On June 8, 1978, Harvard University invited the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to deliver a major commencement address. Solzhenitsyn was, by this time, a world famous figure who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Some two and a half decades earlier, while serving in the Soviet army during World War II, he was arrested and sent to the Gulag for criticizing the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in a private letter. He was imprisoned there for nearly a decade, during which he underwent a profound spiritual, religious, philosophical reorientation and awakening, eventually reflecting on his experiences in a major study of Soviet Gulag system, The Gulag Archipelago.

In time, he was freed from the camp but exiled from the Soviet Union. He settled in America, and there, was thought perhaps to be a valuable critic of the Soviet system. But the fact that he was a critic of Soviet repression and the soul-deforming debasement that Russians were forced to endure did not necessarily mean that he would endorse the American system in which he had found his freedom.

When Harvard invited Solzhenitsyn to address their graduating classes that year, probably weren't expecting so thoroughgoing a critique civic, philosophical, and moral as the one he delivered, warning Americans about deep-seated tendencies of mind that could lead their nation into the very sort of societal sickness from which he had just escaped. This week, as students return to campus, Solzhenitsyn's analysis of America's vulnerabilities may still be relevant. To think about that, host Jonathan Silver here speaks with the literature scholar Gary Saul Morson, author of a recent essay called "Solzhenitsyn Warned Us".

Israel's critics today like to argue that the country is illegitimate because it is the product of what they call settler colonialism. They consider non-Jewish Arab peoples the native inhabitants of the land—inhabitants who were displaced by the appearance of Jewish immigrants over the last 150 years. The great colonial moment was capped in 1948, when the Jews established political sovereignty in the state of Israel; then, subsequent wars, including and especially the Six Day War of 1967, further expanded and entrenched that moment.

According to this sort of analysis, Israel is always and forever illegitimate. Much the same is seen as true of America, which was not only illegitimate at the moment it seized native lands, but is still illegitimate, and will always be illegitimate. This dynamic is captured in a comment by Patrick Wolfe, a frequently quoted Australian scholar of settler colonialism: "invasion is a structure, not an event."

This worldview establishes a moral hierarchy, draws political alliances, establishes political adversaries, and has been at the root of the ideological assault on Israel and its allies. It's an idea that the critic and writer Adam Kirsch explores in his new book, On Settler Colonialism, published recently by W.W. Norton & Company. Here he joins host Jonathan Silver for a discussion of his book and the controversy around Israel.

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.

Last month, host Jonathan Silver spoke with the rabbi Shlomo Brody about Jewish military ethics. They spoke, in particular, about the Jewish ethical tradition's conception of right conduct once a war has begun: how one ought to calibrate the force of a maneuver to the threat it is meant to neutralize, how one ought to balance collateral damage and civilian casualties with force protection, and other related questions. This week, Brody joins Silver once again to discuss the reasons nations go to war—that is, to discern in Jewish history, Jewish text, and the drama of modern Zionism, the ethical parameters of thinking about going to war in the first place. As with their previous conversation, this conversation is informed by Brody's recently published book, Ethics of Our Fighters. 

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.

Jewish communities have just concluded the celebration of Shavuot, a pilgrimage festival in times of the Temple and the moment when, fifty days after the Jewish people's exodus from Egypt, God revealed the Ten Commandments to Moses. Those commandments form the foundation of the many rules and obligations inflected throughout the Jewish tradition. Indeed, after thousands of years of Jewish history, observant Jewish lives continue to be structured by what is known as halakhah, Jewish law.

What is halakhah? In 2018, the rabbi Mark Gottlieb sat down to answer that question with Chaim Saiman, one of the world's foremost scholars of Jewish law and the author of a then newly published book called Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law. This week, in honor of the Jewish holiday that celebrates lawgiving, we bring you a rebroadcast of their 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.

Since the attacks of October 7 and since the Gaza war began, a small but vocal segment of American Jews have joined in with the anti-Israel protests convulsing American cities and campuses. What are their ideas and where do they come from?

Elliott Abrams is the author of If You Will It, a book coming this fall on Jewish peoplehood. Also the chairman of Tikvah and a regular Mosaic writer, he's been an observer of American Jewish life for a long time. In his view, the Jewish turn against Israel in America today is vastly different than the usual critiques one hears every Shabbat in every synagogue across the country. In other words, it's not that these Jews don't like the Israeli prime minister or other members of his governing coalition, or certain policies of the government or trends in Israeli culture. It's that they see Israel as a moral encumbrance on the Jewish conscience, and imagine that the Jews would be better off without statehood altogether. He recently developed this argument in an essay in Fathom called "American Jewish Anti-Zionist Diasporism: A Critique," and here elaborates on it with host Jonathan Silver.

