The Tikvah Podcast

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 Pab

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 histo

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 p

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 s

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 m

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

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 C

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 th

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 its acronym, USAC. USAC is organized in various offices and commissions, one of which is the Cultural Affairs Commis

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.

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 pic

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 episod

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

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 lever

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

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 distingui

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

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

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.

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 overfl