Just over a year ago, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo created the new Commission on Unalienable Rights , tasked with "provid[ing] the Secretary of State advice and recommendations concerning international human rights matters" as well as "fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation's founding principles of natural law and natural rights." The formation of this commission signaled that Secretary Pompeo views America's pursuit of human rights at ...
Jul 30, 2020•1 hr
After centuries of antagonism and persecution, the twentieth century introduced profound changes to the relationship between Jews and Christians. In the shadow of the Holocaust, post-War America witnessed a flowering of interfaith dialogue, often spearheaded by the more liberal wings of both groups. This flowering of interreligious cooperation was made possible by identifying the lowest common denominators between Judaism and Christianity—a shared attachment to the Hebrew Bible, similar ethical ...
Jul 23, 2020•44 min
On June 25, 2020, an explosion rocked the Iranian military complex of Parchin. An hour later, the city of Shiraz—which houses major Iranian military facilities—was hit with a power outage. On June 30, there was an explosion at a clinic in Tehran; on July 2, the nuclear-enrichment facility in Natanz was hit; July 4 saw an explosion at a power plant in Ahvaz. In fact, every day or two since late June has brought news of a mysterious explosion somewhere in Iran. What on earth is going on? In this p...
Jul 15, 2020•25 min
Everyone can see that a revolutionary spirit is haunting American public life right now. The demands being made of our laws and culture are uncompromising and radical. The public mood is given to extremes, and notions of gradual improvement and subtle distinctions are thought to be incapable of speaking to the severity of our racial, cultural, scientific, and spiritual challenges So this week, we are rebroadcasting a discussion from the archives that focuses on a figure whose watchwords were the...
Jul 09, 2020•40 min
As the Supreme Court closed out it 2019-2020 term, it handed down its decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue . With a 5-4 majority, the Court ruled that states could not use their so-called "Blaine Amendments" in order to deny religious schools funding that is generally available to other private schools. It was a momentous decision, with implications for school choice programs and religious liberty across the nation. Earlier this year, soon after the Supreme Court heard oral argu...
Jul 02, 2020•40 min
On May 31, 2020, American Jewry lost a giant. Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, the longtime president of Yeshiva University (YU), was one of the nation's foremost defenders Orthodox Judaism and exponents of the Torah U'Madda —Torah and secular knowledge—philosophy that animates Modern Orthodoxy. His passing was followed with an outpouring of remembrances from friends, family, students, and admirers. Most of them, appropriately, shined light on Rabbi Lamm's remarkable career as a turnaround artist. He inhe...
Jun 25, 2020•38 min
The so-called "rise of the nones" is a trend that has been going on for decades in the U.S., as more and more Americans, when asked about their religion on surveys, are checking the box labeled "none." With this trend strongest among millennials and members of Generation Z, the future seems clear: we are becoming a more secular country. Or are we? The instinctual search for religious meaning and the yearning for transcendence are sewn into the fabric of the human condition. Everyone worships. An...
Jun 18, 2020•49 min
Discussions about "cancel culture," the practice of stigmatizing and ostracizing a person or institution deemed to have transgressed political correctness, have become ubiquitous in the United States. From the campus to the boardroom to the newsroom, the cost of having ever said or thought the wrong thing can now put one's reputation and livelihood at risk. And there is no path for the accused to enjoy ablution, to wash away the sin of wrongthink. Public figures of all kinds, from politics to jo...
Jun 11, 2020•38 min
Professor Wilfred McClay penned his essay, " The Soul of a Nation ," just three years after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The essay—a deep reflection on the history, nature, and future of American civic religion—was written in part as a response to the deep questions American were asking themselves about civil society, faith, and public life in the aftermath of moment of deep and profound crisis. The United States again finds itself in a moment of pain and crisis. In the spirit of he...
Jun 04, 2020•47 min
Jewish institutions have not been immune from the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Summer camps and other revenue generators have been canceled, and donations are predictably down. What does this mean for Jewish life America—especially for the denominational infrastructure that has loomed so large for so long? When the crisis is over, will congregants return to synagogues with renewed enthusiasm or will they continue to enjoy livestreamed services from the comfort of their homes? Will the lib...
