As 2023 began, Israeli opponents of the new government have been organizing protests and demonstrations. Manifest there, and in the newspapers and magazines and television programs of the center and left, is the fevered and frustrated political rhetoric that one expects to hear from politicians who've just lost an election and want back into the game. Rhetoric on the subject outside of Israel—expressed by a great many American Jews—is just as heated, and has led some to withdraw their support fo...
Jan 20, 2023•37 min
The Uighur people is an ethnic group historically located in central and east Asia; the bulk of its population lives western China. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has severely restricted Uighur religious life and has detained many Uighurs in mass re-education and work camps. On this week's podcast, inspired by a conversation he had with the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the democracy activist Carl Gershman joins us to think about whether the Jewish experience can offer anything to the Uighu...
Jan 12, 2023•37 min
In 2022, we convened 46 new conversations, probing some of the most interesting and consequential subjects in modern Jewish life: the war-torn Jewish community in Ukraine, the nature of modern sexual ethics, the prospects of Israeli judicial reform, how to read the book of Esther, and the passing of one of the great Jewish critics of the 20th century. In conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, each guest brought his or her unique expertise or viewpoint to some timely issue or enduring q...
Jan 06, 2023•58 min
Benjamin Netanyahu was Israel's prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and then again from 2009 to 2021. Already Israel's longest-tenured leader, he just won another electoral victory and is expected to take office again later this week. Netanyahu has recently recounted his life in his new memoir Bibi: My Story . He was born not long after modern Israel was founded. In describing his military service, his diplomatic role at the United Nations, and his various ministerial posts through the years, the ...
Dec 27, 2022•31 min
There was never an explicit announcement to men that they no longer needed to wear bowties and could wear neckties instead, just like there was no announcement that they didn't need to wear ties at all. Those cultural norms shifted gradually, and are understood even as they do so. In Orthodox Jewish communities, the way cultural norms work are a bit similar and a bit different. They come both from unspoken social cues and from explicit instruction, including from religious texts. The latter appr...
Dec 16, 2022•39 min
On February 24, when Russian president Vladimir Putin began his country's invasion of Ukraine, Jewish leaders found themselves caught on opposing sides of an active war. Ukrainian rabbis have suggested that the war is a holy fight between good and evil. Jewish religious leaders in Russia, meanwhile, have come under heavy pressure to denounce the war publicly, which most of them have thus far avoided doing, no doubt in part since the Russian government is now cracking down on dissent. Instead, th...
Dec 08, 2022•50 min
Over the years, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank in Washington D.C., has been home to some of the most interesting and important thinkers at the intersection of religion and public affairs in America. And unlike most other D.C. think tanks, EPPC is just as interested in cultural renewal and the moral health of America as it is in policy and politics. On this week's podcast, EPPC's new president Ryan Anderson joins us to discuss how his institution actually tries to influence Ame...
Dec 01, 2022•49 min
There are major concerns facing Israel's democracy today. Some have to do with voting and Israel's system of electoral representation. Others relate to Israel's judiciary. Champions of the current configuration of the Israeli judiciary believe that its famous independence is a necessary check on the legislature, and that it exercises proper authority in checking and repealing illegitimate laws. Critics, on the other hand, assert that Israel's supreme court has no right to undo laws that were pas...
Nov 17, 2022•47 min
By developing an impressive arsenal of attack drones, rockets, and cruise and ballistic missiles, Iran—a nation that struggles to provide clean drinking water to its populace—has achieved a decisive advantage over its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Most importantly, the Iranians have learned how to use these weapons in concert, in ways that can overwhelm even the most sophisticated American and Israeli defensive systems. The U.S., for its part, has shown itself r...
Nov 11, 2022•46 min
In recent years, a new movement has shaken the world of finance. Many investors are no longer interested in the financial return on their investments alone, but they want to feel that they are investing in companies that align with their ethical values. In response, a new metric was created: the ESG score, which attempts to measure the environmental, social, and governance factors and attitudes present in any given company. A few years ago, it was discovered that Morningstar, one of the most pro...
