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Ruth Wisse on Grievance, Gratitude, and the Transmission of Jewish Confidence
6 november 2026 · 54 min
This has been a momentous week in American politics and, whether you cheer or mourn the results of the 2026 midterm elections, the Jewish people find themselves in a different America than they were in last week. In difficult times, there is no one better to strengthen Jewish spines than Ruth Wisse, longtime professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard, and, for the last many years, a senior distinguished fellow at Tikvah. It was earlier this year, in March, that she delivered the National Endowment for the Humanities' distinguished Jefferson Lecture. Lees meer
Professor Wisse recently sat down at the Altneu synagogue in New York City with Caroline Bryk, the co-director of Tikvah's Jewish Parents Forum. They discussed grievance and gratitude, the transmission of Jewish confidence, the relationship of Jews and America, and what Professor Wisse would have us read.
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Yehoshua Pfeffer on Haredim in the Israeli Election
30 oktober 2026 · 48 min
Israelis voted in national elections this week. There have been dozens of discussions about what the elections portend, what they reveal about the country and its future, the inadequacy of polling, the person of Benjamin Netanyahu, the political identity of Israeli Arabs, and much else. The larger question of who will form the next government remains unsettled. Lees meer
But there is one conclusion that can be drawn definitively, and it contains an interesting political puzzle. The haredi population of Israel has grown, and continues to grow, both in absolute terms and in terms relative to the rest of the country. It would follow then, that with each election their political power would grow. Yet despite being, for decades, one of the most durable and significant forces in Israeli politics, the haredi parties emerge from the October 2026 elections significantly weakened. How did this happen? And what does it show us about the state of Israel's most politically interesting demographic?
For our analysis of the Israeli election, we're looking inside the haredi bloc with Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer, who leads the Iyun Institute and chairs the rabbinic committee of Hatzibur HaHaredi, one of four new haredi parties that entered this race. Readers of Mosaic will know his important essay, "Israel's Haredim Confront the Burdens of Jewish Self-Government," which makes the case for this new party's coming into being. In conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver, he explains how the haredi parties went from kingmakers to fixed members of Netanyahu's coalition, why Shas lost so much of its traditional Mizrahi following to Likud and to Otzma Yehudit, and why, at a moment of such evident disillusionment, none of the new parties, his own included, came close to the threshold.
This conversation was recorded on October 29, before the final results were certified and before efforts to form a government have officially begun.
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Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman on Israel's Wartime Decisions
22 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 3 min
A number of books have now been written about October 7, some of them very moving, even haunting. Today's podcast focuses on a different kind of October 7 book, and this one is valuable because it is a first cut of the history of what followed October 7, and focuses on decision-making and leadership in the war Israel waged against Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran. We get to see inside the decision-making process as the military and political leaders of Israel determined who would be fought first, how, and when, and how they argued, maneuvered, and bore the weight of those consequential decisions. Lees meer
That focus invites a particular kind of reading. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides believed that the war between Athens and Sparta, for all its particularity, could instruct statesmen in the future. He called his history of the war "a possession for all time." Thucydides' method was to place before the reader the speeches and deliberations of the main actors as they happened, with imperfect information and without knowing how any campaign would turn out. A future general or statesman, pondering what he would have done in the same position, could use Thucydides' account to refine his own judgment.
Today's podcast treats the last three years of Israel's war in a similar way. Joining Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver are Yonah Jeremy Bob, senior military correspondent and intelligence analyst at the Jerusalem Post, and Elliot Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal. Their new book, In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight against Hamas and the Iranian Axis, draws on extensive access to Israel's political, military, and intelligence leadership, and to officials in the Biden and Trump administrations.
This episode takes up three of the war cabinet's decisions and tries, in each case, to understand the kind of problem the decision-makers thought they were responding to.
These decisions expose rivalries within the military establishment, that establishment's struggle with …
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Simone Rodan-Benzaquen on Why French Protesters Are Waving Palestinian Flags
16 oktober 2026 · 51 min
If you have been following the news from France over the last few weeks, you have seen the images of cities in flames and high-school students in the streets. And if you have been reading the American press, you have probably read that these protests began with teachers striking over the conditions in their schools. There are too many children in the classrooms, too few teachers, the buildings are falling apart, and it was too hot this summer to learn. All that may be true, but this account appears to leave out quite a lot about what really matters. Looking at the protests, one sees Palestinian flags, not French flags, and keffiyehs draped over the shoulders and shrouding the faces of the demonstrators. What on earth do these symbols have to do with school buildings and faculty-to-student ratios in France? Lees meer
Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and previously led the American Jewish Committee's work in Europe for many years. Earlier this month she published an essay in the Free Press called "Why France Is Burning," and recently joined the Tikvah Podcast to delve into the different forces at work.
With Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver, Rodan-Benzaquen explores the political logic of these protests, the economic reality that underlies them, the generational anxieties that are being expressed there, and why a whole amalgam of French grievances are arrayed against the Jews and the Jewish state.
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Rabbi Meir Soloveichik on "Fauda" and the Jewish Return to History
9 oktober 2026 · 42 min
Fauda is one of the most surprising and interesting success stories of the streaming age. When conventional opinion looks with such studied contempt on Jewish expressions of strength and violence for the sake of national security, Netflix somehow greenlit a show that brings unvarnished depictions of precisely that to screens across the globe. It follows a unit of Israeli counterterrorism agents who embed among Arabic-speaking adversaries to gather intelligence and neutralize threats. The show is fabulously well done. And, well before October 7, 2023, one of its narrative arcs explored the presence of Hamas operatives in and underneath a major hospital complex in Gaza. Lees meer
This week's podcast discusses the final episode of the latest season of Fauda, but not from the perspective of intelligence and counterintelligence, or from the perspective of Israeli security, or even from the perspective of the Zionist exercise of power—all of which would be worthy angles of analysis. This week, we discuss the latest season's final moments from the perspective of Jewish ritual and Jewish religious ideas
Today's guest is Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who has just published an article about Fauda in the October 2026 edition of Commentary, titled "This Is Not Fauda, This Is Real Life." We discuss the relationship of art to truth, kaddish and covenant, whether the Jewish state can ever be a normal state, operating in the normal canons of politics, and what Fauda reveals about the Jewish return to history.
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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on September 11 and October 7
2 oktober 2026 · 51 min
On September 30, 2026, a flight took off from Dubai International Airport for Tel Aviv, with 174 passengers and a crew of six. Over the skies of Saudi Arabia, Flydubai Flight 1073's first officer stabbed the captain and tried to hijack the plane in order to crash it into the earth. The plane dove from 34,000 feet to 17,000 feet in less than a minute. Lees meer
Despite suffering from stab wounds, the captain was able to unlock the cockpit door and some of the Israeli passengers on board managed to restrain the assailant, level off the plane, and treat the pilot while the plane was brought to an emergency landing. All 180 passengers and crew survived what was very nearly a catastrophic act of terrorism.
Today's conversation was recorded in the weeks between two anniversaries. September 11, 2001 is now a quarter-century behind us, and October 7, 2023 took place three years ago. For those of us old enough to remember 9/11, the weeks between these two dark days are something of a season of remembrance. That remembrance helps to put this foiled attack into perspective
Earlier this week, the assailant attempted to turn a passenger jet into a weapon, as the terrorists did on 9/11. And the people who prevented him from succeeding belong to the nation that was attacked on October 7. These two anniversaries and last week's attack are all connected—just as America (the "great Satan") and Israel (the "lesser Satan") are connected in the minds of our mutual adversaries.
They're connected in other ways, too, and how such events are remembered is the subject of this week's conversation with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a fellow at JINSA's Gemunder Center and the author of the Abrahamic Metacritique Substack. In the latest installment of his Mosaic column, Via Maris, Hussein, explored "How October 7th Inherited the Guilt of September 11th." He observes that in a growing number of quarters in American life, September 11 is remembered less as an atrocity committed against Americans than as th…
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Is Turkey the New Iran?
