conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, Horn suggests that Jewish communities, figures, and abstract symbols of “the Jews” have come to serve a moral role in the Western imagination that, when one takes a step back, is bizarre and grotesque.

It’s easy to acknowledge the darkness of the Holocaust and to marvel at the optimism of Anne Frank, but Horn detects in that acknowledgement something insidious that hasn't yet been fully revealed or explained.

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.

Izzy Pludwinski on the Art and Beauty of Hebrew Calligraphy Jul 27, 2023

Perhaps more than any other major religious tradition, Judaism is mediated through words. God first communicated to Abraham through intelligible speech. Moses brought down from Mount Sinai tablets inscribed with words codifying the structure of Jewish moral order. The book of Deuteronomy commands that every Jewish king write his own Torah scroll. For millions of Jews, the study of Jewish texts constitutes the holiest activity of all.

So perhaps it is not surprising that, seen in this light, words, letters, the technology and artistry of writing, the vocation of the scribe—the sofer, in Hebrew—deserve an elevated place in Jewish tradition. The English word calligrapher comes from the Greek phrase kalos graphos, beautiful writing; the vast tradition of Hebrew calligraphy offers no small amount of beautiful writing.

This week on the podcast,host Jonathan Silver looks at a stunning new book, The Beauty of the Hebrew Letter by the sofer Izzy Pludwinski, and speaks with its author. It's a lavish coffee-table book full of gorgeous illustrations; it can be bought here.

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.

Joshua Berman on the Traumas of the Book of Lamentations Jul 20, 2023

In the sixth century BCE, the kingdom of Judah and its capitol in Jerusalem were besieged by the Babylonian forces of Nebuchadnezzar II. After a long period of deprivation, the walls of the city were finally breached. On the Hebrew date of the 9th of the month of Av—Tisha b’Av—the Temple that had stood in Jerusalem for centuries was plundered and destroyed, the inhabitants of the city were massacred, and the survivors were taken into captivity.

This experience remains one of the most traumatic in Jewish history. The Hebrew Bible records it in the book of Eicha, known in English as the book of Lamentations. Its five chapters, all of them highly structured, contain some of the most grotesque and poignant language of oppression and suffering in all of biblical literature. There are descriptions of mothers driven to such desperation that they resort to cannibalism; there is a haunting description of a man whose body has so withered from starvation that his skin hangs on him like desiccated wool.

Lamentations expresses a range of emotional responses to that trauma. Some, seemingly in line with Jeremiah’s chastening prophecy, understand the destruction of the city as a just punishment for a sinful people meted out by God; while others direct frustration, desperation, and even bitterness at God. The rabbi and academic Bible scholar Joshua Berman has just published a new commentary called The Book of Lamentations with Cambridge University Press. His interpretation and his new book frame a discussion this week with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver.

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.

Meir Soloveichik on Ten Portraits of Jewish Statesmanship Jul 13, 2023

The first century Roman essayist and philosopher Plutarch is perhaps most famous today for his stylized, paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen. In Plutarch’s parallel lives, Alexander, who conquered the Mediterranean world, is compared to Julius Caesar, who did the same a few hundred years later. Alcibiades and Coriolanus are paired together to show how spiritedness and martial virtue, when not tempered by political judgment, can wreak havoc.

Plutarch’s lives are moral portraits; their task is the moral formation of the reader, civic education, and the inculcation of virtue. They inspired Shakespeare’s portraits of Coriolanus, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, and Casca. The Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau likewise drew inspiration from them in, for example, his treatise Emile. And the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once called Plutarch’s parallel lives “a bible for heroes.”

But what about the Bible, and the Jewish tradition it inaugurates? Meir Soloveichik, the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, and host of the podcasts Bible365 and Jerusalem365, believes that Jewish history offers its own examples of Jewish leadership. He's just published a new book, Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship, that attempts to do for the Jews what Plutarch did for the ancient Greeks and Romans. He joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver here to talk about that new book.

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.

Tevi Troy on the Biden Administration's Plan to Fight Anti-Semitism Jul 06, 2023

At the end of May, the Biden administration released the first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism. This document looks at the threat anti-Semitism poses to America, outlines ways the federal government can improve the safety and security of Jewish communities, offers plans for countering anti-Semitic discrimination online, in media, and in schools, and describes the administration’s vision for partnering with various religious and civic groups to address the issue.

