Elliott Abrams has served two presidents, working on issues in Latin America, the Middle East, and human rights. In the service of his country, he has always been unabashedly Jewish. Was there ever a tension? How did his Jewish upbringing and Jewish pride shape him for a life in American politics and diplomacy? Abrams talks about the Soviet Jewry movement and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor and Ronald Reagan, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations under George W. Bu...
Feb 03, 2015•1 hr 58 min
As part of Tikvah’s advanced institute “The Case for Nationalism,” the participants heard from the great Jewish dissident, thinker, and statesman, Natan Sharansky. Sharansky discussed the ideas of his book, Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy ; the problem of a world with “nothing to die for,” to quote John Lennon; and the complementarity of the democratic desire to be free and the particularist desire to belong. Audience questions prompted Sharansky to analyze the...
Jan 12, 2015•1 hr 40 min
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove wrote a provocative article in 2007 titled “Where Have All the Theologians Gone?” This is the question Shearith Israel rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Mechon Hadar rabbi Shai Held begin with: Why is there so much less public argument about Jewish theology than there was in the middle of the last century? What does this say about contemporary Jewish life? About our synagogues? About our universities? About our interfaith relations? The conversation moves from the sociology of the...
Jan 12, 2015•1 hr 57 min
Weekly Standard editor William Kristol spoke with Israeli alumni of Tikvah Fund programs in Jerusalem last month about his life in the arena of American politics. The first half of the conversation was largely autobiographical. He talks about his upbringing—including his Jewish upbringing—as the child of Irving Kristol, “the godfather of neoconservatism,” and the legendary historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. How did he go from being a professor of political philosophy to the vice president’s chief of...
Jan 09, 2015•1 hr 26 min
In 1993, the late Samuel Huntington described Islam as having “bloody borders.” But what does this observation have to do with Islam as a religion or set of ideas? How much of the violence in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Gaza or the uncertainty in Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, the Gulf states, Indonesia, or Turkey has to do with Islamic ideas? Is the Islamic State a new geopolitical challenge or an ancient one? What would a better understanding of Islam tell us about these state and non-state actors’ strate...
Dec 26, 2014•2 hr 2 min
As part of Tikvah's Summer Fellowship, participants were treated to a discussion on how to read and how to think about rabbinic literature. The two interlocutors approach rabbinic literature from different points of view and from different intellectual traditions. Christine Hayes of Yale University is one of the very few and perhaps the most accomplished academic expert in Talmudic literature who was neither born nor raised as a Jew and who, as you will see below, consciously decided not to conv...
Aug 03, 2014•2 hr 11 min
What is the proper relationship between Jews and political power? To what extent should Jews eschew worldly power for the sake of piety? How Machiavellian can Jews allow themselves to be? Two of the Jewish world's most esteemed intellectuals, Ruth Wisse and Moshe Halbertal, examined these questions for participants in the Tikvah Fund's Summer Fellowship and Advanced Institutes. Wisse, an American expert on Yiddish literature generally associated with the right, and Halbertal, an Israeli expert i...
Jul 28, 2014•2 hr 3 min
What is the condition of modern Judaism? It is simultaneously rationalist and non-rationalist, Israeli and Diasporic, nationalist and individualist, powerful and fearful of rising anti-Semitism, particularist and universalist. To sort out modern Judaism's camps and contradictions and to offer some thoughts on Judaism's theological, sociological, and political future, Tikvah hosted a conversation between two very different thinkers who taught in Tikvah's summer fellowship and advanced institutes....
Jul 28, 2014•1 hr 48 min
Participants in Tikvah's advanced institute on "War and Human Nature" were treated to a conversation on the method and meaning of statesmanship with Frederick W. Kagan. Beginning in theory and ending in practice, Kagan, a man of reflection and action, a military historian and strategic advisor, detailed his approach to serious problems in global affairs. Together with Tikvah Fund executive director Eric Cohen, Kagan discussed the great books of history and statesmanship, the culture of West Poin...
Jun 20, 2014•58 min
Tikvah was privileged to have several wise and experienced foreign-policy professionals as instructors for the advanced institute, "War and Human Nature." Two of them, Frederick W. Kagan and Eric Edelman , sat down during the institute to discuss the subject of statesmanship in wartime, with Kagan mostly interviewing Edelman. Edelman was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2005 to 2009 after a long career in the foreign service and White House foreign policy team. Kagan is a scholar at...
