The Tikvah Podcast

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 th...

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 ch...

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-tim...

In July of the year 1263, the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani met to debate the rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, sometimes known as Nachmanides, to discuss whether Jesus was the Messiah, and thus whether Christianity or Judaism had a greater claim to truth. They  conducted this debate in the court of King James of Aragon, who famously guaranteed the rabbi's freedom of speech, allowing Nachmanides to even...

Most everyone who reads it loves the book of Ruth, with its bucolic settings, its charming loves, its grace, and its devoted characters—Naomi, Boaz, and Ruth herself. Alongside that appeal, the book of Ruth also conveys truths about the human condition: about who children are and what they mean for the life of a woman, a family, and a nation; about the complementary human and divine sources of red...

Many modern movements and philosophies have invited humans to look for answers to fundamental human questions not outside of themselves—as many traditional religious forms and classical and pre-modern philosophical traditions did—but inside of themselves. This is an impulse to seek contentment through self-realization, to judge a person's inner attitudes by the extent to which they are authentic t...

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of religion. An employer can't say that he won't hire Muslims or Mormons or Jews, and he can't fire one of his employees because of their faith. But how is religion defined? Religion, after all, is both a belief and a practice. It's not only what happens in the head of the believer—it's al...

About three weeks ago, Yaakov Amidror, Israel's former national security advisor and a retired IDF major general, remarked during a radio interview that Israel must prepare for war. "It's possible," he said, "that we will reach a point where we have to attack Iran even without American assistance." Why? Iran, he explained, is relatively confident in  its regional power in light of a recent agreeme...

It's sometimes argued that, as material and political and economic conditions improve in a society, that society tends to grow less religious. Polls have seemed to demonstrate for years the validity of this argument in America. Gallup, for instance, recently found that fewer than half of all Americans belong to a house of worship or religious congregation, down from about 70% at the turn of the ce...

For patriots, patriotism, or one form of it at least, is a recognition of the obligations that flow when one recognizes all that one owes to previous generations and what they undertook and passed down. And if one wanted to inculcate that form of patriotism, how would one do it? Rick Richman has a simple and powerful answer to that question. Richman recently published  And None Shall Make Them Afr...

Earlier this month, Yuval Levin, the editor of  National Affairs,  published an op-ed in the  New York Times  entitled " The Solution to Israel's Crisis Might Be in America's Constitution ." That essay forms the point of departure for this week's discussion with Levin himself.   Levin does not, of course, think that Israel should simply adopt the American constitution, or any of its particular fea...

Nearly 75 years ago, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel's sovereignty: a renewed Jewish state, the political expression of the national home of the Jewish people, located in their ancestral homeland. Many essays and books have been published about the words Ben-Gurion spoke that day—Israel's Declaration of Independence. But the professor Neil Rogachevsky and his co-author Dov Zigl...

Part of what animates the two sides in Israel's  current judicial-reform crisis  has to do with the specific proposals that the Knesset is currently debating. But the crisis is not only   about these concrete constitutional issues. It is also a proxy for a larger cultural and sociological conflict pitting different sectors of Israeli society against one another. Critics of the proposed reforms ten...

News broke last week that China had mediated a restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Afterwards, analysts of the Middle East wondered what that means for the quiet relations that Israel and Saudi Arabia had been building recently thanks primarily to their joint opposition to Iran. Had Israeli domestic politics turned Saudi Arabia away? Did the American withdrawal from...

To understand the dramas, disagreements, and protests roiling Israeli politics at this moment requires an understanding of the government's proposed judicial reforms, as well as the history of Israel's Supreme Court and its relationship to the Knesset. It also requires knowledge of Israeli society, and how the founding generations of Israel's political leadership—which tended to be Ashkenazi, secu...

This year, Koren Publishers released a new edition of the book of Esther. It contains the complete, unabridged, and Hebrew text of Esther, the same text found in any other volume of the Hebrew Bible. But the rest of it is all new: a graphic novel version of the story illustrated by Yael Nathan and masterminded by Jordan B. Gorfinkel. Gorfinkel, known commonly as Gorf, was an editor at DC Comics fo...

One of the great debates in the history of Jewish theology is about how to reconcile two contradictory truths. First, that God is beyond human comprehension, and—unlike pagan deities—does not have a corporeal presence and is not subject to human emotions. Second, that the Hebrew Bible often describes God in human, bodily terms, as do the liturgy and rabbinic elaborations on Scripture. Thus, in one...

In the early years of the 19th century, some German scholars decided to read and analyze Jewish texts in a new way. They looked at Jewish sources through the eyes of academic scholarship, rather than with the rabbinic ones, or literary ones, or folk ones which had kept Judaism alive. Their approach came to be called, in German, Wissenschaft des Judentums —the science of Judaism—and it was to be di...

When the United States entered the Second World War, it needed to fight against both the Nazis in Europe and the Middle East and the Japanese in the Pacific. To manage that gargantuan task, American military planners divided the regions of the earth into different areas of responsibility, within which a single authority would unify and command forces from every military branch and service. That st...

"Prayer is the language of the soul in conversation with God. It is the most intimate gesture of the religious life, and the most transformative." Those lines are from an essay called "Understanding Jewish Prayer" by Jonathan Sacks, the late chief rabbi of the United Kingdom. "As the sea smooths the stone," he writes, "as the repeated hammer-blows of the sculptor shape the marble, so prayer—cyclic...

To understand the inner life of the biblical world, one must look to Egypt. In the Hebrew Bible, it plays a role in the psyche of the Jews as the great other, the great alternative. Thus, when the land of Israel suffers from famine, Egypt is a land of plenty. While the land of Israel is subject to the limits and vicissitudes of nature, the Egyptian regime is dedicated to conquering nature and over...

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—expr...

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...

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 Si...

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,...