The existence of this strategy is both praiseworthy and worrying. Often in Jewish history it has been the very governments to which Jews are subject that themselves fuel or carry out anti-Semitic attacks; now, the government is trying to prevent them. Still, the fact that such a national strategy is now needed is a sign of some disturbing trends in American culture and American public life.

Tevi Troy, a veteran of the American government, recently analyzed the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism in a new essay, called “How to Combat Anti-Semitism,” for the journal National Affairs. Here, he joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his ideas.

In particular, he wonders if, however, praiseworthy or well-intended the impulse behind this national strategy might be, the federal government has the wherewithal to do any good here. Then, looking a little more deeply into the report, he raises other questions—questions having to do with the definition of anti-Semitism, the strategic conceptions deployed to fight against it, the partners that have been enlisted to help implement these initiatives, and so forth.

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.

Avital Levi on Loyalty Jun 30, 2023

Loyalty—as a human sentiment, as a moral virtue, as a matrix of decision-making—is the subject of this podcast conversation.

Avital Levi, a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University and a teacher of Bible and philosophy in Israel, is curious about what keeps nations that are deeply divided together. Conservative Americans dislike liberal ones, and vice versa; and the same goes for Israelis and for the populations of many other nations. So what keeps those nations from descending into civil war? Levi looks at modern philosophical approaches to ethical decision making and thinks they’re not fully equipped to answer that question. Instead, she argues, another approach is needed.

This approach begins not by asking what people are support as partisans but whom they stand with as citizens. Loyalty is the quality she thinks is most important here—the moral virtue responsible for belonging and membership, that contours the devotion that people muster to stand with their fellow citizens even when they dislike them. Together, Levi and Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver discuss what motivated her research into loyalty—and why it matters.

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.

Michael Doran on the Ambiguities in Biden's Middle East Strategy Jun 23, 2023

Earlier this week, the American foreign-policy expert and Mosaic writer Michael Doran published an important essay called “Biden’s Ties That Bind.” In it, he argues that the Biden administration’s true strategic aims in the Middle East are not a change from the Obama administration’s aims but are consistent with them.

These aims were to empower Iran in order to establish a balance of power in the region which would, in turn, allow America to focus more attention on China. And to empower Iran, the United States must constrain Israel, Iran's chief regional nemesis. Doran’s essay seeks therefore to explain how the Biden administration deploys symbols of an American-Israeli united front in order to advance toward a new deal with the Tehran. Here, he joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss that idea and the evidence he sees for it.

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.

Eric Cohen on the Questions Graduating Jews and Their Parents Must Confront Jun 15, 2023

This week, the Tikvah Podcast offers up not a conversation but a speech. It’s a speech that was offered up to American Jewish high school and college graduates by Tikvah’s CEO, Eric Cohen. In the fall of 2021, four Jewish women—Carolyn Rowan, Liz Lange, Nina Davidson, and Rebecca Sugar—came together to create an organization for parents grappling with the challenges of raising committed Jewish children in today's confusing and contentious cultural environment. The Jewish Parents Forum organizes events for parents to get to know one another and to learn how to address the practical challenges facing Jewish mothers and fathers today, from the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism to identity politics to vociferous anti-Zionism to what to do about social media and phones.

This spring, the Jewish Parents Forum invited Cohen to deliver a graduation address on these themes for students in Tikvah’s education programs. In that speech, he raises questions that all American Jews are now confronted with—questions that are also those that all Jews at all times must ask and answer.

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.

Eli Steinberg on the Warriors of Torah Jun 09, 2023

This past Sunday, photographs began to appear on social media of a sports stadium, the Wells Fargo Center just outside of Philadelphia, full of haredi men—some 27,000 of them. The name of the gathering was Adirei HaTorah, a Hebrew phrase that means “warriors of Torah.” All those people were convened in order to honor a small group of men: hundreds of relatively anonymous adults engaged in full-time Torah study at Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey.

Beth Medrash Govoha is one of the most interesting Jewish educational institutions in the world. It’s the largest yeshiva outside of Israel; thousands of students are enrolled there full time. Most if not all of them are married, which means that there are also thousands of wives, and many thousands of children, amounting to an entire world of Orthodox Judaism.

