The Tikvah Podcast

In April of this year, Israel's Foreign Ministry created a position that had never before existed: special envoy to the Christian world. The appointment came after a string of incidents that have strained Israel's standing with Christian communities: an IDF soldier destroyed a statue of Jesus in Lebanon; during the war with Iran, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pizzaballa, was barred fo...

When students begin to study international politics, they meet some very old and well-established schools of thought. These approaches disagree about a fundamental question: what is the most important kind of information to acquire? One school of thought recommends studying power: who holds the weapons, and who fears whom. From that, the thinking goes, you'll be able to map the hierarchies and rel...

Today 's  conversation is about a publishing project: the Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel . The concept of the series is that it takes the books of the Hebrew Bible and sets them back down in the world that produced them—in the Land of Israel, and in the economic, political, theological, and cultural setting of the ancient Near East. Around each verse it gathers what is known about that world:...

This week we bring you a conversation between Eric Cohen, president and CEO of Tikvah, and the former vice-president of the United States, Mike Pence. The conversation was recorded before a live audience at the Fund for American Studies, and we are grateful to our friends at TFAS for the invitation and for the work they do: forming young leaders in the principles of individual liberty, free market...

In 2024, the Atlantic  ran a splashy feature titled "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books." Professors at the Ivy League and at other elite universities reported that their students, among the most credentialed young people in the country, could no longer make their way through a whole book. One Columbia professor described his bewilderment when a student told him she had never once bee...

From the phone that sits in his pocket, a person can now order almost anything online and have it delivered to his door the next morning. For all of human history, no one on earth had that kind of power, and now, within a single lifetime, every middle-class American has it. Walmart or Amazon or other major e-commerce platforms will bring you whatever you want: a vintage edition of a particular boo...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, grew up in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to escape an arranged marriage, became a member of the Dutch parliament, and collaborated with the filmmaker Theo van Gogh on a short film about the treatment of women under Islam. Ever since Van Gogh was murdered by a Dutch Islamist on an Amsterdam street in 2004, with a death threat...

On May 4, President Trump issued a proclamation which reads: In special honor of 250 glorious years of American independence and on the weekend of Rededicate 250—a national jubilee of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving—Jewish Americans are encouraged to observe a national Sabbath. From sundown on May 15 to nightfall on May 16, friends, families, and communities of all backgrounds may come together i...

Every year on Shavuot, many Jews have the custom of reading the book of Ruth. The holiday commemorates the giving of the Torah at Sinai—the moment when the Jewish people gathered at the foot of the mountain and declared, "we will do and we will listen."  The rabbis paired Sinai with Ruth for a reason. Sinai is the national conversion story, in which the whole people, swept up in thunder and fire,...

In the spring of 2026, Israel and the United States conducted joint offensive military operations against Iran: coordinating targets, dividing airspace, and operating with a degree of integration that has no precedent in the history of the alliance. The operation significantly degraded Iran's military capabilities, and it marked what many analysts regard as a genuine turning point, not just in the...

Something has been happening in Michigan politics that deserves the attention of everyone who cares about the health of American democracy. And, as they so often are, the Jews are at the center of events. Taking root in Michigan is a specific and serious ideological threat—Islamism—that is gaining influence inside the Democratic party. This is a story about what happens when that influence is unna...

Roy Altman came to America as a little boy. He came from Venezuela, where his own grandparents had fled to during the Holocaust. Altman and his family arrived in the U.S. with very little and knowing almost no one. Some three decades later, the president of the United States nominated him to serve as a federal judge for the Southern District of Florida, where he became the youngest person ever to...

There is an irony set at the cornerstone of Jewish memory. The very texts that proclaim the Jewish people's liberation from Egypt—the Song of the Sea, the Haggadah that we recite at the Passover seder—borrow their most evocative imagery from the propaganda of our Egyptian oppressors. For instance: the phrase "mighty hand and outstretched arm," which the Torah uses to describe God's miraculous deed...

  From the moment of its founding, and, in truth, before its founding, the State of Israel has faced the determined opposition of the Arab world. The armies of five Arab nations invaded Israel the day after it declared independence in 1948. In 1967, after a similar attempt again failed, the Arab League met at Khartoum and issued the famous three no's: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel...

On February 28, 2026, Ali Khamenei was assassinated. He was killed in a joint American and Israeli airstrike, in a bunker so deep the elevator took five minutes to reach it, at a meeting with senior advisers whose location intelligence services had tracked for months. The infrastructure that made this targeted assassination possible—the human networks engaged in the patient penetration of one of t...

At 1:15 in the morning on February 28, more than 200 Israeli Air Force jets took off from bases across the region, bound for Iran. They were soon joined by American B-2 and B-1 bombers and the full weight of U.S. air and naval power in the Middle East. Not long after in Tehran, the Iranian supreme leader was dead, along with dozens of the seniormost figures in his government. Operations Epic Fury...

On February 25th, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India became the first Indian head of government to address the Knesset. It was a moment that, years ago, would have been difficult to imagine. India and Israel established full diplomatic relations only in 1992. For most of the preceding decades, India had been among Israel's harshest critics—a reflexive supporter of the Palestinian cause, a...

Israel has operated in the skies above Tehran. It has struck nuclear facilities near Baghdad and dominated the airspace of its enemies across the region. But according to a newsletter that the Israeli journalist Amit Segal sent out earlier this week, there is one city in the Middle East where the IDF cannot move freely. That city is a fifteen-minute drive from Tel Aviv, and is called Bnei Brak. On...

Recently, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Carlos Campo, president of the Museum of the Bible, joined the CEO of Tikvah, Eric Cohen, for a conversation about cherishing and strengthening America's heritage of religious freedom. They were convened by t he Levy Forum for Open Discourse, now in its fourth season, an initiative that is sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, generously fun...

In November 2025, Rod Dreher published an essay in the  Free Press , based on an earlier Substack post he'd written, about anti-Semitism on the American right. Dreher had just returned from Washington, where he'd spent several days speaking with young conservatives working in think tanks and in government. What he discovered was that a significant portion of young men on the right, perhaps as many...

On January 26, 2026, after 844 days, the body of Ran Gvili was brought home to Israel for burial. Of the hostages taken on October 7, his remains were the last still kept in Gaza. And when you factor in the hostages taken to Gaza before October 7, Gvili's return marked the first time since 2014 that no Israeli hostage or hostage remains are being held captive, to torture and torment Israelis, in t...

Tikvah has campus chapters at many colleges and universities throughout the United States, and earlier this week we welcomed over 100 delegates from over 40 chapters to our annual college conference, the Redstone Leadership Forum. The closing session at that conference brought Reverend Johnnie Moore together with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik to discuss evangelical Christians, Israel, and the Jews. Moder...

On June 22, 2025, the U.S. air force sent B2 bombers to destroy Iran's nuclear sites. Five days before that, on June 17, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, observing the extent of Israel's military operations inside of Iran and its destruction of Iran's proxy network, published an  essay  in  Mosaic with a counterintuitive argument: Israel's devastating strikes on the Islamic Republic would not lead to an...

In December 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul reached an agreement with the New York state legislature to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act, which would legalize what proponents call  "death with dignity" and what critics call physician-assisted suicide. About a dozen other states already permit doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients who request it. The state of Oregon pioneer...

In 2025, we convened about 40 new conversations, taking up the great questions of modern Jewish life—questions of war and peace, providence and civilization, memory and meaning. This year,  Mosaic 's editor Jonathan Silver spoke to military strategists, scholars of religion, writers, historians, rabbis, one Catholic priest and two Catholic theologians, and professors whose students have become sol...