The Tikvah Podcast

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John Bursch on the Freedom to Pray at Home Aug 06, 2026

Show notes

Traditional Jews pray in a minyan, a quorum of ten men who form the communal setting in which an individual Jew prays as a part of the Jewish people. In January of 2021, a man named Daniel Grand sent an email to some of his friends, seeing if he could organize a minyan at his home. He lives in University Heights, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, too far from his synagogue to walk on Shabbat and holidays when driving is forbidden by Jewish law.

A neighbor saw the invitation and complained to the mayor's office, after which the city sent Grand a cease-and-desist letter. Praying with guests in his home, the city told him, made his house a place of worship, and a place of worship requires a zoning permit he did not have.

A public hearing followed, at which neighbors said, on the record, that they did not want the area known as a Jewish neighborhood. Without the proper zoning and permitting, the city arranged for police surveillance of Grand's house. His neighbors set up cameras to make sure that visitors would not come there to pray. And there was, in the fine print of the city's own code, a cruelty that reads almost like satire: had Grand actually won his permit, transforming his home into a house of worship, he and his family would have had to move, since a house of worship cannot also be a residence.

Grand sued the city, and his case was thrown out because the court held that it was not yet ripe, a legal term that refers to the fact that the local zoning board had not yet ruled against him, and was officially still considering his application. This December, the Supreme Court will consider the case of Grand v. University Heights.

To discuss this case, Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic and host of the Tikvah podcast, is joined by John Bursch, who is one of the attorneys representing Grand. Bursch is senior counsel and vice-president of appellate advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom and a veteran of many oral arguments before the Supreme Court, and formerly served as a solicitor general in the state of Michigan.

Dan Schueftan on Israel's Doctrine of Preventive Violence Jul 30, 2026

Show notes

For half a century, Israel treated its adversaries as if their intentions could be tracked and might change according to circumstances. With the states surrounding it, that assumption largely held: Egypt, for instance, signed a peace treaty and kept it, whatever else occurred in the region. But with the radical forces that Iran built around Israel in the years before October 7, that same assumption proved catastrophic. Hamas, Hizballah, the Houthis, and the militias in Syria and Iraq do not vary in their commitment to Israel's destruction. What varies is only their capability. And so Israel has been forced to exchange a doctrine built on monitoring intention for one built on continually destroying capability, whatever the diplomatic cost, wherever preparations for war are found. Today's guest, Dan Schueftan, calls this doctrine preventive violence, or simply, violent maintenance.

Schueftan is the director of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa. In conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver, he lays out this doctrine, its roots, and the circumstances that forced Israel to adopt it. He then offers a threat assessment of Iran's proxy network as it stands today: in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq—before turning to the sepearate question of Turkey.

Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin on the Legacy of Masada Jul 24, 2026

Show notes

In the spring of the year 73, after Jerusalem had already fallen to Roman forces, 960 Jews atop a desert fortress chose death by their own hand rather than surrender. We know the story because of Josephus, the 1st-century Jewish historian and former rebel commander who turned chronicler of the very revolt he had once been a part of.

Yesterday was Tisha b'Av, which commemorates the destruction of the two Temples. Josephus records another catastrophe: Masada, the last stand of the Sicarii, the most militant faction of the Jewish rebels, against Rome, and a mass suicide that Jewish tradition has argued over ever since. Was it heroism? Was it madness? Should the Jews of Masada instead have followed in the path chosen by Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and the sages at Yavneh—accommodating the enemy to preserve the Torah?

This week's podcast is an episode of The Pillars, a series produced by the Lobel Center for Jewish Classical Education and hosted by Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin. In this episode, Rabbi Rocklin takes up Josephus's account directly—what it asks of us, what the rabbis made of it, and what it has come to mean for the modern state of Israel. The episode first aired this past March, but its questions are the questions Jews are reflecting on during this week in the liturgical calendar, about the demands of Jewish sovereignty and God's providence in history.