May 28, 2020•34 min
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread in the United States and Israel, and those nations' governments and public institutions responded with quarantines and social-distancing guidelines, the Jewish community was placed in a unique bind. Passover—the most widely observed holiday in the Jewish world, on which families and friends traditionally gather for the seder—was just around the corner. With the world on lockdown, what would the seder look like? The liberal denominations of Judaism respond...
May 20, 2020•48 min
The biblical book of Exodus "not only recounts the founding of the Israelite nation, one of the world's oldest and most consequential peoples...but also sheds light on enduring questions about nation building and peoplehood." So writes Dr. Leon Kass in the introduction to his scintillating, profound, and meticulously close reading of Exodus, Founding God's Nation , forthcoming from Yale University Press in January 2021. In this remarkable commentary, Kass masterfully draws out, line by line and ...
May 14, 2020•47 min
The so-called "right of return" is one of the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's thorniest issues. During Israel's 1948 War of Independence, as many as 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven from what had been mandatory Palestine. Since then, and unlike most of the world's other refugee populations, the official number of Palestinian refugees has not declined, but exploded. The United Nations has decided that the refugee status of the Palestinians passes down from generation to generation, so that ch...
May 06, 2020•45 min
Have you ever seen the old murals that decorate the walls of Israel's historic kibbutzim ? They often feature young, brawny Jewish men and women working and plowing the land. They evoke the pioneering spirit of early Zionism: glorifying the mixing of sweat and soil, focused on what Hebrew labor could achieve through cooperation and collective action, and strikingly statist, even socialist. These murals are, in fact, a stark reminder that the Jewish state was founded in large part by Labor Zionis...
Apr 29, 2020•31 min
Like so many nations around the world, Israel has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. As of today, the Jewish state has over 14,000 confirmed cases of the virus, and over 180 deaths. Among those who have suffered most from the pandemic are Israel's ultra-Orthodox. The haredi public was slow to recognize the threat of the disease—keeping its synagogues and houses of study open even as the rest of the country closed down. Many haredim initially failed to observe the "social-distancing" protoco...
Apr 22, 2020•52 min
Yoga represents a $16-billion industry in the U.S., reaching an estimated 36.7 million people in 2016 alone. And the Jewish community enjoys it as much as any other. One hears of synagogue-sponsored yoga programs and yoga minyanim (quorums). Even a right-wing Orthodox educational organization like Aish HaTorah has seen fit to re-post on its website an item titled "How Orthodox Jews Taught Me Yoga." In a stimulating Mosaic essay on the subject, Menachem Wecker asks if the very thing that gets peo...
Apr 07, 2020•38 min
With the recent agreement between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief political rival, Benny Gantz, a governing coalition is at long last beginning to emerge in Israel. After three national elections in a single year, the Jewish state will soon have a regular cabinet and resume the work of government. It couldn't have happened at a better time. The coronavirus pandemic will have significant effects on Israel's politics and economy, while Israel's citizens continue to live under threa...
Apr 03, 2020•37 min
In the past two months, the Coronavirus has spread rapidly around the globe, affecting nearly every nation in the world. As disruptive and damaging as this pandemic has been in the United States, Israel, and Europe, it has been far more devastating in Iran, where mass graves have been dug to bury its victims. Official statistics paint a dreadful picture of the situation there, but Iranian citizens have taken to social media to tell that world that the reality on the ground is even worse than the...
Mar 31, 2020•32 min
Understanding the soul of a nation requires more than understanding the way it orders its laws and governing institutions. True understanding demands that we also look at a people's culture—its art, its theater, and its music. In this podcast, we are joined by the author, intellectual, and Hartman Institute fellow Yossi Klein Halevi to explore the transformation of Israel music throughout the history of the Jewish state. We will look at the music that characterized Israel's early years—music tha...
Mar 25, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Over the past two decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has financed terrorism, civil war, and repression throughout the Middle East—and even in Europe and Latin America—while working to develop nuclear weapons. What can the U.S. do to pressure Iran to stop? And how can it do so without involving American forces in a costly and dangerous military confrontation? In this episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we are joined by Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies ...