Jun 19, 2014•50 min
At the advanced institute "War and Human Nature," Tikvah hosted Yale University diplomat in residence and career foreign minister Charles Hill for a lecture on "War and Human Consciousness." Mr. Hill's session began from the insight that the distinctively human quality – the essence of human nature – is the capacity for reasoned speech. In light of this recognition, Mr. Hill focused on the rhetoric of war and peace that has typified past cultures and our own, analyzing different strategies that ...
Jun 12, 2014•51 min
As part of the advanced institute on "Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews," Tikvah hosted the legendary editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz has been a partisan of the left, the right, and, most of all, the Jews. In an interview with Tikvah's executive director Eric Cohen, Podhoretz discussed his life's work and his ideological transformation. He reflects on his early education and the conflict between his low-brow immigrant Judaism and his high-brow training under Lionel Trillin...
May 19, 2014•58 min
During the advanced institute "The Israeli Economy: A Strategy for the Future," Tikvah was honored to have Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer join us. A close adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu for many years, Amb. Dermer detailed the Prime Minister's role in enacting free market reforms and other policies that have promoted exceptional growth. He also discussed both the moral case for capitalism and the relationship of the free market to Jewish values. Recording took place on April 28, 2014....
Apr 28, 2014•46 min
Since 1945, American power has been the principal guarantor of world order. Nearly 70 years on, what is America’s place in today’s global order, and do we stand at the dawn of a new and more chaotic age? How do the arrangements and understandings through which war is generally avoided, commerce generally protected, and the cause of civilization generally advanced, cease to function? Do natural and political events that seem unconnected actually relate, and together, portend a coming global disor...
Mar 20, 2014•1 hr 29 min
The American future is in question, and it is up to the present generation of civic leaders to ensure that the nation continues to thrive. The United States faces new challenges to its economic and social infrastructure, as well as the very cultural and spiritual qualities which comprise the foundations of our social compact. And how, beyond America's borders, should the United States responsibly project its power and influence? The American future depends on addressing five issues of key strate...
Mar 18, 2014•1 hr 4 min
Lord Acton famously proposed that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." In Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse provides an analysis of Jewish history that suggests the exact opposite. With neither sovereignty, nor centralized government, nor even mechanisms of self-defense, the Jewish people reconceived the meaning of their nation in manifestly moral terms. They fell prey to the danger of being corrupted by powerlessness. Generations of exilic Jews sought to live as "a light u...
Mar 10, 2014•1 hr 12 min
What did the architects of American's democracy agenda get right, and what did they get wrong? What do more recent developments teach us about hopes for democracy in the Arab world and their place in American foreign policy? Tikvah's Jonathan Silver hosted former deputy national security advisor and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Elliott Abrams for an in-depth reconsideration of America's democracy agenda. The event was recorded before a live audience on March 6, 2014 at the Tikvah C...
Mar 06, 2014•1 hr 24 min
Reviled as a fascist demagogue by his great rival David Ben-Gurion, venerated by Israel's underclass, the first Israeli to win the Nobel Peace Prize, a proud Jew but not a conventionally religious one, Menachem Begin was both complex and controversial. Begin's Herut party led the opposition to the Labor governments of Ben-Gurion and his successors until the surprising parliamentary victory of 1977 made him Israel's Prime Minister. Listen as Daniel Gordis, author of Menachem Begin: The Battle for...
Mar 04, 2014•1 hr 15 min
In the popular imagination, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is remembered for his involvement in civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the cause of Soviet Jewry. But, as Rabbi Shai Held demonstrates in his new book, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence , Rabbi Heschel was first and foremost a theologian and philosopher of religion. What are his core ideas, and what are his main religious insights? How did he develop his views of covenant and love, his fear of the unbounded e...
Feb 25, 2014•1 hr 20 min
Nineteenth century political emancipation brought citizenship rights to European Jews. In How Judaism Became a Religion , Leora Batnitzky explores how this new political reality affected Jewish philosophy and the Jewish people. The prospect of secular citizenship challenged Judaism's premodern integrity, and drove Jewish writers, intellectuals, and rabbis to grapple with how to recast Judaism as a "religion," emphasizing its private faith over its national call to public practice. The transforma...
Feb 20, 2014•45 min
The United States has been a strong supporter of Israel. Is that likely to continue? How do changes over the last few years in the Middle East affect the US-Israel relationship? To what extent are different parts of the American public, the American Jewish community, and the American foreign policy establishment still inspired to stand with Israel? Indeed, what does it mean to "stand with Israel?" Listen to William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, in conversation with Tikvah's Director of...
Jan 27, 2014•1 hr 29 min
