In 2019, 40 different guests came on the Tikvah Podcast to engage in serious conversations about Jewish ideas, Jewish texts, and Jewish public affairs. This year we covered everything from diplomacy to defense, from Jewish philosophy to Jewish food, from anti-Semitism to Jewish heroism. On this retrospective episode, you'll hear highlighted selections from our conversations with Israel's U.N. Ambassador, Danny Danon, Hudson Institute foreign-policy analyst Michael Doran, Swedish journalist Annik...
Jan 01, 2020•57 min
In both Israel and the United States, most politicians, foreign-policy experts, and citizens desire a strong and ever-closer relationship between the two nations. Israel and America share values, interests, and a deeply rooted biblical heritage that ties them inextricably together. But lately, U.S.-Israel relations have hit an impasse of sorts. As the Jewish state pursues greater economic ties with the People's Republic of China, it has created new friction with America, which views China—rightl...
Dec 26, 2019•39 min
Three years into the Trump Administration, how is America doing? What does Israel's current political instability mean for its foreign policy? How should the rise of China affect how the U.S. thinks about projecting global power? It can be hard to penetrate the news cycle and think deeply about the many facets of politics and world affairs from a strategic point of view. But that's exactly what Walter Russell Mead does week after week in the Wall Street Journal and as a scholar at the Hudson Ins...
Dec 18, 2019•40 min
This past October, the former U.S. senator Joseph Lieberman was a keynote speaker at the inaugural Herzl Conference on Contemporary Zionism, held on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. His speech was published on November 7 in Mosaic in essay form as " What American Jews Can Do to Help Keep Herzl's Dream Alive ." In it, Senator Lieberman reflects on the miracle of the modern Jewish state, the meaning of Jewish self-determination for American Jews, and some of his concerns about the future of bipartisan su...
Dec 11, 2019•23 min
A Jewish man hit in the face with a brick. An observant woman's wig pulled off her head. An Orthodox mother and her baby assaulted in the street. These incidents took place not in 19th-century Russia or pre-war Germany, but in Brooklyn—which has one of the densest Jewish populations in America—in 2019. The recent spike in anti-Semitic attacks in New York against the most visibly Jewish members of our community, the ultra-Orthodox, is a worrying sign in a nation experiencing rising levels of Jew-...
Dec 04, 2019•33 min
On November 18, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a momentous announcement: The United States does not consider Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—illegal or illegitimate. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Israeli building in the territories it captured in 1967 is a violation of international law. But after a process of many months, the Trump State Department has decided to return to an understanding of the Geneva Convention once embraced by the Reagan Admin...
Nov 26, 2019•26 min
The establishment of a sovereign Jewish state just three years after the Holocaust is both a miracle and the achievement of some remarkable women and men. Now that the founding generation has passed on, it falls to those living today to sustain that achievement. But how? In thinking about the careers of prominent Israeli leaders, what lessons, particularly in courage, can we, and today's leaders, learn from them? To ponder this question, Tikvah's Jonathan Silver is joined by David Makovsky, a fe...
Nov 21, 2019•54 min
Facebook is now a central fact of world politics, commerce, and affairs. With more than 2.3 billion users worldwide, it has more users than there are Christians or Muslims, not to mention Jews. Industry analysts project that by 2020 more marketing dollars will be spent on Facebook alone than on the entire TV ad market. It is, in sum, a global presence that hovers above the world declaring that it desires nothing but to connect us with each other, to convene community. Its understanding of itself...
Nov 13, 2019•45 min
On November 10, 2019, Norman Podhoretz—longtime editor of Commentary and one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism—will receive the Tikvah Fund's 2019 Herzl Prize at the 3rd Annual Conference on Jews and Conservatism. Podhoretz is a true renaissance man, whose has written on everything from culture to politics to Jewish affairs. In one of the earliest episodes of the Tikvah Podcast, we were privileged to have him join our executive director, Eric Cohen, for a conversation on his 2007 essay,...
Nov 06, 2019•36 min
"What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" Oceans of ink have been spilled seeking to answer this question, first posed by the early Church father Tertullian. How do the two intellectual pillars of Western Civilization, Scripture and the philosophical tradition born in ancient Athens, relate to one another? Thinkers like Maimonides sought to reconcile Greek wisdom and Jewish thought. Other thinkers focused on the radically different grounds—reason versus revelation—upon which the insights of each t...