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.

Traditional readers of the Hebrew Bible, reinforced by rabbinic commentary, condemn the bloodlust, cruelty, exploitation of the weak, and exaltation of the strong that is on display in the Amalekite attack on Israel in the book of Exodus. But it's not the Amalekites, the nomadic enemies of the Israelites, who are shocking for their sacralized violence; it's the Israelites who are shocking for their ability to quiet that darker, natural impulse, and live out a different moral code. 

That is the thought that frames a recent essay called "Civilization Is from the Jews," written by Andrew Doran, a senior research fellow with the Philos Project. Here, with host Jonathan Silver, Doran discusses his contention that what we think of as "civilization" came into the drama of human history in no other way than through God's covenantal promise with Abraham and his children.

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.

A stable if somewhat cold peace has endured between Egypt and Israel for nearly fifty years, a peace that includes serious diplomatic and security cooperation. Much of that has to do with Gaza. After Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel and Egypt jointly imposed a blockade and began to control its borders, since each had its own reasons to fear Hamas. Hamas was, after all, an outgrowth of the very Muslim Brotherhood that threatened the Egyptian government's rule.

Since October 7, Egypt has catapulted itself into a role as a key mediator between Israel and Hamas. The country's leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has seen the crisis as a lever he could use to grow his country's economy and restore some of its diminishing political clout. Has that worked?

Haisam Hassanein is an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In this podcast, he joins host Jonathan Silver to think through how Cairo assesses the war on its border, how it sees its own interests there, and what lasting consequences Israel's war with Hamas may have on the future of Egypt's relations with the Jewish state.

In the last few days, it's been widely reported that Egyptian mediators were responsible for surreptitiously changing the terms of a recent hostage negotiation between Israel and Hamas, thereby deceiving the American and Israeli negotiators. That news broke after the two recorded their conversation, and so while they won't discuss it explicitly, this news can be better understood in light of how Hassanein describes how Egypt understands its own national interests.

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 national anthem, "Hatikvah," has a long and poignant history that traces back to a poem originally written by Naftali Herz Imber called "Tikvateinu." This week, to mark the 76th anniversary of Israel's founding, the historian and author Asael Abelman joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to investigate that history. Together, they look at the biblical sources and national aspirations of the poem, examine some of the contemporary discussion surrounding it, and take stock of some of its mysteries and paradoxes. Foremost among those paradoxes is the fact that the state of Israel's anthem is a song of longing for the day that there will be such a thing as a state of Israel.

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.

After a long delay, the Israeli military's advance into Rafah, the city in southern Gaza that is the last stronghold of Hamas's fighting force and that now also hosts many civilian refugees from the rest of Gaza, may now be underway. Many in the U.S. are concerned that an Israeli push into Rafah will incur high numbers of civilian casualties. How does and should Israel think about that possibility?

The rabbi and scholar Shlomo Brody is the author of a new volume on Jewish military ethics, Ethics of Our Fighters. It is traditional in the intellectual and philosophical field of just-war theory to draw a distinction between the ethics of going to war and the ethics of fighting in war. Here, Brody and host Jonathan Silver discuss the latter subject—ethics in war—as it is seen through the Jewish tradition and the historical experience of the Israeli military.

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.

Anti-Israel campus activism has never been more popular or unpleasant than it is right now. In years past, much of this activism was mixed up with nods to the desire for peace and a two-state solution that would allow for Palestinians to enjoy their own sovereignty alongside a secure Israel. That isn't happening now. It certainly isn't what is meant by the chants, now common at the most prestigious universities in the United States, that call for the globalization of the intifada or that give voice to the delusion that Israel can be unborn.

To analyze the protests, the protestors, and their slogans, Ruth Wisse, the scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literature and history, and the author of books including Jews and Power, joins Jonathan Silver.

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.

Next week, Jewish families will sit at their seder tables and relive the drama of Jewish liberation from Egyptian oppression. The text used, the Haggadah, is one of the most widely read works of the rabbinic tradition. It has an inescapably national aspect, and its main themes, when seen in the right perspective, suggest to the rabbi Meir Soloveichik that it can be understood as a preeminent work of Jewish political thought: tackling themes of freedom and oppression, covenant and constitution, state and society, the nature of law and the dreams of a people.

Soloveichik discusses that and more here, in the first lecture in his eight-part course, "The Haggadah: A Political Classic," which is available in full at meirsoloveichik.com.

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.

