The Tikvah Podcast

This week,  Mosaic  editor and podcast host Jonathan Silver steps into the arena of campus conflict. Alexandra Orbuch is a junior at Princeton, while Gabriel Diamond is a senior at Yale and the co-author of an essay in the New York Times  entitled "What is Happening on College Campuses is Not Free Speech." Zach Kessel recently graduated from Northwest and is a fellow at  National Review  as well a...

In the summer 2023 issue of Sapir , Roya Hakakian, an Iranian Jewish refugee to America, published an essay titled "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Idealist." Its form echoes some of the most important arguments in modern times: Edmund Burke's  Reflections on the French Revolution  was written as a letter, as was perhaps the foremost Zionist polemic in English, Hillel Halkin's  Letters to an American Je...

Compared to the United States and other great military powers, Israel has been relatively weak, relatively poor, and relatively embattled, without much space or time to incubate sophisticated military technology. Yet it has somehow become an innovator in that field. How is it that Israel has been able to turn its many limitations into assets that have helped it develop some of the most advanced de...

On October 7, Hamas terrorists recorded themselves in a state of joyous excitement to document their murder of so many Jews. But over the ensuing weeks, that emotion has given way to another emotion: pity for the Palestinians as passive victims of Israeli aggression. The men instigated this war are now seen as victims of this war, occupied, displaced, not murderers but among the murdered. That tra...

After the Hamas massacre of October 7, the Israeli military took three weeks before it responded with a ground invasion of Gaza, a span longer than most outside observers seemed to expect. What was happening? In that time, Israel's air force was softening the ground for that incursion, and giving Palestinian civilians time to vacate the battlefield. Assaf Orion, a retired IDF brigadier general and...

When Israeli officials examined shells and munitions that have been fired into Israel recently by Hamas, they realized that they look like they were not made in Gaza. Similarly, when IDF inspectors looked at some of the rocket launchers Israel captured near the Gaza border, they discovered units with the word Bang-122 written on them in Korean. Bang is evidently an abbreviation of the Korean phras...

After years of acrimony, several recent meetings between Israeli and Turkish leaders seemed to suggest the possibility of a gradual thaw in relations between the two most powerful nations in the Middle East. Such a reconciliation, combined with a growing relationship with the Arab states in the Gulf, might have firmed up an alliance structure in the region powerful enough to deter Iran and its man...

On October 6, 1973, on Yom Kippur, the forces of Egypt and Syria invaded Israel and launched the Yom Kippur War. Fifty years and one day later, Hamas terrorists invaded southwest Israel, killed some 1400 Israelis, took some 200 hostages, and, in so doing, opened up a new front in the simmering conflict that pits Iran and its supporters—China and Russia among them—against Israel and its chief suppo...

Pidyon shvuyim, the redemption and release of captives, is an old and urgent task that Jewish communities are obliged to meet. It is an obligation derived from the Hebrew Bible, developed in the writings and reflection of the rabbinic sages, and deepened and explicated in the work of Jewish medieval thinkers whose communities were situated inside Christian and Muslim host cultures. At the moment w...

Jews typically honor the dead by saying the phrase  zikhrono livrakha , "may his memory be a blessing." But when a Jew is murdered because he is a Jew, he is considered a martyr, and his name is then honored by the use of a different phrase,  hashem yikom damo, " may God avenge his blood." Today, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik joins  Mosaic  editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his 2018  essay  in  Commentar...

Sixty years ago, outlawing racial segregation was a dominant civil rights priority of liberals. Today, in the name of racial equality, many progressive thinkers and activists champion policies and actions that promote segregation. The story of how that moral transformation took place is one of the central preoccupations of the professor Yascha Mounk, the author of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ide...

Israel's success in military cyber-operations and cyber-security, from disrupting Iranian nuclear development to covert intelligence gathering, is well known. It has given birth to a cluster of companies that have made Tel Aviv a global hub for cyber-security. Alon Arvatz is CEO and co-founder of PointFive, a new cybersecurity start up based in Tel Aviv, and the author of a new book,  The Battle f...

"When a man or woman shall commit any sin that men commit, to do a trespass against the Lord, and that person be guilty; then they shall confess their sin which they have done: and he shall make restitution for this trespass in full." So reads chapter 5 from the book of Numbers. Repentance is on the Jewish mind these days. The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is called the Ten Days of Tes...

Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah, when Jewish communities celebrate the new year and, as part of this celebration, read chapter 22 of Genesis. This contains the famous story in which God asks Abraham to take his son Isaac to a mountain and offer him there as a sacrifice. What is this passage all about? What does it mean? What can be learned about Abraham, about Isaac, or about God by reading it carefu...

Last Saturday, supporters and opponents of Eritrea's president, Isaias Afwerki, confronted one another in violent clashes. Yet rather than in Asmara, Eritrea's capital city, this confrontation took place in the streets of south Tel Aviv. In the second half of the 2000s, east African migration to Israel began to accelerate. Since then, in part due to changes in labor policies and law enforcement an...

Podcast: Mordechai Kedar on the Return of Terrorism in the West Bank Since the end of the second intifada nearly twenty years ago, and the attendant calming of the West Bank, the main source of violence against Israel has been the Gaza Strip. That's involved fewer terrorists blowing themselves up in Israeli cafes and more rockets fired across the border. But over the last year the pace of terroris...

Starting in January of this year, there have been popular protests each week in Israel. On Saturday night, when Shabbat comes to a close, hundreds and thousands of people go into the streets protesting the government and its policies, chief among them judicial reform. Yet it was plain from the beginning that the protests were about more than judicial reform—that the lens of judicial reform isn't a...

In the period between 1936-1938, now known to historians as the Great Terror, Joseph Stalin oversaw the murder of over 700,000 Soviet subjects. Some of them were political rivals. Some of them held heterodox views. Some of them were merely accused of holding heterodox views. Nearly 30,000 of them were executed at two mass gravesites, Kommunarka and Butovo. Today's podcast guest recently journeyed...

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 u...

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 communi...

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 con...

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 massacr...

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, w...

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 administratio...

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 fo...