25 september 2026 · 1 uur 21 min
Last week Mosaic convened an important discussion about Turkey, Israel, and the Middle East, framed by the Turkish-Israeli analyst Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak's September essay, "How Turkey Is Forging a New Ring of Fire around Israel." Joining Yanarocak and Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver were the Israeli strategist Dan Schueftan, and the American Hudson Institute scholar Michael Doran. Lees meer
The day before that conversation took place, video footage emerged out of Saudi Arabia showing an intercepted drone that was aimed at Mecca. The Saudis claim that the drone was fired by the Houthis, the Iranian proxy in Yemen. And now, aside from being the holiest city in Islam, Mecca is also the name of a new defense pact that Saudi Arabia signed just over a month ago with Turkey and Pakistan.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement is modeled after NATO's Article 5, which treats an attack on one as an attack on all. The first test has arrived, and its partners offered statements of condemnation, but not much more. Turkish and Pakistani officials have told reporters that they haven't been asked for help, and that the alliance still needs to be institutionalized. Yet, as Yanarocak points out, the Mecca pact is one of several frameworks Ankara has created that by design exclude Israel. In his view, that fact, combined with the Turkish military presence in Syria, is far more disquieting than any of the inflamed rhetoric coming from Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Yanarocak thus asks us to take seriously a scenario that Bernard Lewis put to him personally, more than a decade ago: Turkey and Iran might one day exchange roles as the primary strategic threat to Israel.
This week, we bring you the full proceedings of his discussion about that question with Michael Doran and Dan Schueftan. You can also read the transcript, or watch the video, on the Mosaic website.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Marina Solovey and Leo Goldstein in honor of the yahrzeit of Isidoro Solovey (…
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Jon D. Levenson on Strangeness of Jonah
17 september 2026 · 41 min
"I cried to the Lord out of my distress, and he heard me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried and Thou didst hear my voice. For Thou didst cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all Thy billows and Thy waves passed over me." This is from the book of Jonah, and in these verses from its second chapter we find the prophet from the Galilee praying from inside a great fish that had swallowed him in the ocean. "The waters compassed me about, to the point of death;" Jonah said, "the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars closed on me forever: yet hast Thou brought up my life from the pit." Lees meer
Jonah is a short book, four chapters, and one of the most unusual in the prophetic corpus. A prophet is commanded to go and warn a great and hostile city, and instead of arguing with God, the way Moses and Jeremiah do when they are summoned to prophesy, Jonah flees in the opposite direction. He ends up in the belly of a fish, offering words of thanksgiving for a rescue that has not yet happened. When God does save him, and Jonah finally delivers his warning, the city repents completely, expressing contrition and donning sackcloth. But Jonah is disappointed that his prophecy of destruction did not come true. The book ends with God asking Jonah a question that he doesn't answer.
To try to make sense of this puzzling book, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver spoke with Jon D. Levenson, the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School.
This conversation airs just before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, when the book of Jonah is typically recited. Levenson and Silver discuss the pagan sailors on Jonah's ship who behave, by any ordinary measure, more piously than the prophet does; what it means that Jonah identifies himself to those sailors as a Hebrew, and what that word signified to them. They also address the book's satirical…
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Eliana Aiken on the Information War against the Jews
11 september 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
Even the most casual consumer of social media has noticed it. The explosion of anti-Jewish memes, videos, grotesque jokes, snickering, trolling—and, in a different register, material that is quite a bit darker—has flooded our screens. Since October 7, we've grown accustomed to talking about the rise of anti-Semitism as though it were the weather, a cloudy mood that settled over American campuses and American streets that we can describe and deplore and hope that it passes. Today's guest argues that this way of thinking misses the point entirely, because much of what looks like weather is in fact the product of arson, much of what seems like spontaneous surges in anti-Semitism is in fact the deliberate practice of information warfare by Russia, Iran, and China against the United States. Lees meer
Eliana Aiken is a policy fellow at Defense Technology Alliance, and her August essay in Mosaic explores "Anti-Semitism as Information Warfare."
The essay walks us through the machinery of this campaign in granular detail. It explains what troll farms and SIM farms are. It explains how bots manufacture the appearance of popularity. She reports on research that points toward the astroturfing of figures like Nick Fuentes, whose content is amplified at a rate no organic audience could produce.
Aiken's argument is that, in anti-Semitism, America's adversaries have found a potent tool to divide Americans, sow confusion and disorder in American society, turn Americans against one another, and distract the country from their own offensive strategic maneuvering. She discusses that argument in conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver.
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Michael Weingrad on Contemporary Israeli Poetry
4 september 2026 · 54 min
Man is a storytelling animal, and conveying the experience of the human condition in poetry and prose helps us understand and contend with it. That's true in all times and places, and it is why students of a society and its culture have much to learn from its poets. Contemporary Israel is one of the most interesting societies anywhere on earth, and its poets encompass the depth of its culture—God and man, the inescapability of war, human vices large and small. Today, we take a peek into their work. Lees meer
Making this possible is Michael Weingrad, a scholar of modern Hebrew and Jewish literature who is on the faculty of Hillsdale College, where he is helping to build a new undergraduate program in Judaism and Western Civilization. Weingrad recently founded an online publication, the New Jerusalem Review, where he publishes his translations of contemporary Hebrew verse into English. Today, he sat down with Jonathan Silver, the host of the Tikvah podcast and the editor of Mosaic, to introduce some of the most revealing selections from some of his favorite writers.
The subject is important not only because of the intrinsic value of poetry, but also because anglophone literary culture has grown hostile to Israeli and Jewish writers, especially since October 7, and the poems Weingrad translates are not the safe, well-behaved kind of poetry that makes its way into the standard anthologies. They come out of a Hebrew-language literary world that most American readers, Jewish or Gentile, have almost no access to—a world that includes religious and secular, skeptics of multilateral summits and peace processes, and even conservatives.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Kenneth Weiss in memory of his father, Eliezer Lipa ben Uri. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
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Avi Shilon on the Legacy of the Altalena
28 augustus 2026 · 53 min
By the spring of 1948, three armed Jewish militias had been fighting and working towards the birth of modern Israel. There was the Haganah, under David Ben-Gurion, which would become the core of the new Israel Defense Forces. There was the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and a smaller group, the Lehi. Begin agreed to dissolve the Irgun units operating in Israel into the new army, a decision he made in the name of national unity and cohesion even though tensions between the Irgun and the Haganah were deep, and Haganah operatives had previously informed on their counterparts in the Irgun to British officials. Even so, the Irgun had pledged to become a part of the IDF in the newly formed state of Israel. Lees meer
A month after Ben-Gurion declared independence, a ship named the Altalena set sail from France under the auspices of the Irgun, carrying rifles and some 900 immigrants, many of them survivors of the Shoah. The ship left port the same day a United Nations cease-fire took effect, a truce that barred the importation of any new arms or combatants into the country. When it reached the coast at Kfar Vitkin just north of Tel Aviv, a dispute broke out over how the weapons would be distributed, and in particular over Begin's insistence that a share go to an Irgun battalion in Jerusalem, which he argued stood outside the truce's terms since Jerusalem's status remained unsettled under the UN partition plan. The standoff turned violent onshore, and Begin ordered the ship to sail south, to Tel Aviv, in full view of the city and the international press.
Near what is today Frishman Beach, Ben-Gurion gave the order to open fire on the ship, and by this time, with Begin aboard, on his main political rival. Two officers refused before a third accepted the command. Sixteen Irgun men and three IDF soldiers were killed. And Begin, standing on the burning deck with comrades dying around him, ordered his own men not to fire back. He would repeat that order over the radio that night: never, …
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Rachel Fish on the Corruption of Jewish Studies
21 augustus 2026 · 54 min
Friends of Israel and enemies of Israel both commit the same mistake when they assume that, in American colleges and universities, the faculty hired to teach Jewish subjects are, in their own way, supportive of the Jewish state. The assumption is a reasonable one, and each side's error mirrors the other. The friends of Israel naturally suppose that academic scholars of Jewish history, Jewish thought, the history of Israel, and the arts and letters of Hebrew are there to offer context and support and are both capable of and inclined to explain Israel's case on campus. That doesn't mean that they would be expected to support any particular Israeli policy or Israeli politician or each and every maneuver of the Israeli military, but that they support Zionism in some fundamental sense. And Israel's enemies think that same thing, but of course from the opposite point of view, seeing in the entire enterprise of Jewish studies and all of its related fields and disciplines a vehicle for propaganda. It turns out that both are wrong. There's a good chance that an average member of a faculty of Jewish studies, Israel studies, Hebrew studies, or Holocaust studies holds a documented public position against Israel. Nearly four in ten of the professors specifically teaching Jewish civilization on American campuses are on the record as being hostile to Israel. Lees meer
Those data come from newly released findings of the largest audit yet undertaken of the views of professors of Jewish civilization in America, published recently by the Ronn Torossian Foundation and a publication called The Olam. The audit's own headline number is higher still—better than half, and past 70 percent at the Ivies—but that figure blends named professors together with institutional listings and petition tallies. The number above is the most important: faculty individually identified as teaching these subjects, and what they've put on the public record.