Nov 03, 2022•39 min
On March 23, 2021, Israel voted in its 24th Knesset, and with it sent Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid to the premiership. Next week, on November 1, 2022, Israelis return to the polls in order to vote, again—for the fifth time in just over three years—to elect the 25th Knesset and a new prime minister. The central personality of the election is Israel's longest serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been leading the opposition since leaving office in 2021, who remains the head of the ...
Oct 28, 2022•1 hr 8 min
Some of today's most important ideas were first born in little magazines—magazines, that is to say, like Mosaic . How does that happen? And what is the role of a magazine editor, and does that role differ if the magazine in question is Jewish? On this week's podcast, we bring you the recording of a live discussion convened earlier this week between Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver and Yoav Sorek, the editor of Hashiloach , a quarterly journal in Israel. Moderated by the writer David Weinberg, the t...
Oct 20, 2022•1 hr 4 min
On October 12, 2022, Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid approved an agreement with the government of Lebanon to establish maritime borders between the two countries. The deal, brokered by the United States, is important because large fields of natural gas have been discovered under the seabed of the Israel-Lebanon coast—and whichever country controls these fields can reap the financial and energy benefits from them. In some quarters, the establishment of the new borders—without a war being fought...
Oct 13, 2022•50 min
The legacy of Christian anti-Semitism is not a happy one. Early in the history of Christianity, as the religion grew, the persecution of Jews became a normal feature of life in Christian lands. By the Middle Ages, the Jewish people were subject to dislocation, alienation, psychological torment, violence, and torture—all with the approval, and at times the official encouragement, of church authorities. Even in modern times, religiously inflected anti-Semitism has been an unavoidable part of the r...
Oct 07, 2022•38 min
On September 16, a squad of Iranian police officers arrested a twenty-two-year-old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini. Charged with improperly wearing a hijab, Amini died in police custody. Since then, suspicion that she was beaten by Iranian forces, combined with the widespread public view that she was accosted unjustly to begin with, have catalyzed widespread protests across Iran. On this week's podcast, the writer Shay Khatiri, who grew up in Iran and participated in protests against Mahmoud Ahm...
Sep 30, 2022•45 min
At this time of year, the Jewish calendar compels Jews to think about the human capacity for personal change, which in the Jewish view is made possible by God. The ability for humans to undertake t'shuvah , repentance, is a subset of that capacity that rises to the fore of this week's podcast conversation (a rebroadcast of a 2017 episode), with the rabbi, editor, and writer Gil Student. Student's subject is a classic essay, published in Rolling Stone in 1977, called " Next Year in Jerusalem ." T...
Sep 22, 2022•33 min
On September 11, 2022, the New York Times published a leading story about the hasidic schools of greater New York. The article, " In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush with Public Money ," purported to show that, though New York's hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years, they provide extremely poor secular education, deploy corporal punishment in class, abuse the political process, and are unaccountable to outside ...
Sep 15, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Jerusalem is perhaps the most interesting and spiritually important city in the world. For the Jewish people, it is the most treasured city in their long history. It is mentioned over 600 times in the Hebrew Bible; every time a Jew prays, he or she faces Jerusalem; at the end of every Passover seder, Jews sing out l'shanah haba b'Yerushaliym, "next year in Jerusalem." On this week's podcast, we're joined by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who just launched his new daily podcast, Jerusalem 365 , a year-l...
Sep 09, 2022•52 min
Earlier this week, in the Swiss city of Basel, the World Zionist Organization convened to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress, which was the brainchild of one of Zionism's founding fathers, Theodor Herzl. At the time, the condition of European Jewry was precarious and degraded. The solution, in Herzl's eyes, was not to be found in the animating Jewish impulse of the age: assimilation. He thought no amount of assimilation would rid the Jews of anti-Semitism, and that i...
Sep 02, 2022•44 min
Fifty years ago, at the 1972 Olympic summer games in Munich, 11 Israeli olympians were held hostage and murdered by members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. Recently, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, while meeting with the German chancellor, was asked about the event and whether he would apologize for what happened. Abbas declined to apologize, and instead accused the Israelis of having enacted "50 Holocausts" against the Palestinians. Why would Abbas, when a...
