The Tikvah Podcast

The Tikvah Fund is a philanthropic foundation and ideas institution committed to supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish State. Tikvah runs and invests in a wide range of initiatives in Israel, the United States, and around the world, including educational programs, publications, and fellowships. Our animating mission and guiding spirit is to advance Jewish excellence and Jewish flourishing in the modern age. Tikvah is politically Zionist, economically free-market oriented, culturally traditional, and theologically open-minded. Yet in all issues and subjects, we welcome vigorous debate and big arguments. Our institutes, programs, and publications all reflect this spirit of bringing forward the serious alternatives for what the Jewish future should look like, and bringing Jewish thinking and leaders into conversation with Western political, moral, and economic thought.

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Episodes

Shlomo Brody on Capital Punishment and the Jewish Tradition

On October 27, 2018, a gunman burst into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, armed with a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and three Glock .357 semi-automatic pistols. He executed eleven Jews at prayer. When police arrived, they shot the gunman multiple times, but he survived and was taken into custody. Earlier this month, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. How does Judaism look upon capital punishment? Does this killer still bear the image and likeness of God and possess a dign...

Aug 10, 2023•37 min

Dara Horn on Why People Love Dead Jews (Rebroadcast)

The celebrated novelist Dara Horn's new book People Love Dead Jews has an arresting title, one designed to make the reader feel uncomfortable. That's because Horn makes an argument that tries to change the way people think about the function of Jews in the conscience of the West. In the book, and in this podcast conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, Horn suggests that Jewish communities, figures, and abstract symbols of “the Jews” have come to serve a moral role in the Western imagina...

Aug 04, 2023•1 hr

Izzy Pludwinski on the Art and Beauty of Hebrew Calligraphy

Perhaps more than any other major religious tradition, Judaism is mediated through words. God first communicated to Abraham through intelligible speech. Moses brought down from Mount Sinai tablets inscribed with words codifying the structure of Jewish moral order. The book of Deuteronomy commands that every Jewish king write his own Torah scroll. For millions of Jews, the study of Jewish texts constitutes the holiest activity of all. So perhaps it is not surprising that, seen in this light, word...

Jul 27, 2023•44 min

Joshua Berman on the Traumas of the Book of Lamentations

In the sixth century BCE, the kingdom of Judah and its capitol in Jerusalem were besieged by the Babylonian forces of Nebuchadnezzar II. After a long period of deprivation, the walls of the city were finally breached. On the Hebrew date of the 9th of the month of Av—Tisha b’Av—the Temple that had stood in Jerusalem for centuries was plundered and destroyed, the inhabitants of the city were massacred, and the survivors were taken into captivity. This experience remains one of the most traumatic i...

Jul 20, 2023•31 min

Meir Soloveichik on Ten Portraits of Jewish Statesmanship

The first century Roman essayist and philosopher Plutarch is perhaps most famous today for his stylized, paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen. In Plutarch’s parallel lives, Alexander, who conquered the Mediterranean world, is compared to Julius Caesar, who did the same a few hundred years later. Alcibiades and Coriolanus are paired together to show how spiritedness and martial virtue, when not tempered by political judgment, can wreak havoc. Plutarch’s lives are moral portraits; their...

Jul 13, 2023•47 min

Tevi Troy on the Biden Administration's Plan to Fight Anti-Semitism

At the end of May, the Biden administration released the first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism. This document looks at the threat anti-Semitism poses to America, outlines ways the federal government can improve the safety and security of Jewish communities, offers plans for countering anti-Semitic discrimination online, in media, and in schools, and describes the administration’s vision for partnering with various religious and civic groups to address the issue. The existenc...

Jul 06, 2023•56 min

Avital Levi on Loyalty

Loyalty—as a human sentiment, as a moral virtue, as a matrix of decision-making—is the subject of this podcast conversation. Avital Levi, a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University and a teacher of Bible and philosophy in Israel, is curious about what keeps nations that are deeply divided together. Conservative Americans dislike liberal ones, and vice versa; and the same goes for Israelis and for the populations of many other nations. So what keeps those nations from descending into civil war?...

Jun 30, 2023•1 hr

Michael Doran on the Ambiguities in Biden's Middle East Strategy

Earlier this week, the American foreign-policy expert and Mosaic writer Michael Doran published an important essay called “ Biden’s Ties That Bind .” In it, he argues that the Biden administration’s true strategic aims in the Middle East are not a change from the Obama administration’s aims but are consistent with them. These aims were to empower Iran in order to establish a balance of power in the region which would, in turn, allow America to focus more attention on China. And to empower Iran, ...

Jun 23, 2023•41 min

Eric Cohen on the Questions Graduating Jews and Their Parents Must Confront

This week, the Tikvah Podcast offers up not a conversation but a speech. It’s a speech that was offered up to American Jewish high school and college graduates by Tikvah’s CEO, Eric Cohen. In the fall of 2021, four Jewish women—Carolyn Rowan, Liz Lange, Nina Davidson, and Rebecca Sugar—came together to create an organization for parents grappling with the challenges of raising committed Jewish children in today's confusing and contentious cultural environment. The Jewish Parents Forum organizes ...

Jun 15, 2023•12 min

Eli Steinberg on the Warriors of Torah

This past Sunday, photographs began to appear on social media of a sports stadium, the Wells Fargo Center just outside of Philadelphia, full of haredi men—some 27,000 of them. The name of the gathering was Adirei HaTorah, a Hebrew phrase that means “warriors of Torah.” All those people were convened in order to honor a small group of men: hundreds of relatively anonymous adults engaged in full-time Torah study at Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey. Beth Medrash Govoha is one of the most...

Jun 09, 2023•50 min

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