To think through what this means, Jonathan Silver, the edito…
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Rabbi Mark Dratch on Jews' Obligations to Christians in Israel
14 augustus 2026 · 51 min
Visitors to Jerusalem's Old City see a marvelous religious diversity that is unique in the contemporary Middle East, and made possible by Israeli sovereignty. For most of Jewish history, the Jewish people have lived at the mercy of other nations, and the security of Jewish communities depended on the Christian or Muslim rulers in whose lands Jews lived. But in the Old City of Jerusalem, one walks around and sees so many religious sites, Christian and Muslim, of immense theological significance, all protected by the laws and law-enforcement officers of the Jewish state. Israel's commitment to the security of Christian and Muslim sites and worshipers is, seen through the eyes of history, a breathtaking accomplishment. Lees meer
But an accomplishment of this kind is also a test. There are shocking reports of Christian worshippers and Christian clergy being harassed by Jewish Israelis. The Wall Street Journal and other outlets have recently reported on a spike of such abhorrent incidents. Israel's president, prime minister, and chief rabbis, along with several members of the Knesset and other prominent figures, have all condemned this behavior. But even if the perpetrators are not in any way representative of Israeli society as a whole, it is worth seeking to understand why these contemptible acts are happening and what they mean.
Rabbi Mark Dratch chairs the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations and has been writing about the ugly reports of spitting on Christian worshippers and on the damage and disrespect done to a Christian statue by an Israeli soldier in Lebanon. He joins the podcast today to discuss these topics with the host and editor of Mosaic Jonathan Silver. The primary subject of their conversation is not diplomacy or Israel's reputation abroad, though of course these things matter greatly. Instead, the focus of this episode is what the Jewish tradition calls hillul Hashem, desecration of God's name, and what it means for a people who spen…
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John Bursch on the Freedom to Pray at Home
7 augustus 2026 · 41 min
Traditional Jews pray in a minyan, a quorum of ten men who form the communal setting in which an individual Jew prays as a part of the Jewish people. In January of 2021, a man named Daniel Grand sent an email to some of his friends, seeing if he could organize a minyan at his home. He lives in University Heights, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, too far from his synagogue to walk on Shabbat and holidays when driving is forbidden by Jewish law. Lees meer
A neighbor saw the invitation and complained to the mayor's office, after which the city sent Grand a cease-and-desist letter. Praying with guests in his home, the city told him, made his house a place of worship, and a place of worship requires a zoning permit he did not have.
A public hearing followed, at which neighbors said, on the record, that they did not want the area known as a Jewish neighborhood. Without the proper zoning and permitting, the city arranged for police surveillance of Grand's house. His neighbors set up cameras to make sure that visitors would not come there to pray. And there was, in the fine print of the city's own code, a cruelty that reads almost like satire: had Grand actually won his permit, transforming his home into a house of worship, he and his family would have had to move, since a house of worship cannot also be a residence.
Grand sued the city, and his case was thrown out because the court held that it was not yet ripe, a legal term that refers to the fact that the local zoning board had not yet ruled against him, and was officially still considering his application. This December, the Supreme Court will consider the case of Grand v. University Heights.
To discuss this case, Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic and host of the Tikvah podcast, is joined by John Bursch, who is one of the attorneys representing Grand. Bursch is senior counsel and vice-president of appellate advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom and a veteran of many oral arguments before the Supreme Court, and formerly ser…
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Dan Schueftan on Israel's Doctrine of Preventive Violence
31 juli 2026 · 44 min
For half a century, Israel treated its adversaries as if their intentions could be tracked and might change according to circumstances. With the states surrounding it, that assumption largely held: Egypt, for instance, signed a peace treaty and kept it, whatever else occurred in the region. But with the radical forces that Iran built around Israel in the years before October 7, that same assumption proved catastrophic. Hamas, Hizballah, the Houthis, and the militias in Syria and Iraq do not vary in their commitment to Israel's destruction. What varies is only their capability. And so Israel has been forced to exchange a doctrine built on monitoring intention for one built on continually destroying capability, whatever the diplomatic cost, wherever preparations for war are found. Today's guest, Dan Schueftan, calls this doctrine preventive violence, or simply, violent maintenance. Lees meer
Schueftan is the director of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa. In conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver, he lays out this doctrine, its roots, and the circumstances that forced Israel to adopt it. He then offers a threat assessment of Iran's proxy network as it stands today: in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq—before turning to the sepearate question of Turkey.
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Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin on the Legacy of Masada
24 juli 2026 · 30 min
In the spring of the year 73, after Jerusalem had already fallen to Roman forces, 960 Jews atop a desert fortress chose death by their own hand rather than surrender. We know the story because of Josephus, the 1st-century Jewish historian and former rebel commander who turned chronicler of the very revolt he had once been a part of. Lees meer
Yesterday was Tisha b'Av, which commemorates the destruction of the two Temples. Josephus records another catastrophe: Masada, the last stand of the Sicarii, the most militant faction of the Jewish rebels, against Rome, and a mass suicide that Jewish tradition has argued over ever since. Was it heroism? Was it madness? Should the Jews of Masada instead have followed in the path chosen by Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and the sages at Yavneh—accommodating the enemy to preserve the Torah?
This week's podcast is an episode of The Pillars, a series produced by the Lobel Center for Jewish Classical Education and hosted by Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin. In this episode, Rabbi Rocklin takes up Josephus's account directly—what it asks of us, what the rabbis made of it, and what it has come to mean for the modern state of Israel. The episode first aired this past March, but its questions are the questions Jews are reflecting on during this week in the liturgical calendar, about the demands of Jewish sovereignty and God's providence in history.
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Ari Lamm on Chosenness
17 juli 2026 · 1 uur 9 min
This week, Rabbi Ari Lamm joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss the biblical idea of election or chosenness. Rabbi Lamm has argued that Genesis itself is a long sequence of choosing and rejection—Adam over the animals, Abel over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau—and that the Bible never once tells us why. We learn how God assesses a life after the fact; we are never shown the reasoning behind the choice itself. One midrash even imagines Abraham chosen by lottery. Rabbi Lamm suggests that this silence is deliberate: chosenness is a mystery, an acknowledgment of the limitations of human understanding. Lees meer
Naturally, the subject of chosenness has long been discussed within the Jewish tradition, and Rabbi Lamm focuses on the debate between Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides about whether divine election is earned or something carried through inheritance.
With this in mind, the conversation turns to the theological puzzle facing 17th-century English Christians: should Israel in Scripture be understood as the church or as the actual, literal, Jewish people? And once some concluded it meant the latter, an old theological problem became a new and productive one. Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, the great Amsterdam sage at the center of that story, offered European thinkers a way to hold Jewish particularity and universal natural law together rather than against each other, and in doing so shaped the political thought of a nation. The conversation expands on themes Rabbi Lamm explored in his 2025 Sapir essay, "The Rebirth of Chosenness."
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Celine and Kenneth Weiss in memory of their parents. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
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George Deek on Israel's Relationship with the Christian World
9 juli 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
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 for safety reasons from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; a nun was assaulted in Jerusalem; and videos of Jewish Israelis despicably spitting on Christians have gone viral on social media. There are not very many of these incidents, thankfully, but each and every one does enormous damage to Israel's standing and contradicts all of the good work that Israel does to keep its Christian minority safe. Aside from the publicity problems that they create, these incidents (with the exception of the protective measures that kept worshippers from Jerusalem's holy places during a ballistic-missile attack) are in and of themselves wrong. That's why they've been so roundly condemned by the highest levels of Israeli government, including by Prime Minister Netanyahu. In response, the foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar has appointed one person to mediate Israel's relationship with the Christian world as a full-time charge. Lees meer
That person is George Deek, a veteran Israeli diplomat, an Arab Christian whose family has lived in Jaffa for hundreds of years, and the first Christian in Israel's history to reach ambassadorial rank, serving in Nigeria, Norway, and finally Azerbaijan before assuming this post.