Yechiel Leiter is a distinguished Israeli public servant and thinker. A scholar of political philosophy, the head of the international department of the Shiloh Policy Forum, the former chief of staff to then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he is also the father of seven children—including five of whom are serving in Israel's current war with Hamas. His oldest son, Moshe Leiter, himself a father of six children, fell in battle on November 10.

Here, he joins host Jonathan Silver to mark six months of the war, to talk about the obligations of Israeli citizenship, Zionism, and Judaism, to remember his son Moshe, and to share how he and the nation have mourned their lost children.

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.

Right now, over 50,000 Israelis from the northern reaches of the country are not living in their homes. The intensity of rocket fire from Hizballah, arrayed across the Lebanese border, is too dangerous. For that reason and several others relating to Hizballah's patron, Iran, a war to Israel's north looms. In April of this year, the Israeli security analyst and IDF reserve intelligence officer Raphael BenLevi published an essay in Mosaic that explains the history of Israel's northern border security, and what Israel can do now to restore it. To discuss that essay and its arguments, Mosaic's editor and the podcast's host Jonathan Silver convened a conversation with the Lebanese writer Hanin Ghaddar and the Iran expert Richard Goldberg.

This week, given the intensification of concern toward Israel's north, brings the audio of that conversation in podcast form: as good a place as any to start thinking about the dangers that Hizballah poses in the larger conflict between Iran and Israel.

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.

Whether or not haredi Jews should be required to serve in the IDF is a perennial question of Israeli politics, one that has caused political parties to form and disband, governing coalitions to rise and fall. It was the subject of a 2021 episode of this podcast with the haredi judge, editor, and rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer. This question has taken on a new intensity lately, as the October 7 attacks and Israel's war in Gaza have unified most of the country in a belief that the haredi draft exemption is unsustainable, unwise, and unjust.

This week, Pfeffer joins Jonathan Silver again to talk about how the matter now looks from within the haredi community. They discuss how Israeli haredim reacted to the October 7 attacks, the experience of the small number of haredim who have been serving in military operations since the war began, and what Pfeffer thinks they should do. Notably, he argues that, as a matter of Jewish belonging, haredi men ought to enlist and help to protect their country.

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.

Nearly twenty-five years ago, at the turn of the new millennium, America came very close to selecting not only a Jewish vice president, but a proudly religious, Shabbat-observing, kosher-eating Jewish vice president: Joe Lieberman, senator from Connecticut.

Lieberman, who died this week, epitomized a certain spirit in American public life, when the great debates over the conduct of American foreign policy and the management of domestic affairs still admitted heterodox disagreement. He was also a key figure in the U.S.-Israel relationship, articulating as well as anyone in public life why the widespread support that Americans feel toward the Jewish state also had a strategic value in serving American interests.

In October 2019, Lieberman, by then retired from the Senate, was in Jerusalem, where he addressed the Herzl Conference on Contemporary Zionism. In that speech—later published in a suitably edited form in Mosaic—he took a retrospective tone, looking back at the initial impulses that led Theodor Herzl's ideas to take concrete form in modern Israel. He looked at the effect that Israel has had on American Jewry. And he honestly examined growing political trends that troubled him.

Today, we rebroadcast a 2019 conversation that Jonathan Silver had with Lieberman in which they discuss that speech and his career.

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.

Neighborhoods have always played a distinctly important role in American public life. The neighborhood is the most intimate public setting outside of the home, the place where mediating institutions of common life—schools, stores, gyms, houses of worship—connect citizens to each other. American neighborhoods, however, have lately grown fragile and unhealthy, reflecting the nation's loneliness epidemic, its underwhelming public education system, its demoralized society.

Seth Kaplan is the author of Fragile Neighborhoods, a new book that diagnoses these dilemmas and that offers practical steps to nurse neighborhoods back to health. He joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss how Jewish neighborhoods might serve as models that could inspire other communities in the United States.

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.

In 21st-century America, the formation of families has become less common, and when people do get married and have children, they have fewer of them. According to demographers, for a population to reproduce itself, each family in it must on average produce at least 2.1 children. Americans are now reproducing at well below that number, a trend that comes with economic, social, political, spiritual, and moral consequences.

It's possible that government initiatives and financial incentives can encourage this number to rise. But in general there are mixed results when governments try to incentivize childbirth. This may be a sign that the forces undermining family formation are not primarily legal or economic, and that they are instead cultural attitudes and norms of behavior.

That possibility is what today's podcast guest, Timothy Carney, addresses in a new book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. In looking for examples of communities that have developed healthy family cultures, his reporting took him to an Orthodox suburb of Washington, DC, where he spent Purim and Shabbat, and to Israel.

