The Tikvah Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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.   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.

Last week, Michael Smuss died at age ninety-nine. Born in 1926, he was the last surviving fighter of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. His passing marks the end of an era, and brings to a close a chapter of living memory. Now the responsibility to tell this story passes fully to us.

In the spring of 1943, against impossible odds and with almost no weapons, a small group of young Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw staged a revolt that would reverberate through history. This was not just a military engagement, but a story of Jewish resistance, dignity, and moral choice under unimaginable circumstances.

Before the war, Warsaw was home to nearly 400,000 Jews—the largest Jewish community in Europe. This was a vibrant, diverse Jewish population: workers and intellectuals, religious and secular, Yiddish-speakers and Polish-speakers. Jews published daily newspapers, ran theaters, fielded soccer teams. They were 40 percent of Warsaw's population.

Then came September 1939. Within weeks, Warsaw fell to the Germans. Over the next year, the Nazis systematically stripped Jews of their rights—blocked bank accounts, forced them to wear special armbands, and conscripted them into slave labor. In November 1940, they sealed 400,000 Jews into a ghetto of just two square miles, then forced in 150,000 more from nearby towns and cities. With official rations of just 184 calories per day and no heating, 100,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. But 80 percent stayed alive through extraordinary resourcefulness—smuggling food, establishing soup kitchens, creating underground factories. This too was resistance.

In July 1942, the Germans began mass deportations to Treblinka, where most were murdered upon arrival. Over seven weeks, they sent 300,000 Jews to the gas chambers, with the help of a Jewish police force. By September, only 60,000 remained.

At that point, something shifted. Survivors asked why they hadn't fought back. The shame and anger became a catalyst. Between September and April, the ghetto prepared. They built 750 bunkers with electricity, water, and food stocks. When the Germans came on April 19, 1943, expecting to round up the Jews with no resistance, they were met with gunfire, grenades, and mines. The Germans thought it would take three days. It took 27—because the entire community had transformed the ghetto into a network of underground revolt.

To tell this story, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Professor Samuel Kassow of Trinity College. They discuss the courage of the fighters as well as the resistance of those who built the bunkers, who preserved cultural life, who maintained their dignity in ways that have largely been forgotten. They also confront difficult questions about heroism, survival, and how to fulfill the sacred obligations of remembering.

Between the year 63 before the Common Era, and the year 136 of the Common Era, the Jewish people waged three revolts against the mightiest empire in the world. In retrospect, we can see that these were not only local uprisings, but civilizational confrontations that would echo through history—struggles that pitted the Jewish people's fierce determination to live as a free nation in their ancestral homeland against Rome's inexorable drive to impose order across its vast dominions.

What makes these revolts so fascinating is not merely their military drama, but the profound questions they raise about how different civilizations remember and interpret the same events. Recall the way that Rome understood its purpose and its mission, the grand aspirations that fueled Rome's rise and Rome's bloodstained greatness. As Vergil puts it in the Book VI of the Aeneid (in John Dryden's poetic rendering):

But, Rome, 't is thine alone, with awful sway,

To rule mankind, and make the world obey,

Disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way;

To tame the proud, the fetter'd slave to free:

These are imperial arts, and worthy thee.

When Roman historians recorded these conflicts in Judea, they saw rebellious subjects disrupting the peace that Rome had brought to the world. They saw the Jews as ingrates and troublemakers, who refused to appreciate the benefits of imperial rule. But when Jewish historians look back on this period they tend to see something altogether different: a tragic tale of national resistance—a struggle for freedom—to defend the honor of God, His people, and His land. These competing narratives reveal something essential about the nature of historical memory, and the separate moral universes of these rival civilizational traditions.

To illuminate and explain this conflict, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver speaks with Barry Strauss, formerly a longtime professor of classics at Cornell University, and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His forthcoming book is Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire, to which he brings deep expertise in Roman military history, and also a keen appreciation for the strategic dimensions of these conflicts.

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

 

After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, an Israeli board, known as the Agranat Commission, issued a report investigating the failings of the IDF leading up to the war. No commission has yet been established to investigate the intelligence and operational failures that allowed the October 7 massacre to take place. But there are clearly some echoes and similarities between the two attacks. To explore them, Michael Doran joins Mosaic editor and Tikvah Podcast host Jonathan Silver for a discussion.

 

Doran is the author of the October essay at Mosaic, "The Hidden Calculation behind the Yom Kippur War," which argues that Israeli leaders made a conscious choice not to preempt the Egyptians and take the initiative, as they had so successfully in the 1967 Six Day War, because they were thinking about the U.S. Israel relationship. They didn't know that war was looming, exactly, but they knew that something might happen. They certainly didn't know the intensity of the offensive campaigns against Israel, or about the proficiency or tactical deployment of anti-aircraft missile technology layered into Egyptian defenses—much the same as, this year, they didn't know about Hamas's ability to use drones and gliders. 

 

Doran is also the instructor of a free new online course on the same subject, which can be found at yomkippurwar.tikvahfund.org. 

 

The conversation took place on a live broadcast on October 18 to subscribers of Mosaic /and to Tikvah's online course supporters, who also got the chance to ask questions.

 

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.