What does the decision to honor the adults who dedicate themselves to Torah study reveal about the spirit of the Lakewood world ? To answer that question, the rabbi Eli Steinberg, a 10-year veteran of the Lakewood yeshiva, formerly on the professional staff there, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver on a tour of the Adirei HaTorah celebration last Sunday, and of the society built around a school of which that celebration is a fascinating expression. Together, they also ask if there’s something there from which all Jewish communities can learn.

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.

Cynthia Ozick on "The Conversion of the Jews" Jun 01, 2023

In July of the year 1263, the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani met to debate the rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, sometimes known as Nachmanides, 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 Nachmanides to even advance 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 fully understand 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 Sephardic 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 writing 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 their own family, their own teachers, their own neighbors, their 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. Her newest story is called “The Conversion of the Jews,” and it was published in Harper’slast month. Ozick’s “The Conversion of the Jews” follows a 24-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. This week, to discuss that story, and the many ideas, themes, and questions it raises, Cynthia Ozick joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver on our podcast.

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.

Leon Kass on Reading Ruth May 24, 2023

Most everyone who reads it loves the book of Ruth, with its bucolic settings, its charming loves, its grace, and its devoted characters—Naomi, Boaz, and Ruth herself. Alongside that appeal, the book of Ruth also conveys truths about the human condition: about who children are and what they mean for the life of a woman, a family, and a nation; about the complementary human and divine sources of redemption; and about a distinctly Hebraic sense of the shape of a human life.

These ideas and more are offered up in a 2021 book about Ruth by Leon Kass and Hannah Mandelbaum, Reading Ruth: Birth, Redemption, and the Way of Israel. The origins of their book—a line by line commentary on Ruth—is itself a story no less moving than the text it interprets. Hannah Mandelbaum is Leon Kass’s granddaughter, and they began to read the book of Ruth together while mourning Amy Kass, Kass’s late and beloved wife of 54 years and Mandelbaum’s grandmother. In so doing, they followed a path that Ruth herself treads, from desolation to gladness, with a distinguished Jewish future unfurling along the way.

Leon Kass is an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, the author of many books, including studies of Genesis and Exodus, and the dean of faculty at Shalem College in Jerusalem. In this conversation, recorded at an event in 2021, he joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to talk about Reading Ruth and writing it with his granddaughter.

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.

Tara Isabella Burton on the Creation and Curation of the Modern Self May 19, 2023

Many modern movements and philosophies have invited humans to look for answers to fundamental human questions not outside of themselves—as many traditional religious forms and classical and pre-modern philosophical traditions did—but inside of themselves. This is an impulse to seek contentment through self-realization, to judge a person’s inner attitudes by the extent to which they are authentic to who they truly are. That means that personal thoughts and feelings now govern behavior more than external standards or external channels of ambition. Modern people do not want the self to melt away into something greater, or holier; modern people are self-made.

Self-Made is the title of a forthcoming book from Tara Isabella Burton, the author of Strange Rites and an occasional Mosaic contributor. Strange Rites was about the way old spiritual drives have endowed new and unorthodox practices—like eating organic food or exercising at a fancy gym—with spiritual significance. Self-Made tells the story of how so many people came to believe in the importance of creating their own bespoke personalities, in “branding ourselves,” in self-definition, in fashioning desires into purposes. It’s an important book, and Burton is one the most theologically attuned social critics writing today. Here, she joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to talk about it. Their conversation ranges through many time periods and the philosophical and literary authors who have influenced her thought on these matters. In other words, it’s a bit more abstract that most conversations on this podcast.

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.

Nathan Diament on Whether the Post Office Can Force Employees to Work on the Sabbath May 11, 2023

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of religion. An employer can’t say that he won’t hire Muslims or Mormons or Jews, and he can’t fire one of his employees because of their faith. But how is religion defined? Religion, after all, is both a belief and a practice. It’s not only what happens in the head of the believer—it’s also the actions the believer undertakes based on their religion. That question has been a major point of legal battles relating to religion and the Civil Rights Act over the last sixty years.