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.

During Israel's war against Hamas, it has provided direct aid to Gazans, and it has allowed for the distribution of foreign aid. Hamas has accused Israeli soldiers of intentionally targeting Palestinians as they gather to receive food, most recently on February 29. The Israeli military released video evidence to the contrary, but by the time they did so, international impressions were already set, and Israelis now wonder why they're volunteering the wellbeing of their own soldiers, and their own resources, only to be met with international condemnation.

To explain the historical and strategic context of the aid to Gaza that Israel gives and facilitates, Jonathan Conricus joins Mosaic editor and podcast host Jonathan Silver. Conricus served in the Givati Brigade of the IDF when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Since then, he's served as a combat commander, military diplomat, and IDF international spokesman, and has been acting as a spokesman in the months since October 7.   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.

One day after this phase of the war began, on February 25, 2022, the writer, former Senate staff member, Navy reservist, and executive director of the KKR Global Institute Vance Serchuk joined Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss what was happening in real time. Two years later, he joins the Tikvah Podcast again to step back and ask some basic questions, and to offer his considered judgment on the state of the war.

What are its causes? On what basis can one decipher the truth from the conflicting narratives about the war in Europe, in Ukraine, in Russia, and in the United States? What have we learned about the deployment of novel military technology? What sorts of alliances have emerged or been strengthened, and what can we learn from them? Has the invasion of Ukraine helped the West relearn the necessity of military force, and chastened some of the most idealistic discourse about human rights and multilateralism? How does the war in Ukraine shed light on the state of U.S.-Russia relations and competition?

Serchuk recently returned from the Munich Security Conference, where he spoke with foreign officials about the state of the war. And, this August, he's teaching a specialized seminar on U.S.-Russia Relations as a part of the Security Studies Program at the Hertog Foundation in Washington, DC. If you're an advanced undergraduate, a recent college graduate, or a young professional working in national security, foreign policy, or related fields, you might consider applying to study with Mr. Serchuk. Applications are available at hertogfoundation.org, and they are due on March 4.

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 outstanding rabbinic authority and philosopher of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, was also a physician. After writing The Guide of the Perplexed, his great philosophical treatise, he turned his attention to composing works of medicine. He produced ten: On Hemorrhoids, On Cohabitation, On Asthma, On Poisons and Their Antidotes, Regimen of Health, On the Causes of Symptoms, Extracts from Galen, Medical Aphorisms, a Commentary on Hippocrates' Aphorisms, and a Glossary of Drug Names.

In all of these, Maimonides is preoccupied with organizing, clarifying, simplifying vast expanses of text into usable guidelines. That's one reason why the production of and instruction in aphorisms was so important for him—they were designed to be easy for physicians and their patients to remember. And there was a lot to remember. According to Maimonides, a doctor must know all about anatomy, symptoms, the health and sickness of the body and its parts, how to restore health when a person is sick, and food and diets, medicines, bathing, bandaging, and the various instruments that a medical doctor would need to use.

To get a sense of all this, the Maimonides expert Yehuda Halper sits down with host Jonathan Silver to focus on one particular medical work, Maimonides's Commentary on Hippocrates' Aphorisms. Many now will be familiar with Hippocrates because the popular Hippocratic oath that inducts physicians into their profession is attributed to him. But in Maimonides' time, medical research often took the form of commentary on the ancient writings of Hippocrates. One of Hippocrates earliest and most authoritative commentators was Galen, an ancient Roman doctor, and in his commentary, Maimonides applies his reason and empirical experience in the medical field to both of them. Along the way, Halper, in the fourth and final episode in their mini-series on Maimonides, explains how Maimonides thinks about the nature of authority, about the role and also the limits of tradition, and about the domain of reason and observation in human life.

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.

In the 1850s, when a young Italian Jewish boy named Edgardo Mortara fell ill, his family's Christian maid had secretly baptized him in hopes that he would be restored to health, or that if he died, his soul would be saved.

This meant that when Edgardo survived and his baptism was revealed, the church saw him as a Christian child, not a Jewish one—and it was forbidden by Canon law for a Christian child to be raised by Jewish parents. So Edgardo, then six years old, was removed from his family against their wishes by the pope, and brought to Rome where he was instructed in the Catholic faith and eventually became a priest.

This is the background to a new work of short fiction, "The Story of My Family," written by the great American Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick and published in the March 2024 issue of Commentary. In it, Ozick retells the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara as it is remembered by Edgardo's nephew's daughter who, by the time of the story, has moved to America. From there, she reflects on the way that Edgardo's life and priesthood haunted his nephew, that is, her own father.