Ari Lamm on Chosenness Jul 17, 2026

Show notes

This week, Rabbi Ari Lamm joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss the biblical idea of election or chosenness. Rabbi Lamm has argued that Genesis itself is a long sequence of choosing and rejection—Adam over the animals, Abel over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau—and that the Bible never once tells us why. We learn how God assesses a life after the fact; we are never shown the reasoning behind the choice itself. One midrash even imagines Abraham chosen by lottery. Rabbi Lamm suggests that this silence is deliberate: chosenness is a mystery, an acknowledgment of the limitations of human understanding.

Naturally, the subject of chosenness has long been discussed within the Jewish tradition, and Rabbi Lamm focuses on the debate between Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides about whether divine election is earned or something carried through inheritance.

With this in mind, the conversation turns to the theological puzzle facing 17th-century English Christians: should Israel in Scripture be understood as the church or as the actual, literal, Jewish people? And once some concluded it meant the latter, an old theological problem became a new and productive one. Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, the great Amsterdam sage at the center of that story, offered European thinkers a way to hold Jewish particularity and universal natural law together rather than against each other, and in doing so shaped the political thought of a nation. The conversation expands on themes Rabbi Lamm explored in his 2025 Sapir essay, "The Rebirth of Chosenness."

This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Celine and Kenneth Weiss in memory of their parents. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.

George Deek on Israel's Relationship with the Christian World Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

In April of this year, Israel's Foreign Ministry created a position that had never before existed: special envoy to the Christian world. The appointment came after a string of incidents that have strained Israel's standing with Christian communities: an IDF soldier destroyed a statue of Jesus in Lebanon; during the war with Iran, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pizzaballa, was barred for safety reasons from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; a nun was assaulted in Jerusalem; and videos of Jewish Israelis despicably spitting on Christians have gone viral on social media. There are not very many of these incidents, thankfully, but each and every one does enormous damage to Israel's standing and contradicts all of the good work that Israel does to keep its Christian minority safe. Aside from the publicity problems that they create, these incidents (with the exception of the protective measures that kept worshippers from Jerusalem's holy places during a ballistic-missile attack) are in and of themselves wrong. That's why they've been so roundly condemned by the highest levels of Israeli government, including by Prime Minister Netanyahu. In response, the foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar has appointed one person to mediate Israel's relationship with the Christian world as a full-time charge. That person is George Deek, a veteran Israeli diplomat, an Arab Christian whose family has lived in Jaffa for hundreds of years, and the first Christian in Israel's history to reach ambassadorial rank, serving in Nigeria, Norway, and finally Azerbaijan before assuming this post. In today's podcast, Ambassador Deek addresses those incidents directly, distinguishing isolated wrongdoing from patterns that demand real institutional response. He lays out an argument about why Israel's bond with the Christian world is simultaneously theological and strategic and delineates his strategy in relation to the major cultural crises of our moment: that the Middle East is losing its ancient minorities at the same time the West is losing its confidence, and that both crises stem from the same failure to answer honestly the question of what went wrong—a failure that too easily curdles into blame, and from blame into anti-Semitism. This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jeffrey Druckman and Erica Goldman in memory of Vicki Frolich. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.

Michael Doran and Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on Power, Ideology, and Understanding the Middle East Jun 26, 2026

Show notes

When students begin to study international politics, they meet some very old and well-established schools of thought. These approaches disagree about a fundamental question: what is the most important kind of information to acquire? One school of thought recommends studying power: who holds the weapons, and who fears whom. From that, the thinking goes, you'll be able to map the hierarchies and relationships that tell you everything essential that you need to know. Another recommends studying the cultures and dominant ideas that constitute the spirit of a given regime—to try to understand the way a nation will behave based on what it loves, what it honors, and how it understands itself.

Of course, ideally you would want to understand both. This week, I'm bringing together two of the most sophisticated, interesting analysts of the Middle East to discuss how they approach the region.