In 1977, the Supreme Court heard the case of TWA v Hardison. Larry Hardison was a Christian employee at Trans World Airlines and felt that he could not work on the Sabbath (which his particular Christian denomination kept, like Jews, on Saturdays). TWA tried to reassign him, but that didn’t work and he was eventually fired. When Hardison sued TWA for religious discrimination, the court sided with TWA, arguing that, yes, accommodations should be made for believers, but that TWA tried to make some reasonable accommodations and could not be expected to make more than that. Not everyone on the court agreed; Thurgood Marshall wrote, in his dissent from the majority’s opinion, that “religious diversity has been seriously eroded” by the ruling.

Since then, the decision in TWA v Hardison has held. Yet it may not hold for much longer. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard a new case about an American Christian who, like Larry Hardison, was fired for keeping the Sabbath. That case, Groff v. DeJoy, could be a major moment in the history of religious freedom in America. Nathan Diament, executive director for the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center, is the co-author of the OU’s amicus brief on this case, and also the author of an April 17 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Can the Post Office Force a Christian to Deliver on Sunday?” He joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his argument, the history of the issue, and what the Supreme Court might decide.

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.

Yaakov Amidror on Why He’s Arguing That Israel Must Prepare for War with Iran May 04, 2023

About three weeks ago, Yaakov Amidror, Israel’s former national security advisor and a retired IDF major general, remarked during a radio interview that Israel must prepare for war. “It’s possible,” he said, “that we will reach a point where we have to attack Iran even without American assistance.” Why? Iran, he explained, is relatively confident in its regional power in light of a recent agreement with its erstwhile rival Saudi Arabia and the fact that America is reducing its involvement in the Middle East.

Amidror's view, therefore, is that Israel must be ready to take independent action to strike Iranian nuclear targets and safeguard its citizens. To explain that assessment, Amidror joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver in conversation here.

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.

Liel Leibovitz on the Return of Paganism Apr 27, 2023

It's sometimes argued that, as material and political and economic conditions improve in a society, that society tends to grow less religious. Polls have seemed to demonstrate for years the validity of this argument in America. Gallup, for instance, recently found that fewer than half of all Americans belong to a house of worship or religious congregation, down from about 70% at the turn of the century some 20 years ago.

But perhaps such polls show do not show that Americans are becoming less religious at all. Perhaps they suggest instead that Americans are simply less devoted to traditional forms of biblical faith. That's the background for the argument advanced in the cover story of the May 2023 issue of Commentary, called "The Return of Paganism." Written by Liel Leibovitz, the editor at large of Tablet, the essay argues that the diminution of traditional forms of Christian worship has not made Americans less religious but has instead opened up space for inescapable religious impulses to find expression in beliefs that are awfully similar to ancient forms of paganism. To talk about these ideas, their manifestations in American culture and politics, and their implications, Leibovitz joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver.

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.

Rick Richman on History and Devotion Apr 20, 2023

For patriots, patriotism, or one form of it at least, is a recognition of the obligations that flow when one recognizes all that one owes to previous generations and what they undertook and passed down.

And if one wanted to inculcate that form of patriotism, how would one do it? Rick Richman has a simple and powerful answer to that question. Richman recently published And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel, a book that tries to foster connection to Israel and the Jewish people by telling stories from the past.

Rick’s answer: we have to teach them history. History, as he sees it, has a role to play in the formation of devotion to the Jewish people. It can help Jews see all that they owe by relaying the stories of all that their predecessors have accomplished, and by implication, what Jews now have an opportunity and obligation to pass on to their own descendants.

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.

Yuval Levin on How America's Constitution Might Help Solve Israel's Judicial Crisis Apr 10, 2023

Earlier this month, Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “The Solution to Israel’s Crisis Might Be in America’s Constitution.” That essay forms the point of departure for this week’s discussion with Levin himself.

Levin does not, of course, think that Israel should simply adopt the American constitution, or any of its particular features. Israel is a sovereign nation with its own history and its own destiny, and no foreign documents will suit it word for word. Yet the American constitution contains within it elemental concepts of democracy, equality, and representation—understandings that the women and men now called upon to establish judicious political structures in Israel might be able to learn from as they structure their own political order.

So here, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, Levin expands on his essay and looks at the American constitution in search of those foundational ideas—and in particular of the ones that might be useful for Israelis at their current moment of political instability.

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.

Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Zigler on the Political Philosophy of Israel's Declaration of Independence Mar 30, 2023

Nearly 75 years ago, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s sovereignty: a renewed Jewish state, the political expression of the national home of the Jewish people, located in their ancestral homeland.

Many essays and books have been published about the words Ben-Gurion spoke that day—Israel’s Declaration of Independence. But the professor Neil Rogachevsky and his co-author Dov Zigler take a new angle on the declaration and what it means.

In a new book from Cambridge University Press, Israel’s Declaration of Independence: The History and Political Theory of the Nation’s Founding Moment, they look at the drafting process and distill from the elements that endured from draft to draft—as well as the elements that were changed or removed—a political theoryof Israel's founding, in which the political purposes of the Israeli project are made most clearly manifest.

How, in other words, did Israel’s founders think about rights, about citizenship, about the justifications of Israel’s sovereignty, an Israeli view of freedom, of civil order, and of religion? That’s the subject of their new book—and the subject of the conversation they have here with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver.

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.

Yehoshua Pfeffer on Israel's Social Schisms and How They Affect the Judicial Reform Debate Mar 23, 2023

Part of what animates the two sides in Israel’s current judicial-reform crisis has to do with the specific proposals that the Knesset is currently debating. But the crisis is not onlyabout these concrete constitutional issues. It is also a proxy for a larger cultural and sociological conflict pitting different sectors of Israeli society against one another.

Critics of the proposed reforms tend to be in the political center and the political left, to be more secular or at least critical of Israel’s Orthodox rabbinic establishment, and to be comfortable in the vision of Israel passed down by its largely Ashkenazi founding generation. Supporters of the reforms, meanwhile, tend to be on the political right, to be more religious and more supportive of the rabbinate, and to belong to a coalition of Israelis with roots in the Arab Middle East, North Africa, and, in part, the former Soviet Union.

Yehoshua Pfeffer is uniquely positioned to discuss all sides of the issue. A rabbi and the editor of Tzarich Iyun, a magazine of ḥaredi ideas, Pfeffer also clerked on Israel’s Supreme Court. He recently wrote an essay in Tzarich Iyun called “No Longer a Minority: Behind the Veil of Israel’s Public Unrest.” He joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss that essay and the broader schisms in Israeli society today.

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.

Jonathan Schachter on What Saudi Arabia's Deal with Iran Means for Israel and America Mar 16, 2023

News broke last week that China had mediated a restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Afterwards, analysts of the Middle East wondered what that means for the quiet relations that Israel and Saudi Arabia had been building recently thanks primarily to their joint opposition to Iran. Had Israeli domestic politics turned Saudi Arabia away? Did the American withdrawal from the Middle East over the last decade create a vacuum that China saw an opportunity to fill? How, if it all, did this relate to reports of recent liberalization in Saudi society, or the ongoing protests in Iran? Would this deal breathe new strength into the latter regime at the very moment that it has acquired new fighter jets from Russia and grows closer to breakout nuclear capacity?

Jonathan Schachter, one such observer of the Middle East, thinks that the Iran-Saudi deal is, in significant measure, a diplomatic signal directed at President Biden and the United States. In conversation here with host Jonathan Silver, he looks at that deal in light of a set of Saudi announcements that were released just one day before. Those announcements hint at what might induce Saudi Arabia to formalize its relations with Israel and even more deeply root itself in the American-led, Western alliance structure. He believes that the Saudis are sending America a question: do you, the United States, want to see us go in the direction of our Thursday announcement, or do you want us to go in the direction of our Friday one?

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.

Peter Berkowitz and Gadi Taub on the Deeper Causes of Israel's Conflict Mar 09, 2023

To understand the dramas, disagreements, and protests roiling Israeli politics at this moment requires an understanding of the government’s proposed judicial reforms, as well as the history of Israel’s Supreme Court and its relationship to the Knesset. It also requires knowledge of Israeli society, and how the founding generations of Israel’s political leadership—which tended to be Ashkenazi, secular, and oriented to the political left—have given way to an Israeli population that tends to be more ethnically diverse, more traditional and religious, and oriented towards the political right.

That history, in turn, has got to be mapped onto the fact that Israel is also home to subcommunities that each have different historical relations to one another and to the government, and that is each pursuing different interests and outcomes. To understand this Israeli moment, in other words, requires understanding how each Israeli sector—Arab, Haredi, secular, national religious—relates to the nation as a whole.