Oct 30, 2019•43 min
The English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton famously described the United States as "a nation with the soul of a church." Americans, even now, are a uniquely religious people, and it is impossible truly to understand the American Founding and the American story without reference to Scripture in general, and the Hebrew Bible in particular. And yet, while one can sometimes undertake the academic study of the Bible in our universities—uncovering the text's strands of composition, its dating, and it...
Oct 24, 2019•44 min
This past July, something unusual happened in Alaska. The Israeli military launched its most technologically sophisticated defensive missiles through the atmosphere, into space. The July testing of the Arrow 3 represents the consummation of decades of military and scientific partnership between Israel and the United States. The Arrow 3 conveys a kill vehicle that constantly adjusts in order to intercept an incoming missile itself—what is called in missile defense, a "metal to metal" intercept. I...
Oct 16, 2019•25 min
According to Jewish tradition, the holiday of Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year—marks the "birth" of man on the sixth day of creation. But what else was created along with him? According the sages of the Talmud, Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge on the very same day they were made, bringing the capacity for sin latent within them out into the world. Sin, in other words, is part of God's original creation. In this season of repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we welcome Rab...
Oct 03, 2019•36 min
In the American Jewish imagination, the story of Israel's founding is a story of East European pioneers, socialist kibbutzim , and a Jewish state rising from the ashes of the Holocaust. And all of these things are indispensable elements of Israel's early history. But they are not the whole picture. After the founding of the state, Israel absorbed a massive influx of Jews from Middle Eastern lands—Mizrahim—who came from a society and culture vastly different from that of their East European co-re...
Sep 25, 2019•53 min
If you follow Israeli politics, then you know that within the past year, the Jewish state has experienced two deadlocked elections. What explains this political stalemate? According to Micah Goodman, one of Israel's leading public intellectuals, Israeli politics is trapped in a Catch-67 . Most Israelis have been persuaded by the Right that peace with the Palestinians isn't feasible and that withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would be a security nightmare. But they are also persuaded by the Left's...
Sep 18, 2019•35 min
Throughout our podcast series with eminent Jewish historian Jack Wertheimer, we have spoken about a Judaism of "peak moments." This is the kind of Judaism most American Jews practice; connecting to their faith at a small number of important dates and life transitions: the High Holy Days, b'nai mitzvah , weddings, funerals. In this week's podcast—the third and final episode in our series—our conversation focuses on the place where so many of these peak moments take place: the synagogue. The litur...
Sep 11, 2019•46 min
With the exception of shabbat , there is probably no practice that distinguishes pious Jews more than the observance of kashrut —the Jewish dietary laws. Whether at a business meeting or an everyday social gathering, Jews who keeps kosher have to set themselves apart from the crowd whenever food is involved. To keep kosher is to stand out. And that is precisely the point. In " Locusts, Giraffes, and the Meaning of Kashrut ," Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik argues that the deepest purpose of kashrut l...
Sep 04, 2019•46 min
On July 18, 1994, a car-bomb struck the headquarters of AMIA—the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, the largest Jewish community center and social-service agency in Buenos Aires—killing 85 people and wounding 300 more. It was the worst single attack on Diaspora Jews since the Holocaust. A quarter-century later, the perpetrators of this terror attack have still not been brought to justice. And in this month's Mosaic essay , the renowned Jewish activist Rabbi Avi Weiss tells the story of the ...
Aug 28, 2019•50 min
For much of the 20th century, the major denominations—Conservative, Reform, Orthodox—loomed large over institutional Jewish life in America. But in 2019, the Jewish scene looks different; the movements hold less purchase on Jewish life than they once did, especially for the young. And the denominations look different internally as well. Reform Judaism has embraced ritual practices once deemed outmoded. Orthodoxy, which many thought on its way to extinction, is strong, growing, and confident. And...
Aug 21, 2019•53 min
There is probably no character in Jewish fiction more well known than Tevye the Dairyman. Fiddler on the Roof is one of the best known and most widely performed musicals of all time, and the film adaptation is the quintessential portrayal of shtetl life in American cinema. But long before he sang his way into the hearts of theatergoers around the globe, Tevye was the protagonist of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem's most important short stories. At turns comedic, tragic, and wise, Tevye ...