When Michael Doran looks at the Middle East, he focuses relative power. Doing so gives him the ability to separate the signal from the noise. The vitality of theological disputes and national cultures is constrained by the ability of the state to deploy force, whether in Iran, Egypt, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia. When Hussein Aboubakr Mansour looks at the Middle East, by contrast, he sees a set of ideologies whose provenance he traces back to European philosophy.

How do these two angles of vision relate to one another, and what does each offer? And what do they reflect back to us about America and the West?

Michael Doran is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute, and host, together with Gadi Taub, of the podcast Israel Update, which is cosponsored by Hudson and Tablet.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is a fellow at JINSA's Gemunder Center, a columnist at Mosaic, and the author of the Abrahamic Metacritique on Substack.

This conversation was recorded live in front of an audience of elite undergraduates, participating in this year's Beren Summer Fellowship, where this week, Michael Doran and Hussein Aboubakr Mansour have been resident faculty members.

This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Vicki Phillips in memory of Phyllis Bordorf. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.

David Arnovitz on the Tanakh of the Land of Israel Jun 19, 2026

Show notes

Today's conversation is about a publishing project: the Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel. The concept of the series is that it takes the books of the Hebrew Bible and sets them back down in the world that produced them—in the Land of Israel, and in the economic, political, theological, and cultural setting of the ancient Near East. Around each verse it gathers what is known about that world: its archaeology and geography, the languages and the treaties and the pantheon of gods of the tribes and nations and empires among whom Israel was situated. In its modest form, the claim behind all this is one almost no one would dispute: to know the world a text came from can help you understand the text better.

But a less modest claim is folded inside the modest one. For roughly two centuries, the academic study of the Bible used much of this same material—archaeology, comparisons with other sources from the ancient Near East—to take the text apart: to dissolve it into sources and redactors, to historicize revelation until what remained was an artifact of clumsy human pastiche. This series takes up the same tools and turns them to the opposite purpose. Here the history does not dissolve the text. It mediates the text, and more intimate knowledge of the ancient world carries the reader toward the integrity of the Tanakh, rather than away from it. The instruments that an earlier generation of scholars deployed to disenchant the Hebrew Bible are, in this series, put into the service of reading it with intellectual and religious integrity.

And, now that Koren has published all five volumes of the Humash (the Five Books of Moses), as well as the books of Samuel, something else becomes clear. Proximity to the Land of Israel itself helps to open up the meaning of the text. If knowing how a field was watered, or how a city withstood a siege, brings the verse nearer, then the return to the Land of Israel is not only a political restoration. It is also a condition for reading our sacred scripture with greater fidelity. For most of our history, most Jews studied Torah in exile, praying and longing for, but at a great distance from, places in which the story of ancient Israel unfurls. Conversely, the ingathering of the Jews in the land of their fathers can change the way they read the text, so that Zionism itself enhances the learning of Torah.

The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel is a marvelous accomplishment, and it has been captained by the series's editor, David Arnovitz. Arnovitz joins the Tikvah Podcast this week to discuss the book of Deuteronomy, the series as a whole, and the wager it makes about history, about the land, and about the rediscovery of the Hebrew Bible.

This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Vicki Phillips in memory of Stanley Bordorf. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.

Mike Pence and Eric Cohen on What It Means to Be Endowed with Natural Rights Jun 12, 2026

Show notes

This week we bring you a conversation between Eric Cohen, president and CEO of Tikvah, and the former vice-president of the United States, Mike Pence. The conversation was recorded before a live audience at the Fund for American Studies, and we are grateful to our friends at TFAS for the invitation and for the work they do: forming young leaders in the principles of individual liberty, free markets, and honorable leadership, and sending them out to advance the cause of a free society in their communities and around the world.

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

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

This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jessica and PJ Heyer. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.