This week, Jonathan Silver discusses the judicial reforms and those deeper causes together with the professor, media personality, and author Gadi Taub, as well as the political scientist, and former state department official Peter Berkowitz.

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.

Jordan B. Gorfinkel on His New Illustrated Book of Esther Mar 02, 2023

This year, Koren Publishers released a new edition of the book of Esther. It contains the complete, unabridged, and Hebrew text of Esther, the same text found in any other volume of the Hebrew Bible. But the rest of it is all new: a graphic novel version of the story illustrated by Yael Nathan and masterminded by Jordan B. Gorfinkel. Gorfinkel, known commonly as Gorf, was an editor at DC Comics for nearly a decade, where he managed its signature Batman franchise. The themes of American superheroes—who disguise their true identity and then at the opportune moment cast off their disguise for a higher purpose—bear not a little on the text of Esther.

This week on the podcast, Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver joins Gorfinkel to discuss the editorial, artistic, and design decisions that went into the presentation of the graphic novel Esther.

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.

Malka Simkovich on God's Maternal Love Feb 23, 2023

One of the great debates in the history of Jewish theology is about how to reconcile two contradictory truths. First, that God is beyond human comprehension, and—unlike pagan deities—does not have a corporeal presence and is not subject to human emotions. Second, that the Hebrew Bible often describes God in human, bodily terms, as do the liturgy and rabbinic elaborations on Scripture.

Thus, in one of the most poignant moments of the liturgical year, Jewish worshippers refer to God as Avinu Malkeinu, “our Father, our King.” This is but one of many Jewish prayers that, following the biblical text, describe God as a father. And God has long been thought of in paternal terms in the Jewish imagination.

Yet, as Moses Maimonides and other Jewish philosophers never tire of reminding us, God exists beyond such human categories as sex, and can’t be fully comprehended as a father. Therefore it is no contradiction that there are also aspects of womanhood and motherhood—specifically its creative, generative capabilities—that can be used in describing God. And perhaps that is why the Hebrew Bible sometimes portrays God not only as a father but also as a mother. Malka Simkovich, whose essay on this subject was published in August 2022 in the Christian Century, discusses biblical portrayals of God’s maternal love with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

Joshua Karlip on the Demise of Jewish Studies Feb 15, 2023

In the early years of the 19th century, some German scholars decided to read and analyze Jewish texts in a new way. They looked at Jewish sources through the eyes of academic scholarship, rather than with the rabbinic ones, or literary ones, or folk ones which had kept Judaism alive. Their approach came to be called, in German, Wissenschaft des Judentums—the science of Judaism—and it was to be dispassionate and rigorous. Unlike a rabbi, a scholar could pursue the truth without concern that the consequences of his research might affect the religious life of the Jewish community. And, by adopting sound methodological tools shared by other academic disciplines, the practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums could bring their work into conversation with scholars in other fields. It was, in other words, the beginning of what is today in the universities called Jewish studies.

Since this academic discipline was premised on the need to abstract from Judaism’s particularity, it is not surprising that some other scholars of Judaism were suspicious of it. Judaism cannot escape its particularity, these scholars argued, nor can it escape its theological and covenantal doctrine of election or chosenness, nor can it escape its self-understanding in national terms, ancient or modern.

For a time, in the second half of the twentieth century, the particularists steered the ship of Jewish studies. Many young scholars recognized their work in relation to a moral obligation to preserve and replenish what the Shoah had nearly destroyed. This generation was propelled into the field not out of an embarrassment at Jewish distinctiveness, but instead out of a desire to recognize Jewish distinctiveness. Many scholars conceived of their work as a kind of redemption, an effort to begin reassembling a shattered people.

And what now, as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century?

Fewer and fewer scholars of that generation are active. Is Jewish studies reverting to form, and returning to its universalizing and abstracting roots? And what explains the ideological and intellectual animus against Israel and the Orthodox that seems to be in the air? Together, Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic, and Joshua Karlip, a professor of Jewish studies at Yeshiva University and the author of a recent Commentary essay called “The Demise of Jewish Studies in America—and the Rise of Jewish Studies in Israel,” look at this moment in the history of Jewish studies in the United States.

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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