Aug 25, 2022•34 min
Earlier this month, Israeli forces captured the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the West Bank city of Jenin after he had been involved in planning a number of terrorist attacks. Infuriated, PIJ threatened to fire anti-tank weapons at Israeli towns from its home base in Gaza. In response, the IDF struck PIJ's chief of operations in the northern Gaza Strip and killed his counterpart in the south. After that, the Iranian-backed terrorist group began bombarding Israel with rockets and mor...
Aug 19, 2022•37 min
Just as Israeli society has become more at home with Judaism, so too has Israeli music. Across the Israeli music scene, songs and albums infused with religious themes, language, and sentiments have become far more popular in recent years. And a similar movement can be seen in Israeli culture; once dominated by an Ashkenazi elite, Israeli music now relates to its Arab neighbors as much as it does to the musical traditions of Europe and America. Haim Louk, a Moroccan-born rabbi, prayer leader, and...
Aug 11, 2022•1 hr 6 min
This week, Jews around the world will begin reading from the Book of Deuteronomy each Shabbat. Sefer Devarim , as it is known in Hebrew, is a remarkable work; consisting almost entirely of an address Moses delivered to the Israelites in his final weeks of life, it touches on history, politics, prophecy, and much more. Two years ago, Jonathan Silver sat down with Israeli thinker and scholar Micah Goodman to uncover meaning of Moses's final speech. As we begin again this last book of the Torah, we...
Aug 04, 2022•34 min
More than half a million Jewish men and women served in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II. They fought in every theater of the war, from North Africa and Italy to France and Belgium to the Philippines and Japan. In the process, many of them fell in service to their country. In the fog of war, some of them were buried in military cemeteries under Christian gravestones in the shape of the Latin Cross. Decades later, there's now an organization dedicated to working with the families of the fall...
Jul 29, 2022•57 min
In October 2013, Robert Nicholson wrote a defining essay in Mosaic, " Evangelicals and Israel: What American Jews Don't Want to Know (but Need to). " It in he outlined the wide and deep support that millions of Christian evangelicals had for Israel. He also sounded a note of caution: that support could diminish over time. Nearly ten years later, that warning may be coming to fruition. At the very least, the communities of American Christian evangelicals who formed the basis of Christian Zionism ...
Jul 21, 2022•49 min
Before the state of Israel was founded, some early Zionists argued not only for the recovery of Jewish political sovereignty, but also for the emergence of a new type of Jew. This "New Jew," as they called it, would be free of Judaism's bookish habits and the weight of diaspora Jewish history and be able to take the reigns of the newly independent Jewish polity. Three-quarters of a century after Israel's founding, what is the state of the New Jew? Last month, the Mosaic columnist Eli Spitzer con...
Jul 15, 2022•1 hr 10 min
In his 2022 book The War on the West , the British journalist Douglas Murray argues that many now prominent cultural ideas unfairly single out Western sins, discounting the good that Western civilization has brought about and sowing discord in America and Europe. On this week's podcast, he joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to explain why Western civilization should be defended, to discuss the role that Israel and the Jewish people play in that defense, and to reflect on two of his friends who ...
Jun 29, 2022•41 min
The Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem is the holiest physical site in all of Judaism. Religiously observant Jews ask God to restore the Temple and its services each and every day in the traditional liturgy. For thousands of years, Jews had no access to the site on which that Temple stood, until 1967, when Israeli forces reunited Jerusalem. Since then, Israel has by special arrangement ceded some forms of control of the Temple Mount to religious Muslim stewards supported by the government...
Jun 23, 2022•51 min
The idea of equality has a long and intricate history, one that this week the philosopher, rabbi, and writer Zohar Atkins joins the podcast to discuss. In conversation with Mosaic 's editor Jonathan Silver, he looks at how various thinkers in the Western intellectual tradition have thought about equality. Together, they discuss thinkers of equality as various as Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Luther, and Hobbes and Rousseau and Hayek. Through it all, their point of departure is the foundatio...
Jun 17, 2022•56 min
There is the argument and there is the context in which that argument is made. It's easy to sing the praises of American life when you're sitting in the United States, but you'd likely to express yourself differently if you were explaining your views in Soviet Russia. The context of the argument does not, of course, determine its truth or falsehood, but it does help clarify what's being said and why. This is true for all arguments, from those made by Socrates and the rabbis of the Talmud to phil...
Jun 09, 2022•45 min