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

At the moment when these laws were conceived, the buying and selling of human lives was common; thankfully, slavery of that kind is rare today. Then, since persons had a market value, the Jewish community often had to raise the funds necessary to purchase the freedom of their hostages. This led to much debate about the practice. Did meeting the demands of the captors incentivize further hostage-taking? If the hostage's family was wealthy and eager to pay any price for release, did they nevertheless have an obligation not to, lest they increase the price for the rest of the community?

These questions are not merely historical any longer. There are 203 Israelis captive and bound in Gaza. Some of them are young children. Some of them are elderly. Some of them have disabilities and handicaps.

The current situation introduces new questions, too. In the times before the modern state of Israel, Jewish communities did not have a sovereign state to act on their behalf, nor did they have a military. And today's captors do not seem to want money, as their predecessors did. They aim instead at a different sort of currency: leverage, shame, and power.

What can and should be done to secure the freedom of Israel's hostages?

This week, the rabbi Ethan Tucker, president and rosh yeshiva of Hadar, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss the history and development of pidyon shvuyim. Together, they try to uncover the roots, the extent, and the limits of the obligation at a moment that presents a difficult set of moral tradeoffs.   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.

Jews typically honor the dead by saying the phrase zikhrono livrakha, "may his memory be a blessing." But when a Jew is murdered because he is a Jew, he is considered a martyr, and his name is then honored by the use of a different phrase, hashem yikom damo, "may God avenge his blood." Today, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his 2018 essay in Commentary on this subject, and to share his first thoughts on one of the worst weeks in modern Jewish history.

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.

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

In that book, released last month, Mounk plots the relevant intellectual history, from the postmodern philosophy of Michel Foucault to the post-colonial writing of Edward Said to early expressions of critical race theory in the work of Derrick Bell and to the articulation of the governing idea of intersectionality in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw. Mounk explores how the architects of what he calls "the identity synthesis"—his term for what alternatively goes by identity politics or wokeness, terms that he avoids because he believes they are overly polemical—are not accidentally but conscientiously opposed to the race-blind aspirations of their liberal predecessors.

All this he discusses this week with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver. The two also turn to the question of what this revolutionary moral transformation has to do with the Jews. Does the very notion that Americans should be categorized and evaluated in political, civic, and educational settings on the basis of race—and that, moreover, Jews are often fit into the racially white, oppressor category—mean that logic of the identity synthesis tends toward anti-Semitism? Does the legitimating of racial categorization give ammunition to white supremacists to reject the whiteness of Jews, and indulge their own Jew-hatred? And what does all this mean for the central goal of Jewish education—to teach children to assume responsibility for and pride in the Jewish tradition?

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.

Israel's success in military cyber-operations and cyber-security, from disrupting Iranian nuclear development to covert intelligence gathering, is well known. It has given birth to a cluster of companies that have made Tel Aviv a global hub for cyber-security.

Alon Arvatz is CEO and co-founder of PointFive, a new cybersecurity start up based in Tel Aviv, and the author of a new book, The Battle for Your Computer: Israel and the Growth of the Global Cyber-Security Industry. With Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he talks here about some of the factors that make Israeli companies so competitive in cybersecurity, how military and intelligence applications of cyber technology have changed over time, how he thinks they will change in the future, how these technological capabilities relate to policy and politics, what kind of regulatory oversight is appropriate for the industry, and much else.

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.

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

What is repentance? How does it operate? What's actually happening in the mind of the penitent?

Daniel Rynhold is dean of the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and professor of Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University. He has thought and written much about repentance and sees it as a way to illustrate some of the most interesting contrasts between medieval and modern philosophers. Joining Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver here to discuss the subject, he focuses on three major thinkers, two from within the Jewish tradition and one outside of it.

The first is Rabbeinu Yonah, the 13th-century author of the rabbinic work The Gates of Repentance. The second is Joseph B. Soloveitchik, known as the Rav, who was perhaps the central intellectual figure of post-war Modern Orthodoxy. The third is the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a famous critic of the Enlightenment, of liberalism, and of modernity. The last two are the focus of his book, written with Michael Harris, Nietzsche, Soloveitchik, and Contemporary Jewish Philosophy, published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press.

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.

Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah, when Jewish communities celebrate the new year and, as part of this celebration, read chapter 22 of Genesis. This contains the famous story in which God asks Abraham to take his son Isaac to a mountain and offer him there as a sacrifice.

What is this passage all about? What does it mean? What can be learned about Abraham, about Isaac, or about God by reading it carefully? Joining Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver today to discuss these questions is Jon D. Levenson, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School and frequent Mosaic contributor. Levenson has written about this episode in several books, including The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son published in 1993 by Yale University Press, and also in Inheriting Abraham, published in 2012 by Princeton University Press.

Akeidat Yitzḥak, the binding of Isaac, as the Jewish people traditionally refer to this episode, has a long afterlife in Christian and Muslim traditions; it is also a centerpiece of philosophical reflection among modern thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard. Reading the text now in the aftermath of those later reflections, it's difficult to retrieve its original meaning. The temptation is overwhelming to propose moral justifications for Abraham and for God, to excuse or at least to try to soften the drama of Genesis 22.  To hear what the text of the Hebrew Bible really might have to say in response to that temptation requires undoing some modern assumptions—a task that Levenson and Silver take up.

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.