Mark Gottlieb and Shilo Brooks on Why Reading Matters Jun 05, 2026

Show notes

In 2024, the Atlantic ran a splashy feature titled "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books." Professors at the Ivy League and at other elite universities reported that their students, among the most credentialed young people in the country, could no longer make their way through a whole book. One Columbia professor described his bewilderment when a student told him she had never once been assigned a full book in high school.

At Tikvah we work with hundreds of educators, and they have observed that it's not only the skill of reading that is in decline; it's also the culture around reading, the patience and attention and habits of the mind that really important books demand.

That is where Rabbi Mark Gottlieb begins the conversation you are about to hear. Rabbi Gottlieb has been a guest on the Tikvah Podcast before. He is a senior adviser and treasured colleague at Tikvah, and the head of school at the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson School in Las Vegas, Nevada.

At the most recent Marom conference, the annual Tikvah gathering of Jewish day-school leaders, he sat down with Shilo Brooks for a session called "A Republic of Readers: Why Great Books Make Good Citizens." Dr. Brooks runs the George W. Bush Presidential Center and hosts the Free Press podcast Old School. He is also living proof of the stakes. As he tells it, the great books did not merely educate him. They saved his life.

Tikvah does not want simply want to air complaints about how the culture of reading has eroded, but to do something about it. This summer, Tikvah Online Academy is running a series of book-clubs for rising sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, live over Zoom. They will tackle The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Phantom Tollbooth, Tom Sawyer, The Life of Frederick Douglass, and more. Applications are open now at Tikvah.org/TOA.

This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Ilene and David Siscovick and family. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.

Ryan McBeth on Why the U.S. Doesn't (Yet) Have a Munitions Crisis May 29, 2026

Show notes

From the phone that sits in his pocket, a person can now order almost anything online and have it delivered to his door the next morning. For all of human history, no one on earth had that kind of power, and now, within a single lifetime, every middle-class American has it. Walmart or Amazon or other major e-commerce platforms will bring you whatever you want: a vintage edition of a particular book, a specific article of clothing in a specific size, same-day delivery of kosher pastrami from Costco. Americans are now used to getting what they want, when they want it, with very little delay.

That's because the interpretation of vast amounts of data has already told retailers that a person is likely to want diapers and baby formula, or the new Winston Churchill biography, or, having bought a new phone, an extra phone charger, already prepositioned in nearby warehouses, just waiting for someone to want it and press "ship."

As a result, it's hard for us to understand intuitively why some things take time to manufacture, and why, when we read reports of missile and interceptor stockpiles, the American military, with all its might, can't just order up another arsenal and have it at the ready. After this spring's combat operations against Iran, the U.S. has used up a lot of missiles.

Here are some numbers, drawn from analysis published this spring by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In the course of Operation Epic Fury, the United States fired over 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles from a prewar inventory of approximately 3,100. Recent annual production is less than 200, and replacement is not projected until late 2030.

Up to 1,430 Patriot interceptors were expended from a prewar inventory of roughly 2,330, at a production rate of 650 per year—half of which go to allied nations.

And 290 of America's 360 interceptors for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense—the most advanced missile-defense system we field, known as THAAD—were fired. We produce about 96 of these interceptors per year.

Needless to say, there are other things that we need those missiles for. And some strategists believe that China or another adversary might look at the state of American munitions and decide that a window of opportunity has opened up.

How did the most powerful military in the history of the world arrive at this moment? What does the supply chain behind a Patriot missile actually look like, all the way down to the raw materials? And what would serious industrial mobilization require?

These are among the questions that Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver takes up with Ryan McBeth. McBeth spent twenty years in the U.S Army as an infantryman, and is now an intelligence analyst with a popular YouTube channel he uses to explain military affairs to non-specialists. You can learn more about him, and follow his work, at ryanmcbeth.substack.com. In today's podcast, McBeth explains why he is not quite so worried about the state of the American arsenal.

This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Robert and Ilana Saposh. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.

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