In today's podcast, Ambassador Deek addresses those incidents directly, distinguishing isolated wrongdoing from patterns that demand real institutional response. He lays out an argument about why Israel's bond with the Christian world is simultaneously theological and strategic and delineates his strategy in relation to the major cultural crises of our moment: that the Middle East is losing its ancie…
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Michael Doran and Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on Power, Ideology, and Understanding the Middle East
26 juni 2026 · 40 min
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 relationships that tell you everything essential that you need to know. Another recommends studying the cultures and dominant ideas that constitute the spirit of a given regime—to try to understand the way a nation will behave based on what it loves, what it honors, and how it understands itself. Lees meer
Of course, ideally you would want to understand both. This week, I'm bringing together two of the most sophisticated, interesting analysts of the Middle East to discuss how they approach the region.
When Michael Doran looks at the Middle East, he focuses relative power. Doing so gives him the ability to separate the signal from the noise. The vitality of theological disputes and national cultures is constrained by the ability of the state to deploy force, whether in Iran, Egypt, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia. When Hussein Aboubakr Mansour looks at the Middle East, by contrast, he sees a set of ideologies whose provenance he traces back to European philosophy.
How do these two angles of vision relate to one another, and what does each offer? And what do they reflect back to us about America and the West?
Michael Doran is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute, and host, together with Gadi Taub, of the podcast Israel Update, which is cosponsored by Hudson and Tablet.
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is a fellow at JINSA's Gemunder Center, a columnist at Mosaic, and the author of the Abrahamic Metacritique on Substack.
This conversation was recorded live in front of an audience of elite undergraduates, participating in this y…
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David Arnovitz on the Tanakh of the Land of Israel
19 juni 2026 · 45 min
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: its archaeology and geography, the languages and the treaties and the pantheon of gods of the tribes and nations and empires among whom Israel was situated. In its modest form, the claim behind all this is one almost no one would dispute: to know the world a text came from can help you understand the text better. Lees meer
But a less modest claim is folded inside the modest one. For roughly two centuries, the academic study of the Bible used much of this same material—archaeology, comparisons with other sources from the ancient Near East—to take the text apart: to dissolve it into sources and redactors, to historicize revelation until what remained was an artifact of clumsy human pastiche. This series takes up the same tools and turns them to the opposite purpose. Here the history does not dissolve the text. It mediates the text, and more intimate knowledge of the ancient world carries the reader toward the integrity of the Tanakh, rather than away from it. The instruments that an earlier generation of scholars deployed to disenchant the Hebrew Bible are, in this series, put into the service of reading it with intellectual and religious integrity.
And, now that Koren has published all five volumes of the Humash (the Five Books of Moses), as well as the books of Samuel, something else becomes clear. Proximity to the Land of Israel itself helps to open up the meaning of the text. If knowing how a field was watered, or how a city withstood a siege, brings the verse nearer, then the return to the Land of Israel is not only a political restoration. It is also a condition for reading our s…
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Mike Pence and Eric Cohen on What It Means to Be Endowed with Natural Rights
12 juni 2026 · 49 min
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 markets, and honorable leadership, and sending them out to advance the cause of a free society in their communities and around the world. Lees meer
The conversation opens where so much American reflection on these questions begins, with George Washington's letters to the Jews of Newport and Savannah—the promise of religious liberty on the one hand, and the vision of America as a providential, almost-chosen nation on the other. Those two ideas do not sit together easily, and Cohen and the vice-president think together about what they mean and how they relate: the biblical sources of the founding, the place of Scripture in American education, the case for school choice and the renewal of the universities, and the meaning of federalism in the conservative project.
At the heart of this conversation is a fascinating discussion about American expressions of Christianity. Cohen, speaking as a religious Jew, believes that the strengthening of American Christianity is the surest hope for American renewal, and he also warns that a strain of anti-Semitism now gathering strength on the political right would turn that Christianity to perverse ends. To these comments Vice-President Pence adds his reflections about religious culture, and together, Cohen and Pence arrive at a description of a Hebraic Christianity and a Hebraic America—a country that understands the Hebrew Bible not as an atavistic relic, but as the foundation it has in fact always been.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jessica and PJ Heyer. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podca…
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Mark Gottlieb and Shilo Brooks on Why Reading Matters
5 juni 2026 · 1 uur 3 min
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 been assigned a full book in high school. Lees meer
At Tikvah we work with hundreds of educators, and they have observed that it's not only the skill of reading that is in decline; it's also the culture around reading, the patience and attention and habits of the mind that really important books demand.
That is where Rabbi Mark Gottlieb begins the conversation you are about to hear. Rabbi Gottlieb has been a guest on the Tikvah Podcast before. He is a senior adviser and treasured colleague at Tikvah, and the head of school at the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson School in Las Vegas, Nevada.
At the most recent Marom conference, the annual Tikvah gathering of Jewish day-school leaders, he sat down with Shilo Brooks for a session called "A Republic of Readers: Why Great Books Make Good Citizens." Dr. Brooks runs the George W. Bush Presidential Center and hosts the Free Press podcast Old School. He is also living proof of the stakes. As he tells it, the great books did not merely educate him. They saved his life.
Tikvah does not want simply want to air complaints about how the culture of reading has eroded, but to do something about it. This summer, Tikvah Online Academy is running a series of book-clubs for rising sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, live over Zoom. They will tackle The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Phantom Tollbooth, Tom Sawyer, The Life of Frederick Douglass, and more. Applications are open now at Tikvah.org/TOA.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Ilene and David Siscovick and family. If you are interested in sponsoring…
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Ryan McBeth on Why the U.S. Doesn't (Yet) Have a Munitions Crisis
29 mei 2026 · 45 min
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 book, a specific article of clothing in a specific size, same-day delivery of kosher pastrami from Costco. Americans are now used to getting what they want, when they want it, with very little delay. Lees meer
That's because the interpretation of vast amounts of data has already told retailers that a person is likely to want diapers and baby formula, or the new Winston Churchill biography, or, having bought a new phone, an extra phone charger, already prepositioned in nearby warehouses, just waiting for someone to want it and press "ship."
As a result, it's hard for us to understand intuitively why some things take time to manufacture, and why, when we read reports of missile and interceptor stockpiles, the American military, with all its might, can't just order up another arsenal and have it at the ready. After this spring's combat operations against Iran, the U.S. has used up a lot of missiles.
Here are some numbers, drawn from analysis published this spring by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In the course of Operation Epic Fury, the United States fired over 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles from a prewar inventory of approximately 3,100. Recent annual production is less than 200, and replacement is not projected until late 2030.
Up to 1,430 Patriot interceptors were expended from a prewar inventory of roughly 2,330, at a production rate of 650 per year—half of which go to allied nations.
And 290 of America's 360 interceptors for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense—the most advanced missile-defense system we field, known as THAAD—were fired. We produce about 96 …
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Religion, the Defense of Western Civilization, and the Assault on the Jews
21 mei 2026 · 48 min
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 addressed to her pinned to his chest with a knife, she has lived under security protection. Lees meer
She is the author of several books, among them Infidel, her memoir, and Heretic, in which she argued that Islam requires a reformation from within if it is to be compatible with liberal democratic civilization. For twenty years she was among the world's most prominent atheists—not merely in her personal convictions but in her public arguments, which held that reason and individual freedom were incompatible with religious submission of any kind.
In November of 2023, she announced that she had become a Christian.
That announcement, and the essay she wrote explaining it, raised one of the most searching questions in contemporary intellectual life: what does a civilization require in order to defend itself, and can secular liberalism supply it?
