The Tikvah Podcast

Some of today's most important ideas were first born in little magazines—magazines, that is to say, like Mosaic. How does that happen? And what is the role of a magazine editor, and does that role differ if the magazine in question is Jewish? On this week's podcast, we bring you the recording of a live discussion convened earlier this week between Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver and Yoav Sorek, the editor of Hashiloach, a quarterly journal in Israel. Moderated by the writer David Weinberg, the two discuss the state of Jewish ideas, the biggest issues facing the Jewish people in their minds, and the differences between publishing for Jews who are a minority—as Mosaic does—and publishing for Jews who are a majority in their own state, as Hashiloach does. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

On October 12, 2022, Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid approved an agreement with the government of Lebanon to establish maritime borders between the two countries. The deal, brokered by the United States, is important because large fields of natural gas have been discovered under the seabed of the Israel-Lebanon coast—and whichever country controls these fields can reap the financial and energy benefits from them.  In some quarters, the establishment of the new borders—without a war being fought, the usual means of fixing borders—is seen as an accomplishment. For those who hold that view, this deal will help stabilize Lebanon and provide it some economic relief. Furthermore, given that Lebanon and Israel are, officially if not currently in fact, still at war, the agreement is seen as evidence of America’s power as a mediator in the Middle East. In short, the deal is a diplomatic achievement worth celebrating.  This week’s podcast guest disagrees. Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has argued that Israel has traded away its maritime rights in exchange for the mere hope of regional order, and it makes future conflict between Israel and Hizballah-controlled Lebanon more likely, not less. In conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he discusses the political context within which the Israelis and Lebanese established their maritime borders, why America pushed so hard for the agreement, and why the deal harms Israeli security and boosts Hizballah.  Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.  

The legacy of Christian anti-Semitism is not a happy one. Early in the history of Christianity, as the religion grew, the persecution of Jews became a normal feature of life in Christian lands. By the Middle Ages, the Jewish people were subject to dislocation, alienation, psychological torment, violence, and torture—all with the approval, and at times the official encouragement, of church authorities. Even in modern times, religiously inflected anti-Semitism has been an unavoidable part of the relations between the two religions. Is that still the case? Perhaps not. Relations between global Christianity and the Jewish people are fundamentally different than they have been. In part this is because of one document: the Vatican’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions, more commonly known by the Latin words with which it begins, Nostra Aetate, “In our time.” Nostra Aetate was promulgated at the ecumenical council called by Pope John XXIII known as the Second Vatican Council, only the 21st such council to have been convened in the nearly two millennia of the Catholic church. This month marks the 60th anniversary of its being convened. To help us understand what the Second Vatican Council was about, and its effects today, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver speaks with one of the most incisive analysts of Catholicism: the author George Weigel. This week marks the publication of his new book about the Second Vatican Council, To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II, a distillation of which was featured in the Wall Street Journal this month under the title “What Vatican II Accomplished.” Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

On September 16, a squad of Iranian police officers arrested a twenty-two-year-old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini. Charged with improperly wearing a hijab, Amini died in police custody. Since then, suspicion that she was beaten by Iranian forces, combined with the widespread public view that she was accosted unjustly to begin with, have catalyzed widespread protests across Iran.  On this week’s podcast, the writer Shay Khatiri, who grew up in Iran and participated in protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in 2009, joins us to explain how the current protests in Iran relate to those in 2009 and 2017. In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, he also thinks about where these demonstrations might lead and whether they hold promise of reform inside Iran.  Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

At this time of year, the Jewish calendar compels Jews to think about the human capacity for personal change, which in the Jewish view is made possible by God. The ability for humans to undertake t’shuvah, repentance, is a subset of that capacity that rises to the fore of this week’s podcast conversation (a rebroadcast of a 2017 episode), with the rabbi, editor, and writer Gil Student.  Student’s subject is a classic essay, published in Rolling Stone in 1977, called "Next Year in Jerusalem." The piece is a travelogue by the critic Ellen Willis as she takes a trip to Israel to see inside the world of her brother Michael, who decided to leave behind his secular life in the United States, undertake Orthodox yeshiva study in Jerusalem, and eventually live as an observant Jew. In doing so, Ellen wrestles with the question of why her brother made the choice that he did, and then, as the attractions of Orthodox Judaism are revealed to her, whether she too should follow in his path. In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, Student walks listeners through the essay, explains why it’s still relevant today, and reflects on his own growth into greater Jewish observance. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