Aug 14, 2019•47 min
21st-century America has seen religious faith buffeted by cultural change, social upheaval, and serious intellectual and moral challenges. American Judaism has not been immune from this broader trend, and Jews across—and outside—the denominational spectrum have tried to adapt to the complexities of modern life. How are Jewish leaders cultivating cultural antibodies to resist the worst of modernity, while at the same time taking advantage of modernity's new realities? Which strategies are succeed...
Aug 07, 2019•57 min
Those of us who care about the success and security of the Jewish state are sensitive to the many military threats Israel faces, from Syria in the north, Iran to the East, and Gaza to the South. But in recent years, some have also drawn our attention to the threat of what is often called "lawfare," the use of the system of international law in order to damage and delegitimize Israel. How does lawfare work? Is the threat to Israel as serious as some claim? And what can its use teach us about how ...
Jul 31, 2019•32 min
Since 1949, every election in Israel's history has yielded a governing majority...until now. Though the bloc of right-wing parties emerged from the April 2019 Knesset elections with a clear majority, coalition negotiations fell apart when Avigdor Lieberman, head of the secular rightist Yisrael Beytenu party, made demands regarding the conscription of haredim into the Israel Defense Forces that were unacceptable to the ultra-Orthodox. Israelis will head back to the polls in September, but the key...
Jul 24, 2019•34 min
The question of the relationship between men and women has long vexed Jewish thought and Jewish life. From the complex biblical relationships between figures like Adam and Eve and Jacob and Rachel down to our present-day struggles over the place of Jewish women in family and synagogue life, issues of sex, gender, and power have commanded the attention of traditional Jews as few other things have. And the form these debates have taken within the contemporary Jewish world have been profoundly shap...
Jul 17, 2019•51 min
Would you want to live forever? What would your spouse, your children, your friends mean to you if you knew you would outlive them all? Is our mortality a problem to be solved, or an indispensable ingredient in making life worth living? These questions have long been debated by philosophers and bioethicists, but they are perhaps best explored though the medium of literature. That's exactly what bestselling novelist Dara Horn does in her latest book, Eternal Life . The book tells the tale of Rach...
Jul 10, 2019•46 min
The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is perhaps the most (in)famous espionage trial in all American history. While their conviction and execution remain familiar and controversial episodes in the Cold War, the fate of their co-conspirator Morton Sobell is less well-known. In his Mosaic essay, " The Death of Morton Sobell and the End of the Rosenberg Affair ," author David Evanier digs into the details of Sobell's life before and after the fall of the Rosenberg ring. As he looks back on this p...
Jul 03, 2019•31 min
This Friday, the world's leading economic powers will gather in Osaka, Japan, for the G20 summit, and though it won't be on the official agenda, the rising tensions between Iran and the United States will loom large over the gathering. Since May, the Islamic Republic has carried out half a dozen acts of sabotage and violence against the U.S. and its allies. What is the story behind Iran's escalating provocations? Is it looking for war? Is America? Earlier this week, Hudson Institute scholar Mich...
Jun 26, 2019•40 min
It is hard to believe that it has been almost a year since the eminent columnist—and great Jewish conservative—Charles Krauthammer passed away. Krauthammer's clarity of mind and force of argument were the cornerstone of American conservative commentary, and the sheer breadth of his knowledge and interests made him a truly irreplaceable writer. Thankfully for those of us who once relied on Krauthammer's commentary to help us think through the most pressing issues of the day, his son Daniel has lo...
Jun 19, 2019•46 min
On September 6, 2007, shortly after midnight, Israeli fighters advanced on Deir ez-Zour in Syria. Israel often flew into Syria as a warning to President Bashar al-Assad, but this time, there was no warning and no explanation. This was a covert operation, with one goal: to destroy a nuclear reactor being built by North Korea under a tight veil of secrecy in the Syrian desert. In his latest book, Shadow Strike: Inside Israel's Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power , Jerusalem Post Edito...
Jun 12, 2019•45 min
Since the destruction of the Second Temple at the hands of Rome, most Jews, for most of Jewish history, have lived in the Diaspora. What are the survival strategies, built up over centuries, that allowed far-flung Diaspora communities to endure and to remain connected to the broader Jewish people? In researching her forthcoming book, Exile: Portraits of the Jewish Diaspora , Swedish-born journalist Annika Hernroth-Rothstein visited a dozen communities from Iran to Tunisia, Uzbekistan to Siberia,...
Jun 05, 2019•44 min