This week, Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins the Tikvah Podcast to discuss her diagnosis of what political Islam is doing to Europe and to America—a diagnosis that has only sharpened since October 7—and her argument that the assault on Jews and Jewish life is not merely a Jewish problem but a leading indicator of a broader civilizational vulnerability.
This conversation was recorded live before members of the Tikvah Society in New York City. If you'd like information about joining the Tikvah Society, write to us at society@tikvah.org and we'll get right back to you.
This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin and family. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to…
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Tevi Troy on America's National Shabbat
14 mei 2026 · 28 min
On May 4, President Trump issued a proclamation which reads: Lees meer
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 in gratitude for our great Nation. This day will recognize the sacred Jewish tradition of setting aside time for rest, reflection, and gratitude to the Almighty.
It is worth pausing on what an astonishing thing that is.
For most of Jewish history, when the most powerful ruler in the world turned his attention to the Jews, it was not to encourage their devotion to Jewish law. It was to constrain the Jews, to tax them, to suppress them, to expel them, or to put an end to the miraculous story of the Jews in history. So did Pharaoh, Antiochus, Hadrian, the kings of England and Spain, and the tsars. Even more benign monarchs—the Habsburg emperors, or Napoleon—conditioned the protections of civic life on the Jews giving up some of their distinctiveness.
America is exceptional. And now, in the year of America's 250th birthday, the incumbent of the most powerful office on earth has issued a formal proclamation encouraging the Jews to be more Jewish.
To discuss this momentous occurrence, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the historian, writer, former government official, and Washington insider Tevi Troy, who recently wrote an article titled, "A National Sabbath for American Jews." The article appeared on May 14, 2026 in the Wall Street Journal, and is the point of departure for today's discussion.
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Kassy Akiva on Conversion after October 7
8 mei 2026 · 56 min
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, accept the covenant. Ruth is a more intimate counterpart: a tale of one woman, at the lowest possible moment, with every worldly reason to return to the clan of her birth, who decides instead to join the same covenant. "Your people shall be my people," she says to Naomi, "and your God shall be my God." Ruth was not drawn toward the Jewish people at their moment of triumph but in her and her chosen family's hour of despair. Lees meer
That tension, between being drawn to Judaism and being pushed toward it, between choosing a people and being chosen, is at the heart of today's conversation with the Daily Wire reporter and video journalist Kassy Akiva, who converted to Judaism in April 2023. In an essay in the October 2024 issue of Commentary—written while she was a Tikvah Krauthammer fellow—Akiva reflected on the long road that brought her to Judaism: the hate mail, the death threats, the stalker who went to federal prison, the years of traveling to Israel before she was Jewish, the beit din, the seminary in Jerusalem, the mikveh. The essay, titled "Anti-Semitism Helped Make Me a Jew," was composed in the immediate aftermath of October 7, not long after a visit to the Gaza border. The intensity of that moment was bound up with her conversion.
We are now a few years further on. The vicious anti-Israel activism that followed in the wake of Hamas's attack on southern Israel has not dissappeared, but it has, for many, settled into something less acute. In that context, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Siliver has invited Akiva to return to that essay and its argument, and to discuss whether anti-…
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Dr. Raphael BenLevi on Ending U.S. Aid to Israel
1 mei 2026 · 1 uur 4 min
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 regional balance of power, but in the nature of the American-Israeli relationship itself. For decades, that relationship had been structured as a powerful patron supporting a dependent client. What the Iran war suggested to some observers is that Israel has—at least in part—outgrown that structure. Lees meer
That is the backdrop for a debate that is now live in both Jerusalem and Washington: what should American military aid to Israel look like when the current memorandum of understanding between the two countries expires in 2028? The U.S. currently provides Israel with approximately $3.5 billion annually in grants, earmarked for the purchase of American-made military equipment—an arrangement that dates to the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War and that has been renewed, and periodically enlarged, ever since. For most of that period, the case for the aid seemed self-evident. First the Arab states, and then Iran and its proxies, were actively threatening Israel's existence. American military and diplomatic support was an indispensable buttress of Israel's security. Whether that case remains self-evident today, in the wake of a war that has significantly diminished Iranian capabilities, is now a serious question being debated by Israelis and Americans of good faith, with thoughtful arguments on multiple sides.
In this episode, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver speaks with a proud Israeli patriot who has been making the case for ending American aid for some time. Dr. Raphael BenLevi is a senior fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, director of the Chu…
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Jesse Arm on Michigan Democrats' Islamism Problem
24 april 2026 · 55 min
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. Lees meer
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 unnamed, accommodated, and finally normalized. And it is a story with major national implications.
Muslim Americans serve in the U.S. military, teach in schools, build businesses, raise families, and love this country. Presumably, most Muslim citizens of America see their futures as bound up with the future of this republic, with no sympathy for those who would undermine it. But a radical Islamic political ideology has taken hold in specific institutions, among them the Michigan Democratic party.
In March of this year, a Hizballah-inspired attacker drove a truck into the largest Reform synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, when over a hundred children were inside. Two weeks later, the Michigan Democrats held their statewide convention, and the incumbent Jewish regent of the University of Michigan—a man whose home had been attacked, whose family had been terrorized—was denied renomination and replaced by a Dearborn attorney who had praised Hizballah on social media. The leading candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination excused the synagogue attacker. And the pro-Israel Senate candidate was booed by delegates when she addressed the Jewish Voters Caucus.
To discuss this growing threat, our guest this week is Jesse Arm, who grew up in West Bloomfield and is now a vice-president at the Manhattan Institute.
This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin and family. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
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Roy Altman on Why Educated Young People Believe Lies about Israel
17 april 2026 · 46 min
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 hold that position. Being an American has been, he says, among the great blessings of his life; a blessing he repaid in public service. Lees meer
Then came October 7. And what disturbed him was not only the massacre itself but the reaction in Western media, on college campuses, in institutions that he had assumed shared his most basic commitments. He found it, he says, first ridiculous, then disconcerting, and ultimately shocking. He set out to understand this reaction and then, as best he could, to counter it.
The result is a new book called Israel on Trial, in which Judge Altman applies the methodology of the federal courtroom to the six most common legal charges leveled against the Jewish state: colonialism, illegitimate founding, blocking Palestinian statehood, illegally occupying Gaza, apartheid, and genocide.
In this episode, Altman discusses the book with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver. Their conversation ranges beyond the book's core argument, paying particular attention to something Judge Altman observed about the 50 college and law-school campuses he has visited since October 7, something that points beyond a pathology specific to Israel to a broader crisis in American intellectual and moral life. Judge Altman has a striking way of evoking that crisis, rooted in his daily experience watching ordinary jurors reason their way to correct verdicts while educated young Americans somehow cannot reason their way through the difference between civilization and barbarism.
This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin and family. If y…
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Joshua Berman on How the Exodus Story Turns Egyptian Imagery on Its Head
27 maart 2026 · 41 min
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 deeds, appears hundreds of times in the royal inscriptions of the Egyptian New Kingdom, applied to the pharaoh himself. The Torah doesn't just recount the Hebrew slaves' deliverance from Egypt. The Torah took Egyptian language, Egyptian symbols, and even Egypt's greatest military triumph, and turned it all inside out. Lees meer
This is the argument that the Bar-Ilan University Bible professor Joshua Berman has been developing for years, including in the pages of Mosaic. And that insight now resides at the center of his new Haggadah, lavishly illustrated with hieroglyphics, photos, and sketches that situate the Passover seder in the historical setting from which the Hebrew slaves escaped. Rabbi Berman joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss the book, and the argument that underlies it.
This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin and family. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
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Hussain Abdul-Hussain on the Arab Case for Israel
20 maart 2026 · 54 min
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, no negotiation with Israel. Terrorism, war, and boycott followed across the decades—the PLO, the intifadas, the missile campaigns, and the Iranian proxy network that exploited Arab grievance and stretched from Lebanon to Gaza to Yemen, and whose efforts came to a gruesome crescendo on October 7, 2023. Arab opposition to Israel has been, for most of the past century, an organizing principle of Arab political life. It was the cause around which governments mobilized populations, and around which Palestinians built an identity. Lees meer
And so it is genuinely remarkable when a man who grew up inside that world, who absorbed its assumptions as a child, who knows its arguments from the inside, sits down and writes a book called The Arab Case for Israel.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain was born in Iraq, raised in Lebanon, and serves as a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. On this episode, he joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss The Arab Case for Israel.