Mar 18, 2020•41 min
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has long been one of the most admired presidents among American Jews. He led the nation out of the depression and ultimately brought a previously isolationist America into World War II. Together with Churchill and Stalin, he defeated the greatest Jewish enemy of the 20th century—Hitler and the Third Reich that elected him. And yet questions have always lingered about the president's conduct. Why would this friend of the Jews close the gates of the country to those fleei...
Mar 12, 2020•44 min
Since the administration of President Jimmy Carter, nearly every American president has sought to attain the holy grail of diplomacy: a solution to the conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors. In some ways, the Trump Administration's new peace initiative, " Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People ," is merely another proposal for an American-brokered arrangement, the next plan in a line of many. But its vision is based on political premises...
Mar 04, 2020•39 min
In the year 2020, we live in the shadow of the sexual revolution. The radical changes in sexual mores and family life that American society experienced in the 1960s and 1970s still reverberate today, having made their impact on everything from popular culture and public education to religious life and the most divisive political controversies. What caused this massive social revolution? How should Jews think about what it has meant for our own way of life? And what vision of sex, romance, and fa...
Feb 26, 2020•37 min
Kendra Espinoza is a low-income single mother from Montana who applied for a tax-credit scholarship program—created by the state legislature in 2015—that would allow her to keep her daughters enrolled in a private Christian school. But soon after implementing the program, the state banned any of the scholarship funds from going to religious schools, thus excluding Espinoza and her family from receiving support. The ensuing legal battle made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arg...
Feb 19, 2020•37 min
Since the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza denied the Mosaic authorship of the Torah, traditional Jews have had to contend with serious intellectual challenges to the doctrine of the divine origin of the Scripture. This challenge has only grown stronger in recent years, with many young Jews at elite universities encountering academic biblical criticism, and the growth of online projects like TheTorah.com exposing ever-greater numbers of Orthodox Jews to contemporary scholarship about the ...
Feb 12, 2020•39 min
Born in 1915 to a traditional Jewish family recently arrived from Russia, Saul Bellow was raised in Chicago and soon became "part of a circle of brainy Jewish teenagers who read and debated weighty books and learned much more from each other than from their formal schooling." Early in life, Bellow decided to become a writer "and worked at it so hard and so successfully that by the time of his death in 2005 he had become America's most decorated novelist." So writes Ruth Wisse in her October 2019...
Feb 05, 2020•55 min
That the young are less religious than the old is not news. But the alienation of today's millennials from religious faith may indeed be something new, and far more permanent than many have thought. That's one of the ominous implications of a new report published by the American Enterprise Institute, titled, " The Decline of Religion in American Family Life ." The report found that young people often leave faith at an early age and that the proportion of young people involved in regular religiou...
Jan 29, 2020•25 min
Traditional Jewish communities are countercultural in a great many ways. But in our age of expressive individualism, one of the characteristics that most sets observant Jews apart is their rich communal life. From crowded Shabbat tables to volunteer ambulance and community watch groups to the close-knit communities that form around synagogues and day schools, the life of a committed Jew is usually embedded within a thick network of formative institutions. Of course, American Jewish life is far f...
Jan 22, 2020•36 min
Israeli politics are a mess. After its second election in six months failed to produce a governing coalition, Israelis are scheduled to head back to the polls for the third time in a single year's time this coming March. In the Jewish state's short history, this kind of political crisis is a first, but its seeds may have been planted at the very founding of the state. Since its very first election, Israel has chosen leaders through a system of proportional representation (PR). At election time, ...
Jan 15, 2020•33 min
When Gertrude Himmelfarb passed away on December 30, 2019, a great Jewish voice was lost. An eminent historian of Victorian Britain, Professor Himmelfarb—or, as she was known to her friends, Bea Kristol—analyzed and defended the moral and political virtues necessary for a healthy democratic society. She was interested in how the Victorians consciously built up England's moral capital and civic confidence when they were in short supply. And drawing from her meticulous historical research, she bro...
Jan 08, 2020•28 min