To discuss her new story, Ozick joins Mosaic's editor and podcast host Jonathan Silver this week. Together, the two investigate the meaning of a tale about a Jew who becomes a tormentor of the Jews, and how such theological disturbances can rattle future generations.

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.

 

This week, the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic returns to the towering intellectual and religious sage of medieval Judaism, Moses Maimonides, the Rambam. In two previous conversations about his work, the professor of Judaism Yehuda Halper and podcast host Jonathan Silver focused on Maimonides's Mishneh Torah, his code of law.

This week, the two turn from the Mishneh Torah to Maimonides's philosophical magnum opus, Moreh ha Nevukhim, known in English as The Guide of the Perplexed. Whereas the Mishneh Torah leaves one with the impression that philosophy and law can be reconciled within the covenantal structure of an observant Jewish life, the emphasis in The Guide of the Perplexed is on the tensions, difficulties, and apparent contradictions between philosophy and law.

The Guide is one of the great books of Jewish philosophy, and it requires some preliminary introduction before anyone can seriously engage its questions. So this discussion is an orientation to the kind of study, the kind of person, and the kind of life that the Guide is written to instruct.

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.

Since October 7, there have been more than one hundred attacks by Iran-backed militias against American forces in the Middle East. On January 28, a drone strike, probably launched by Iran's most powerful proxy in Iraq, killed three and injured more than 40 American soldiers. Iran-supported Houthis have launched dozens of attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea. Iran's most important proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, sustains a low-grade confrontation with Israel. And, of course, 130 Israelis remain captive to Iran-backed Hamas as hostages in Gaza.

In other words, there is a war, sometimes hot, sometimes cool, happening across the entire Middle East between Iran, Israel, the U.S., and various other smaller actors. What does Iran want out of this war? Is it achieving its objectives? What is it concerned about?

To answer these and other questions, Ray Takeyh here joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver. Takeyh is a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs, and the author, just last week, of a New York Times opinion piece called "Why Iran Doesn't Want a War."

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, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she'd invited the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, to be her running mate in this fall's presidential election. Walz has pretty conventional views of Israel for a Democrat: he believes in Israel's right to exist and to defend itself, he has previously spoken at an AIPAC gathering, he condemned Hamas after October 7, that Hamas is not representative of the Palestinian people, that Israel is guilty of allowing too much civilian harm and civilian casualties in Gaza, that there must be a two-state solution, and that Israeli settlements are a barrier to that political outcome. That's what any number of other candidates on the vice-presidential shortlist also think, including Arizona senator Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.

For that matter, until the announcement, Shapiro was widely thought to be the front-runner by virtue of his popularity in what's expected to be the most important swing state in the election. Why didn't Harris select him? Over the last week, there's been an enormous amount of speculation about the reasons. One of the most foreboding possibilities is that Shapiro is a religious Jew, and among the activist class of the Democratic party, being an Israel-supporting religious Jew is now a liability. Of course, no one from the campaign or any Democratic official has said that Walz's selection had to do with that liability. But many of America's Jews—Democratic and Republican alike—took it that way, and so did many of America's anti-Semites.

To disentangle the role that such factors may have played in the Harris campaign's decision, host Jonathan Silver speaks here with the longtime political reporter and editor of Jewish Insider, Josh Kraushaar. Together, the two look at what the activist opposition campaign looked like, and how that campaign interpreted the selection of Walz as a validation and a victory.

Recently, the Israeli professor of Jewish philosophy Yehuda Halper joined Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss Maimonides, the Rambam, perhaps the most significant medieval rabbinic sage and Jewish philosopher. They discussed Maimonides's life and the main genres of his work—his commentary on Jewish law, his codification of Jewish law, his elaboration of philosophic mysteries that he believed are laden within the biblical and rabbinic corpus, his writings on science and medicine, and his views on the laws pertaining to Torah study.

Halper now returns for another conversation about Maimonides. This week, they look at "Hilchot De'ot," a section of the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides's great work on Jewish law, pertaining to the laws of character traits. In "Hilchot De'ot," Maimonides introduced a portrait of the human condition, suggesting a moral psychology that can be assessed, trained, and elevated, and a description of the human person as an embodied being with a physical presence. There are profound philosophical and religious questions raised explicitly in this work, and even more profound ones residing just under the surface of the text.

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.

1948 was a landmark year in international politics. It saw the establishment of modern Israel. And it saw the General Assembly of the United Nations adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That document, recognized today as a foundation stone of international human-rights law, gives voice to a range of fundamental rights meant to honor human freedom and dignity.