This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin and family. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
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Yonah Jeremy Bob on the Mossad's Secret War on Iran
13 maart 2026 · 46 min
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 the most hostile intelligence environments on earth—had been built over more than two decades. Today, Yonah Jeremy Bob joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to delve into how the Mossad build that infrastructure. Lees meer
Bob is the senior military and intelligence analyst for the Jerusalem Post and has deep access to the Israeli intelligence community. His book Target Tehran, co-authored with Ilan Evyatar and published by Simon & Schuster in 2023, was named a top book of the year by the Wall Street Journal. When Prime Minister Netanyahu was photographed in his war room during Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, a copy of Target Tehran was visible on the table in front of him. Bob also has a forthcoming book with the Wall Street Journal's Elliot Kaufman, titled In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis.
Before the airstrikes, there was a decades-long effort to recruit agents inside the nuclear program, to infiltrate Iran's supply chains, and to track and, when necessary, to assassinate the Iranian officials and weapons producers who posed the greatest threat to Israel and America. This episode examines three operations in depth—the 2018 theft of Iran's nuclear archive, the assassination of the weapons-program chief Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and the infiltration of the supply chain for the Natanz nuclear complex—and asks what Israeli human intelligence is contributing to Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury.
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin and Family. If you are interested in sponsoring …
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Mike Pompeo and Michael Doran on the Iran War
6 maart 2026 · 48 min
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 and Roaring Lion had begun. Lees meer
Five days later, the Iranian missile arsenal is measurably degraded, the regime is in a succession crisis, Hizballah has entered the war from Lebanon, Kurdish forces have crossed the border from Iraq, a U.S. submarine has sunk an Iranian frigate in the Indian Ocean, and the Strait of Hormuz has effectively been closed to tanker traffic. The Middle East is in a different place than it was a week ago.
On March 4, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver convened two trusted experts to discuss the context and strategic underpinning of these events: the theory of the campaign, what comes next inside Iran, and what this moment means for American power and the American right. Those experts were Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and the former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo. The conversation, broadcast live over Zoom for members of the Tikvah community, is this week's podcast.
This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Julie Goldberg-Botvin in honor of the IDF and all the brave soldiers who are defending our country and the Jewish people all over the world. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
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Bill Drexel on Narendra Modi's Visit to Israel
27 februari 2026 · 34 min
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 country whose leaders looked on the Jewish state with suspicion or contempt. Lees meer
Something has changed. And Prime Minister Modi's speech in Jerusalem made clear just how much.
Standing before the Knesset, Modi opened by describing himself as "a representative of one ancient civilization addressing another." He noted that he was born on September 17, 1950, the very day India formally recognized the state of Israel. He expressed condolences for the victims of October 7, condemned Hamas's attack as "barbaric," and declared that "no cause can justify the murder of civilians." He called Israel "a protective wall against barbarism." And in language that echoed Prime Minister Netanyahu's own, he told the assembled lawmakers: "The massacre of October 7 made it absolutely clear—either the jihadist axis of evil will break us, or we will break it. And we are breaking it—and will break it." He closed with two phrases that belong to two civilizations, and that he offered as a single statement: Am Yisrael Hai. Jai Hind. The people of Israel live, in Hebrew, and Hail India, in Hindi.
We recorded this conversation on the afternoon of February 25, as Modi was departing from the Knesset. To discuss the visit and its significance, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Bill Drexel, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute whose work focuses on U.S.-India relations, artificial-intelligence competition with China, and technology in American grand strategy.
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jessica and PJ Heyer. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of…
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Yehoshua Pfeffer on the Causes of the Bnei Brak Draft Riot
20 februari 2026 · 48 min
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. Lees meer
On February 15, two female soldiers from the IDF's Education and Youth Corps arrived in this densely populated haredi city for a routine visit to a draftee ahead of his induction. A local resident called a hotline run by the Jerusalem Faction—an anti-conscription group—and falsely reported that military police were distributing draft notices. A mob of hundreds materialized, surrounded the soldiers, chased them through the streets, and forced them to hide until police arrived to rescue them. A patrol car was overturned. A police motorcycle was set on fire. Twenty-six were arrested; most were released by nightfall.
Israeli leaders across the political spectrum condemned the violence as the provocation of extremists. But whether they support the rioters or not, most of the Jews of Bnei Brak see the draft as an existential threat to their way of life. It's just that the extremists are willing to say so with violence.
For the past two years, pressed by the Supreme Court and by growing public resentment, the government has been trying to legislate a resolution to the question of haredi military service. Some 80,000 haredi men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four are currently eligible for conscription but have not enlisted. A bill now moving through the Knesset would set enlistment targets, grant continued deferments to full-time yeshiva students, and impose penalties that critics—including the government's own legal advisers — say will produce no meaningful increase in enlistment. The haredi parties have threatened to block the 2026 state budget unless the bill passes.…
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Meir Soloveichik and Carlos Campo on Strengthening Religious Freedom in America
13 februari 2026 · 1 uur 5 min
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 the Levy Forum for Open Discourse, now in its fourth season, an initiative that is sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, generously funded by Paul and Karen Levy, and hosted by the Palm Beach Synagogue. More information about Levy Forum programs and video recordings can be found at https://goacta.org. This week, we're sharing a special broadcast of this important conversation, which delves into who we are as Americans, the country's biblical heritage, and what it means to be a covenantal nation. Lees meer
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Steve and Deborah Kleinman in memory of Steve's grandmother, Gittel Fox. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
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Rod Dreher on the American Right's Anti-Semitism Problem
5 februari 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
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 as 30 or 40 percent, expressed sympathy for Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist podcaster who denies the Holocaust and openly attacks Jewish institutions and Jewish people. Lees meer
The trigger for Dreher's reporting was an interview of Fuentes in late October by another media personality, Tucker Carlson. Having watched that interview, Dreher witnessed what he called a Rubicon-crossing moment: the most influential conservative media figure in America giving a remarkably soft platform to someone who has praised Hitler and has made all manner of psychotic claims about the Jewish people. Dreher had considered Carlson a friend. That friendship ended when he called him out over the Fuentes interview.
Dreher's voice is particularly important because he speaks from deep within the world of American Christian conservatism. He is the author of The Benedict Option, a defining text for thinking about Christian cultural withdrawal, published in 2017. He has also written extensively about his own conversion to Orthodoxy, and has spent much of his career reporting on the institutional health of American Christianity. So when he sounds an alarm, as he does in this conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver, about anti-Semitism spreading among young Christian conservatives, Jews should listen.
This conversation was recorded in December, with Dreher in Budapest, where he now lives.
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Ilya Shapiro, constitutional scholar at the Manhattan Institute. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you…
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Russ Roberts on the Return of Ran Gvili
30 januari 2026 · 42 min
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 the Gaza Strip. Lees meer
The operation to recover him involved hundreds of soldiers, excavators, and dentists who examined hundreds bodies in a Gazan cemetery. When they found him, the soldiers gathered and sang the song Ani Ma'amin—arms around each other, voices rising together—"I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the messiah, and even though he may tarry, I will wait for him every day."
It's a song that Jews sang walking to the gas chambers during the Shoah. But there's something in that song, in its very structure, that speaks to how the Israeli soldiers experienced this moment.
Ani Ma'amin contains within it the hope for the eventual coming of the messiah, yes, but also the sober recognition that right now we live in pre-messianic times. Not outside of history, but within it. The soldiers singing that song were acknowledging that the relief and closure they felt was not an escapist delusion that they had suddently entered a new phase of history, or that, with the outbreak of peace, history had ended. No, while we hope one day to be at peace, we understand that this tragedy, and the hard-won deliverance that followed, occurred in history. The end of days is coming—but not yet. It was a note of hope and sobriety uttered by a war-weary army.
For two years, yellow ribbons hung from every street sign and telephone pole in Israel. Empty chairs stood at tables in restaurants and homes. The hostages were present in daily Israeli consciousness in ways that are difficult to convey to those who weren't there.