On September 11, 2022, the New York Times published a leading story about the hasidic schools of greater New York. The article, “In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush with Public Money,” purported to show that, though New York’s hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years, they provide extremely poor secular education, deploy corporal punishment in class, abuse the political process, and are unaccountable to outside oversight. The article inspired outrage from a variety of parties; rarely has the public—and especially the Jewish public—been so animated by the educational performance of New York’s yeshivas.  Beyond the article, deeper questions come to the surface. What obligations do religious communities have to the state? What obligations does a state, one that’s constituted to protect religious liberty and individual rights, owe to families and their decisions? And why, as the authors of this feature do not ask, do so many families choose these schools for their children in the first place? To help us think about these important questions in the context of the NYT story, our guest on this week’s podcast is the Mosaic columnist and hasidic educator Eli Spitzer, who wrote an essay about this very issue for Mosaic back in October 2021 called “NY State vs. the Yeshivas.” In conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he explains what hasidic schools are really like, how those communities think about education and the secular world, and the important issues that the Times article fails to address. This discussion was recorded online in front of Mosaic subscribers. 

Jerusalem is perhaps the most interesting and spiritually important city in the world. For the Jewish people, it is the most treasured city in their long history. It is mentioned over 600 times in the Hebrew Bible; every time a Jew prays, he or she faces Jerusalem; at the end of every Passover seder, Jews sing out l’shanah haba b’Yerushaliym, “next year in Jerusalem.” On this week’s podcast, we’re joined by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who just launched his new daily podcast, Jerusalem 365, a year-long examination of the history and significance of the holy city. For roughly 15 minutes each day, Soloveichik will explore Jerusalem’s buildings, its rulers, its people, and its role in the spiritual and cultural history of the Jewish people, the state of Israel, and the West. In this conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he walks listeners through some of the enduring cultural symbols that help illuminate the role Jerusalem has played in the minds of Jews throughout the ages. You can click here to view a PDF with the various symbols, images, and texts referenced in the discussion. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Earlier this week, in the Swiss city of Basel, the World Zionist Organization convened to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress, which was the brainchild of one of Zionism’s founding fathers, Theodor Herzl. At the time, the condition of European Jewry was precarious and degraded. The solution, in Herzl’s eyes, was not to be found in the animating Jewish impulse of the age: assimilation. He thought no amount of assimilation would rid the Jews of anti-Semitism, and that instead only a political solution would work. That political solution, of course, was to establish political sovereignty in the land of Israel. As he put it in his opening remarks, “We wish to lay the cornerstone of the house in which the Jewish nation will one day find shelter.” Our guest this week is the Israeli scholar Daniel Polisar. To him, the early flowerings of that idea in the First Zionist Congress were so significant that the meeting was, to quote the title of an essay he wrote on the subject in 2017 in Mosaic, “the most politically significant meeting of any group of Jews in the last 1,800 years.” Today we revisit that essay, and look back at the First Zionist Congress, how it came to be, and what it aimed to achieve. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Fifty years ago, at the 1972 Olympic summer games in Munich, 11 Israeli olympians were held hostage and murdered by members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. Recently, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, while meeting with the German chancellor, was asked about the event and whether he would apologize for what happened. Abbas declined to apologize, and instead accused the Israelis of having enacted “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians. Why would Abbas, when asked about a crime Palestinians perpetrated against Israelis, reach for the Holocaust as a weapon? To answer that question, the Egyptian writer Hussein Aboubakr joins this week’s podcast. In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, he explains what Abbas and so many Arabs think about the Holocaust, and why, in the Arab mind, that event is inextricably tied up with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in a twisted logic that has brought many to believe that Israelis are the new Nazis and Palestinians the new Jews.  Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Earlier this month, Israeli forces captured the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the West Bank city of Jenin after he had been involved in planning a number of terrorist attacks. Infuriated, PIJ threatened to fire anti-tank weapons at Israeli towns from its home base in Gaza. In response, the IDF struck PIJ’s chief of operations in the northern Gaza Strip and killed his counterpart in the south. After that, the Iranian-backed terrorist group began bombarding Israel with rockets and mortars, firing nearly 1,000 rockets, of which nearly 200 fell short and landed in Gaza itself—causing the deaths of several civilians there. An Egyptian-brokered ceasefire took effect after about three days of fighting. To talk about the weekend war, we've invited analyst Jonathan Schanzer, who pays close attention to Gaza and writes about Middle East politics in Commentary and Mosaic, as well as in several books. (One just last year, Gaza Conflict 2021, carefully analyzed the previous blowup there). Here, Schanzer, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, looks at this month's conflict in that political context, explains how it was like and unlike past rounds of conflict, thinks about how its timing relates to the current nuclear negotiations with Iran, and speculates about the future of Hamas in Gaza. Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.