At the time, many of the proponents of human-rights statements and organizations were not only Jewish but proud Zionists. In the seventy-five years since, those two sorts of commitments seem to have grown in different directions, so that now, most people who work in the human-rights industry do not support but actively oppose the foundational premises and practical necessities of Jewish national freedom.

Hillel Neuer is the executive director of UN Watch, a human-rights organization based in Geneva. Together in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he asks several pressing questions about this history, which he wrote about as a chapter in the new volume Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, published by Wicked Son. How did the human-rights movement and Israel start together? How did they grow apart? Can the human-rights movement change course, so that it can still highlight violations of human-rights law without falling prey to the obsession with Israel that today undermines its credibility?

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.

2024 marks 820 years since the death of Maimonides in the Egyptian city of Fustat. The main focus of his writing falls in three categories. There's his commentary on the Mishnah and his code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, a monumental contribution to Jewish jurisprudence. His Guide of the Perplexed is a magnum opus of theological and philosophical puzzles and reflection. And his writings about science, health, and medicine are an expression of the expertise he developed in his career as a court physician in Egypt.

Today's episode is the first of a multi-episode mini-series on Maimonides featuring Yehuda Halper of Bar-Ilan University, among the most distinguished scholars today of medieval Jewish philosophy and medieval Islamic philosophy, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver. This week, they begin the series by looking at passages from the Mishneh Torah which describe the purview of Torah study.

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.

In 2023, host Jonathan Silver convened 47 new conversations probing some of the most interesting and consequential subjects in modern Jewish life, from theological and religious themes to political and military ones. He spoke to scholars, visual artists, rabbis, writers, soldiers, strategists, and generals. Now that 2023 has come to an end, he's looking back at a number of representative excerpts from the year past in hopes that, as we plan 40 or 50 more conversations in 2024, you'll return to the archive and listen to some of the most fascinating conversations from this year.

In this episode, we present selections from some of our favorite 2023 conversations. Excerpts include the podcast host and president of Shalem College, Russ Roberts; the great American writer, Cynthia Ozick; the Hebrew calligrapher, Izzy Pludwinski; Peter Berkowitz and Gadi Taub debating judicial reform; Ran Baratz on the roots of Israel's rifts; Michael Doran comparing October's Hamas attacks with the Yom Kippur War; Meir Soloveichik on Jewish martyrs; and, discussing Mosaic's November essay on the Palestinian predicament, the scholar Shany Mor, the journalist Haviv Gur, and the intellectual Hussein Aboubakr.

Finally, this episode ends on a note of hope, sounded by the historian Rick Richman, whose book of biographical portraits, And None Shall Make Them Afraid, turns out to have been the book we most needed this year.

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 is known for its advances in military technology, from the helmet-mounted displays of the newest fighter jets to the Iron Beam anti-missile defense system. (See this recent discussion with the military strategist and author Edward Luttwak about his new book on the subject, or this discussion with the entrepreneur Alon Arvatz about the cyber-specific dimension of Israeli defense.)

But as with everything, there are always tradeoffs to technology. Those tradeoffs are the concern of the Israeli writer Matti Friedman, who recently published an essay in the Atlantic called "Israel Is Dangerously Dependent on Technology." Here, he speaks with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver about that essay, and the tradeoffs for Israeli planners and politicians that have recently arrived.

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, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research released a poll of Palestinian attitudes—attitudes towards Israel, towards Hamas, towards the Palestinian Authority, about the Hamas attacks of October 7, about the conduct of the war since that time, and more.

The findings are eye-opening. Asked if the October 7 attacks were the right thing to do, in light of all that's happened since, 72% of Palestinians think they were. A further 85% said that they have not seen the videos of the October 7 attacks, and the vast majority do not believe that Hamas committed the atrocities that the videos show. Meanwhile, 66% of Palestinian respondents do not support the idea of a two-state solution. Approximately the same number, 63% of Palestinian respondents, believes that armed struggle is the best means of achieving, in the words of the poll, "an end to the occupation and the building of an independent state."

Ghaith al-Omari is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the former executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine, and served as an advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team during the 1999–2001 permanent-status talks (in addition to holding various other positions within the Palestinian Authority). Here, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he breaks down some of this data and offers historical and political context for it.

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.

This week, Mosaic editor and podcast host Jonathan Silver steps into the arena of campus conflict. Alexandra Orbuch is a junior at Princeton, while Gabriel Diamond is a senior at Yale and the co-author of an essay in the New York Times entitled "What is Happening on College Campuses is Not Free Speech." Zach Kessel recently graduated from Northwest and is a fellow at National Review as well as at Tikvah. The three come from different places in the country, have different kinds of religious practices, study different subjects, and none intended to become college activists. Yet all three have found themselves caught up in what they all see as a deteriorating climate for young American Jews.