What can we learn about Israeli society from the psychic and socia…
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Johnnie Moore and Meir Soloveichik on Jews, Evangelicals, and Israel
23 januari 2026 · 51 min
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. Moderating their discussion was Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic. A recording of that live conversation is our broadcast this week. Lees meer
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jessica and PJ Heyer. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on Why Saudi Arabia Is Moving Away from Israel
16 januari 2026 · 46 min
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 Arab embrace of the Jewish state. Most observers assumed the opposite, that weakening Iran would accelerate normalization and that gratitude and commercial interests would drive the Gulf states closer to Jerusalem. Mansour argued instead that removing the Iranian threat would reduce the incentives for the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel. Lees meer
Seven months later, Mansour has written a follow-up analysis showing that recent events have borne out his thesis—and indeed exceeded his cautious predictions. Saudi Arabia hasn't just declined to normalize with Israel. It has launched an aggressive regional repositioning campaign, weaponizing anti-Zionism as a competitive instrument against the first Abraham Accords signatory, the United Arab Emirates.
Mansour's latest piece, published this week in his Abrahamic Metacritique Substack, proposes a new way to grapple with the reality of two major changes that are decisively shaping regional dynamics: first, the dismantling of Iran's axis of resistance, and second, the changing nature of America's role in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel now each conduct foreign policy in order to optimize their particular national advantages with neither a dominant common adversary, as Iran was, nor the common umbrella of American leadership.
Under these circumstances, Mansour argues, anti-Zionism will remain strategically useful and even grow in its political utility. He discusses all of this with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver.
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by David Bradlow. If you a…
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Aaron Rothstein on the Medical Aid in Dying Act
9 januari 2026 · 44 min
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 pioneered this practice in 1994 and it has since spread across the Western world. Lees meer
Now, there are people who have an ailing parent or grandparent or, God forbid, a child who is genuinely suffering—suffering in agonizing ways that make the cessation of that suffering seem like the only humane response. It would be inhuman not to acknowledge the enormous emotional, psychological, and physical burdens of that pain, or to minimize it.
But the question of physician-assisted suicide ultimately is one about medical ethics as upheld by the physician, the distorting market effects of this practice, and social policy. What happens when the state makes it possible for large numbers of people to receive this option from the very person whose profession calls on him to heal and not harm? What happens to the moral foundations of our culture when assisted death becomes something we learn to abide?
The evidence from places like Canada and the Netherlands begins to answer those questions in deeply disturbing ways. What started as a carefully limited option for the terminally ill has expanded dramatically. In Canada, deaths from medically assisted dying rose from 4,480 in 2018 to over 10,000 in 2021—and by 2022 accounted for 4 percent of all deaths in the country. Patients are now approved for reasons of poverty, loneliness, and mental illness. Veterans seeking PTSD treatment are sometimes offered death instead.
The physician and educator Leon Kass warned nearly 30 years ago that once we break the ancient taboo against doctors killing patients, the practice would prove "in principle unregulable.…
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Our Favorite Episodes of 2025
2 januari 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
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 soldiers. The conversations ranged from urgent tactical questions facing Israeli commanders to the enduring theological debates that have shaped Western civilization. Lees meer
The most dramatic event of 2025 came in June, when American B-2 bombers struck three nuclear sites in Iran, neutralizing the Islamic Republic's nuclear-weapons program in what came to be known as Operation Midnight Hammer. This followed a coordinated Israeli-American campaign that, in twelve days, fundamentally altered the strategic landscape of the Middle East. By October, a fragile ceasefire had taken hold in Gaza, though the questions of what comes next—for the tunnels beneath Gaza, for the Palestinian national movement, for regional order—remained unresolved.
The year also brought loss. In April, Pope Francis died after a prolonged illness, prompting reflection on the state of Jewish-Catholic relations and the church's posture toward Israel and the Jewish people. And in December, Norman Podhoretz, the great editor and defender of America and Israel, died at the age of ninety-five.
Meanwhile, a disturbing season of anti-Semitic violence descended upon American Jews. Arson attacks, shootings, and other forms of terrorism made clear that the ideological ferment on campuses and in progressive circles had transformed into something more dangerous. Jewish students looked to their institutions for strength and clarity, and the results were mixed at best.
Through it all, we asked: what does Israel's war reveal about providence and Jewish history? What does it mean to teach the Iliad to students who themselves are …
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Ruth Wisse on Norman Podhoretz
26 december 2025 · 1 uur
Norman Podhoretz, z"l, died on December 16 at the age of ninety-five. For more than three decades, he served as editor of Commentary, transforming it into what Irving Kristol deemed the most influential magazine in Jewish history. He was a literary critic, a political essayist, and one of the fathers of the orientation toward public affairs that came to be known as neoconservatism. In 2004, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Lees meer
What fueled these accomplishments —his books, his essays, his editing —was a commitment to tell the truth, however unpopular, and to defend the things he loved, however much it cost him. Norman Podhoretz loved America. He believed in the justice of Israel. He was grateful to have been acculturated into the civilizing traditions of the West. And he was willing to break ranks and turn friends into ex-friends in order to defend all three.
On this episode, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Ruth Wisse to pay tribute to this great American, and to examine his legacy. Ruth Wisse is one of the longest-tenured regular contributors to Commentary and, after a career at McGill and Harvard, is now a senior fellow at Tikvah.
We live in a moment when moral confidence is in short supply, when our institutions betray their animating purposes, and when social-media cleverness and clickbait substitute for serious thinking. Norman Podhoretz was different and his example can show us a better way to think and to argue; and because we live in a democratic country that requires us to persuade our compatriots, in helping us think and argue differently he can help us meet the challenges of democratic citizenship as Jews and as Americans.
This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Richard Moldawsky in memory of Martin Moldawsky. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
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Rabbi Ben Elton on Australian Jewry after Bondi Beach
18 december 2025 · 47 min
On the evening of December 14, 2025—the first night of Hanukkah—Rabbi Benjamin Elton was driving home from performing a wedding, looking forward to lighting candles with his family. Then his phone began to explode with messages. There were gunmen at Bondi Beach. His wife and children were in lockdown at a nearby event. Names of the dead were coming through—colleagues, community members. For several terrible minutes, he couldn't reach his wife. And he wondered whether he was going to come home to find that he had lost his family. Lees meer
By the time the shooting stopped, fifteen people were dead, among them two rabbis, an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor, and a ten-year-old girl. They had been gunned down at a public Hanukkah celebration on one of Australia's most iconic beaches, before a large crowd of Jews who had gathered to light the menorah in the open air—because that's what confident, integrated diaspora communities do.
The massacre at Bondi Beach was the culmination of two years of escalating anti-Semitism that the community had been warning about since October 7. Synagogues firebombed with congregants inside. Cars set ablaze in Jewish neighborhoods. Swastikas painted on schools and daycares. Weekly pro-Palestinian marches past synagogues, with chants of "globalize the intifada." A van discovered full of explosives along with a list of the addresses of Jewish institutions. And through it all, a government that offered sympathy and money for security, but never quite confronted the deeper problem. Until, finally, the community's darkest warnings came true.
Rabbi Benjamin Elton is the chief minister of the Great Synagogue in Sydney—Australia's oldest Jewish congregation, founded in the 1820s, whose pulpit has traditionally made its occupant a primary representative of Judaism to the wider society. He holds a PhD in Jewish history from the University of London, and before entering the rabbinate, he worked in Britain's Ministry of Justice. He is a scholar of …
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Rabbi Meir Soloveichik on the Enduring Power of the Psalms
12 december 2025 · 47 min
On October 6, 2023, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik sat at his desk facing a deadline for his monthly column. Israel's citizens were then furiously debating judicial reform, but he'd already had his say on that matter. He decided to write about something else instead: a Jeopardy episode where three educated contestants stared blankly when asked to identify the source of this line: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." This, among the most famous images in all of Western literature, comes of course from Psalm 23. And none of the contestants knew it. Lees meer
Rabbi Soloveichik submitted the piece on October 6, hours before the festival of Shemini Atzeret. The next morning, October 7, the Jewish people would be thrust into the valley of the shadow of death. T'hillim, as the Psalm are known in Hebrew, would, over the following weeks and months, accompany the Jewish people's every thought. Their distress could be articulated in David's very own words, linking their pain to his pain, their redemptive dreams to his redemptive dreams, their future to his future.