Do arguments over messages scribbled in chalk on the sidewalk or the presence or absence of posters on message boards matter? These three think they do, and ably explain why. The attitudes that are crystalizing in American universities, particularly elite ones, have a disproportionately large impact on American culture by virtue of the disproportionately large power of their graduates. In other words, questions of chalk messages and posters become proxy expressions of power.

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.

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

In it, Hakakian acknowledges the misgivings that her correspondent—a benighted, well-intentioned, kind-hearted, idealist—has about Israel, and confronts that point of view with her own gratitude for Israel. And by examining the different judgments at which she and her correspondent have arrived, she is also able to shed light on the effects that America has had on Zionism in general.

This week, she joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss her letter, the fervor that now surrounds the subject, and the resurgent presence of the anti-Zionist idealists to whom Hakakian addresses herself.

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.

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

Edward Luttwak is a distinguished military strategist and historian, who, together with Eitan Shamir, has just published a new book called The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israel Defense Forces. Luttwak joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver here to discuss the history of Israeli military-technology innovation, and the political, economic, and cultural factors that make it possible.

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

As it happens, that transformation is not unique to the Hamas attacks of October 2023. It is a pattern of Palestinian transformation that can be observed throughout the history of Israel. This is one of the distinguishing features of the Palestinian predicament, according to the Israeli writer Shany Mor, and it's one of the core themes of a big essay he wrote for us at Mosaic in November 2023, called "Ecstasy and Amnesia in the Gaza Strip."

On November 15, Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver convened a discussion of Mor's essay, along with the Egyptian-American writer Hussein Aboubakr, and the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur. This week's podcast brings you that conversation.

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 the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av in the year 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian forces destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Since then, Tisha b'Av has served as a day of commemorating Jewish tragedy, a day when Jews remember those killed for being Jews and recite kinnot, elegies recounting the sacrifice and suffering that is an inescapable part of the Jewish past.

Tisha b'Av this year, taking place on August 12-13, will be the first since the October 7 attack on Israel, and its arrival raises a number of questions. To examine them, host Jonathan Silver is joined here in conversation by the rabbi J.J. Schacter, who for decades has led important Tisha b'Av services and has reflected deeply on questions of kinnot and memory as both a professional historian and a communal leader and teacher. (He recently delivered a free online video course on the meaning of Jewish memory accessible at memory.tikvahfund.org.)

Together, they explore how the liturgy of Tisha b'Av might be expanded to address October 7, how rabbis decide to commemorate specific events with their own fast days and when are they instead subsumed under the rubric of Tisha b'Av, and what elegies Jews will sing this year and in the future to weave October 7 into the religious consciousness of the Jewish liturgy.

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

Assaf Orion, a retired IDF brigadier general and defense strategist, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver this week to explain how Israel staged its air campaign, why it would help the ground phase, whether the air force's objectives were met, how bombs and missiles can penetrate subterranean targets, and how hostage fatalities could be avoided. Their conversation amounts to a preliminary retrospective on the earliest phase in Israel's response.

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 Israeli officials examined shells and munitions that have been fired into Israel recently by Hamas, they realized that they look like they were not made in Gaza. Similarly, when IDF inspectors looked at some of the rocket launchers Israel captured near the Gaza border, they discovered units with the word Bang-122 written on them in Korean. Bang is evidently an abbreviation of the Korean phrase bangsapo, which means "multiple rocket launcher," and 122 is thought to indicate the caliber—122 millimeters.

It turns out that North Korean arms dealers have been supplying Hamas with rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, laser-guided anti-tank missiles, and more. North Korean engineers, meanwhile, have taught Hamas how to design and build the many tunnels that underneath Gaza.

Bruce Bechtol, a political scientist at Angelo State University and a former Marine, is the author of the recent article "Hamas Is Using North Korean Weapons Against Israel" at the website 19fortyfive.com, and the book, North Korean Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa, published in 2018. Here he joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss how Hamas connected with North Korea, what weapons are involved, and what each side gets out of the arrangement.

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.

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

The Hamas massacre on October 7 has thrown a wrench into that possibility. Senior Hamas operatives live in Turkey and operate there under its protection. On October 11, Erdogan criticized the "shameful methods" that Israel used to strike Hamas targets. On October 25, he disputed the idea that Hamas is a terrorist organization at all, calling them instead mujahadeen—soldiers engaged in jihad. On October 27, he called Israel a war criminal and a pawn of the West. Ambassadors in both nations have been recalled.