In his new podcast, "Poetry and Prayer: A Daily Journey Through the Psalms," Soloveichik walks listeners through all 150 psalms, one by one. For today's episode, he sits down with Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic, to discuss this ambitious project. He puts forward a striking claim in the course of the conversation: the Psalms represent something unprecedented in ancient literature. While Homer or Gilgamesh depict external action—heroic deeds, cosmic battles—the Psalms take their reader (or reciter) inside someone else's soul. The Psalmist explores the full range of human emotion—doubt and faith, despair and joy, rage and delight—all while maintaining an awareness of God's presence. It's the first example in world literature of what the critic Edward Cahill calls "the eye of interiority."
When Iranian missiles fell on their cities at 2:00 am one night, Israelis immediately Googled "T'hillim" on their…
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Walter Russel Mead and Elliott Abrams on Navigating the New Middle East
5 december 2025 · 29 min
It's now December, and thus a natural time to look back and think about all that's changed in 2025. What did the Middle East and the world look like at this time a year ago? President Biden was in the Oval Office and President Trump was both the former president and the president-elect. Hamas still held hostages taken on October 7. Iran's regional proxies, though weakened, still threatened both Israel and American interests across the Middle East. Lees meer
Fast forward to today, and the landscape looks dramatically different. Israel has achieved stunning military victories. The United States Air Force bombed nuclear sites in Iran. New diplomatic possibilities have opened up. The balance of power in the region has shifted in ways that seemed unimaginable just twelve months ago.
And yet, like the laws of physics, the iron laws of politics have asserted themselves: there are unintended consequences even, and especially, of those very stunning military victories. Despite wounding their shared adversary, the Israelis and Saudis have not normalized relations and in fact may be further from rapprochement than when the threat from Iran was at its height. Israel's victory has come at a cost of political and popular support in the United States. The Trump administration's management of the hostages' homecoming, and the terms of the cease-fire, have left Hamas in place, with no external peacekeeping force other than the IDF itself willing to restore order.
To help us understand these developments, we're rebroadcasting a conversation Mosaic's editor, Jonathan Silver, had at the 2025 Jewish Leadership Conference with Walter Russell Mead and Elliott Abrams—two of America's leading voices on Middle East strategy. They discussed the new regional order, the opportunities and vulnerabilities it presents for America and Israel, and how all of this fits into the broader competition between the United States and China.
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Josh Tolle on the State of Hillel on Campus
26 november 2025 · 48 min
For many Jewish parents and grandparents, Hillel holds a special place in their memories of college life. Founded in 1923 above a barbershop at the University of Illinois, Hillel grew into a leading Jewish campus organization, now present at hundreds of colleges. For generations, it was where Jewish students found community, celebrated Shabbat, and felt at home as Jews while navigating the challenges of university life. Lees meer
But today, Hillel faces a crisis. That's the view of the writer and former Krauthammer fellow Josh Tolle. Now Tikvah's associate director of university programs, Tolle worked at Hillel for three years, and saw the organization's reaction to October 7 and all the campus frenzy that would come after it up close.
In his essay "If Hillel Is Not for Jews, Who Will Be?"—which appeared in the December 2025 issue of Commentary—Tolle examines how progressive ideology has weakened Hillel's ability to serve its own students, especially in the days, weeks, and months after October 7, when Jewish institutions were most needed. Tolle explains how Jewish students, galvanized by October 7, looked to their campus Hillels seeking clarity and strength, only to encounter what he calls "muddled objectives and self-defeating strategies."
Tolle calls attention to the ways Hillel has strayed from its mission precisely because he believes that mission is worth restoring. Hillel's crisis, he argues, reflects a larger condition in American Jewish life, particularly among pluralistic institutions, and that condition must be remedied for these institutions to remain capable of serving the rising generation.
In this episode, Tolle discusses his essay and the experiences that led him to write it in conversation with Jonathan Silver.
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R.J. Snell on Modern Expressions of the Marcionite Heresy
21 november 2025 · 51 min
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast might be the first dedicated entirely to Christian theology. Why would a Jewish podcast devote so much attention to a theological debate that took place among Christians in the 2nd century? First, because it contributed to the canonization of Christian scripture and defined forever the Christian attitude toward the Hebrew Bible. But more importantly, because we are witnessing today the reemergence of some of the very ideas that the Church fathers of that time declared heretical. Lees meer
The figure at the center of this conversation is a Christian thinker name Marcion, who lived from 85 to 160 CE. He taught that there were not one but two gods: the creator God of the Hebrew Bible—a violent, vengeful, tribal demiurge—and the true God that is revealed to humankind by Jesus. To Marcion, the Christian God alone is a God of love and mercy. Therefore, he concluded, Christianity should detach itself entirely from the Hebrew Bible.
Most people have heard some version of the idea that the Hebrew God is vindictive, unforgiving, and particularistic, and that the Christian God teaches grace and mercy. But the notion that they're radically distinct has now returned. The prominent Internet talk-show host Tucker Carlson has spoken on numerous occasions about disconnecting the Hebrew Bible from the New Testament. On the August 25, 2025 episode of his show, he explained that he had just read what Christians called the Old Testament and "was pretty shocked by—as I think many people who read it are—by the violence in it, and shocked by the revenge in it, the genocide in it." Then, in conversation with Megyn Kelly on November 6, he said that "Western civilization is derived from the New Testament. It is based on Christian ethics. And the core difference between the West and the rest of the world—not just Israel but every other country—is that we don't believe in collective punishment because we don't believe in blood guilt."
It's important to draw a distin…
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Ambassador Ron Dermer Looks Back on His Years in Washington (Rebroadcast)
14 november 2025 · 45 min
This week, Ron Dermer resigned from the Israeli cabinet, stepping down as minister of strategic affairs after years of working closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu to guide Israel through this last harrowing chapter of the country's history. It's a moment of transition—and it brings to mind another such moment, five years ago, when Dermer prepared to leave his post as Israel's ambassador to the United States. Lees meer
In December 2020, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver sat with the departing ambassador and asked him to reflect on his eight years in Washington—years that saw the nuclear deal with Iran, the rise and fall of Islamic State, and the signing of the Abraham Accords.
Much has changed since then. October 7 shattered assumptions about Israel's security. The war in Gaza has tested the U.S.-Israel relationship in ways that seemed unimaginable in 2020. And yet, much has also endured. The alliance itself remains. The strategic logic Dermer articulates in this conversation—about shared interests, shared values, shared aspirations, shared threats—hasn't disappeared either. Indeed, that strategic logic has become easier to see, not harder.
As Ron Dermer steps back once again, we thought it worth revisiting this earlier moment—to reinhabit the U.S.-Israel relationship before October 7, and to hear one of Israel's great public servants explain why he believed then, and still believes, that it can weather the storms that lie ahead.
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Jonathan Leaf on What New Research about Men and Apes Says about Human Nature
7 november 2025 · 38 min
Every schoolboy has been told that, to understand human nature, we must look to our closest genetic relatives—the chimpanzees. Jane Goodall's pioneering research revealed that chimps use tools, hunt cooperatively, and engage in violent activity that looks like warfare. And from these observations, she and generations of scientists who followed in her wake have concluded that humans are essentially advanced primates, and that our behaviors—from violence to sexuality—flow from this genetic inheritance. Lees meer
But what if this foundational assumption is wrong?
The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature is a new book by the playwright and critic Jonathan Leaf. Based on vast quantities of scientific literature, Leaf argues that recent genetic and neuroscientific discoveries are overturning decades of conventional wisdom. A landmark study published in April 2025 revealed that humans share only 86.5 percent of our genes with chimpanzees—not the 98.6 percent we've long believed. More importantly, the differences are concentrated precisely where they matter most: in the structures of our brains that govern cooperation, empathy, and language.
Leaf's thesis is both scientific and moral. If humans are not primarily aggressive primates but rather cooperative pack animals—closer in crucial ways to dolphins and wolves than to chimps—then it's high time to reconsider the natural impulses that lie at the roots of war, family, and human flourishing.
Leaf joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his book and its implications.