Are relations doomed to degrade further? Can they be rescued? Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak is a longtime observer of Turkey based at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and also at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. In June 2022, he wrote an essay in Mosaic looking at Israeli-Turkish relations. Here, he speaks with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to look at that question in the wake of October 7.

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 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.

Suddenly, Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic party's candidate for president. She's been in the public eye for much less time than Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and much less is known about her views on many subjects—including on the U.S.-Israel relationship or America's posture in the Middle East.

For instance, as Israel's war in Gaza ramped up earlier this year, Harris became an outspoken critic of it, and a champion of a ceasefire arrangement between Israel and Hamas on the grounds of humanitarian concern for Palestinian civilians. But it's possible that these attitudes were a product of her role in the Biden administration, that she was assigned the role of bad cop to the president's good cop.

So what does Harris really think about the subject? What role might her Jewish family members play in her views? How does she understand the politics of the U.S.-Israel relationship? To answer those questions, host Jonathan Silver speaks here with Noah Rothman, a senior writer at National Review and the author of a recent essay there called "The Left Thinks It's Getting an Anti-Israel Radical in Kamala Harris." Together, the two also survey the wide coalition of the Democratic party—its elected officials, its voting base, its NGOs and operatives—and try to understand the pressures, the points of leverage, the incentives, and the political vulnerabilities to avoid on questions related to Israel.

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.

Last Saturday, supporters and opponents of Eritrea's president, Isaias Afwerki, confronted one another in violent clashes. Yet rather than in Asmara, Eritrea's capital city, this confrontation took place in the streets of south Tel Aviv. In the second half of the 2000s, east African migration to Israel began to accelerate. Since then, in part due to changes in labor policies and law enforcement and in part to a barrier wall erected along the Egypt-Israel border, the number of new east African migrants has fallen precipitously. Nevertheless, although statistics are hard to come by with great precision, there are probably around 40,000 non-Jewish African migrants living in Israel today.

What brings these mainly Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Sudanese immigrants to the cities and towns of Israel? And how does and how should Israel distinguish between those seeking humanitarian asylum and those looking for work opportunities and social benefits?

These questions have become major points of debate in Israel. Some argue that the state must act in the world as a corrective to the Jewish experience of statelessness in history—that since Jews have so often been migrants and refugees and dependent on the help of others, Israel must help others in need when it can. Others argue that Israel—the political answer to the problems of Jewish statelessness—has an overriding moral obligation to welcome and to secure the lives and liberties of Jews—that it has a special obligation to pursue the ingathering of the Jewish diaspora and so to make a distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants.

To discuss these issues, Yonatan Jakubowicz, formerly an advisor to Israel's Minister of Interior, and a founder of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver.

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.

Podcast: Mordechai Kedar on the Return of Terrorism in the West Bank

Since the end of the second intifada nearly twenty years ago, and the attendant calming of the West Bank, the main source of violence against Israel has been the Gaza Strip. That's involved fewer terrorists blowing themselves up in Israeli cafes and more rockets fired across the border. But over the last year the pace of terrorism from the West Bank is once again accelerating, with two attacks in Israel just this week.

Mordechai Kedar is a scholar of Arab politics and a retired lieutenant colonel in the IDF, where he specialized in military intelligence, focusing on Syria, Arab political discourse, Arab media, and Islamism. Today, in conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he shares his assessment of what's happening in the West Bank.

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.

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

Ran Baratz is the founding editor of the Israeli magazine Mida and a regular contributor to the conservative newspaper Makor Rishon. Speaking here with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, he tries to understand what's really happening now in Israel. If the events of the last six months are not just about judicial reform, then what are they about? And how can any deeper sources of Israeli animosity be understood and addressed? For those who support the protestors, here's a chance to learn how some Israeli conservatives actually think. For those who oppose the protestors, here's a chance to think about their motivations sympathetically. Both endeavors are fitting for democratic citizens of the same nation, and their friends around the world.

 

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.

 

 

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

Dovid Margolin is senior editor at Chabad.org and the author of a new essay, "The Jews in Defiance of History" in the September 2023 issue of Commentary, that looks at Stalin's Great Terror through his own family's legacy. Margolin is a Lubavitcher Hasid, and remarks on the fact that under so much pressure to assimilate—even to the point of persecution and death—the Jews of the Soviet Union did not disappear. That fact leads him to note one of the reasons that the Communist understanding of history cannot be true: because the existence and perpetuation of the Jews disprove it. Here he speaks to Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver about that idea, about his journey, and about his family.

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.