About 120,000 Jews live in Toronto, a city of about three million residents. Eight out of every ten hate crimes in this city involve what local officials call an “anti-Jewish occurrence.” Then there is Montreal, with its 90,000 Jews and its total population of about 1.8 million. There, in the three months following October 7, 132 hate crimes were directed at Jews, which is ten times the number of total reported hate crimes as during the entire year of 2022. In fact, there has been, across Canada, a 670-percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents since October 7. This is in a nation of about 40 million, of which just 350,000 are Jewish. These data come from a blockbuster article by Terry Glavin, published last week. In Canada, hardly a week goes by, it seems, where synagogues are not vandalized, burned, or shot at. Moreover, the conventions that predominate elite institutions, government, media, and NGOs all hold as an orthodoxy that Israel is a unique evil, guilty of every modern sin. How did liberal, polite Canada become such a menacing place for its Jewish citizens?

Terry Glavin, a columnist with the National Post and a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his recent article in the Free Press, “The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada.” This article tells the story of how a liberal country collapsed into progressive ideological commitments, which, when applied to immigration policy, and laced with the intersectional logic of a racialized social doctrine, lost the capacity to resist institutional capture by the activists who most hate the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

On March 8, 1963, the Baath party overthrew the government of Syria, and since then the Assad family has ruled the country—until last weekend, when the son of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad, fled to Russia. The 60-year Baathist domination of Syria came to an end, deposed by a Sunni Islamist organization called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Whereas many current conversations are, appropriately, focused on the military and political revolution that Syrians are now living through, the ideological revolution deserves equal consideration. There is no way of knowing how long the current government in Syria, or the Syrian state as we know it, will endure. We don’t know if the new regime will be just and serve its people well, or whether it will be corrupt and tyrannical. We don’t know how Syria will relate to the West, to America, or to Israel. But by recovering the ideological genealogy of Baathism, from which Syria’s present rulers fought to free their country, we can begin to try to understand Arab politics the way that Arab intellectuals do. To that end, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a writer, student of the modern Middle East, and senior fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.

Over 33,000 undergraduates are enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, known universally by its acronym, UCLA. It’s one of the most competitive schools in the country, accepting less than 9 percent of its applicants. Among the current undergraduate student body, Hillel International estimates that there are about 2,500 Jewish students.

The story of informal discrimination against Jewish students on prestigious campuses is, by now, a sad and familiar story. And in fact, that story is not foreign to Jewish students at UCLA. Worse still, an undergraduate Jewish leader on campus, Bella Brannon, has recently filed a motion with the student government alleging not informal, social discrimination, but formal employment discrimination against Jewish students.

Here some background is necessary. UCLA has an active student government: the Undergraduate Students Association Council, known by its acronym, USAC. USAC is organized in various offices and commissions, one of which is the Cultural Affairs Commission, or CAC. According to CAC’s website, it is “meant to ignite conversation regarding current events” and “facilitate exhibitions of creativity.” It supports dance, art, music, culinary festivals, poetry readings, and tours of culturally significant areas of Los Angeles.

An elected member of the student body is charged with administering each of these commissions, and receives from the university a modest honorarium or payment of some kind for that service as well as a budget to hire fellow students to manage the commission’s many programs. Because UCLA is a public university, a good deal of that money comes from California taxpayers.

Brannon’s motion claims that the current CAC commissioner has made explicit a policy to disqualify Jewish students, described as Zionists, from employment at the commission. Her motion was recently described in an article in UCLA’s Jewish newspaper, Ha’Am, by the undergraduate writer Benjie Katz. This week, these two students, Bella Brannon and Benjie Katz—who are both leaders of the campus Tikvah chapter—join Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss their experiences.

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.

Modeh ani l’fanekha, I thank you, are the first words uttered by observant Jewish women and men every day of their waking life. The first conscious thought is one of gratitude. The impulse to give thanks is a natural human sentiment, as we are reminded during this American season of thanksgiving. 

How does gratitude appear in the biblical text, and how does the Hebrew Bible’s moral teaching instruct the natural impulse to gratitude? On this week’s podcast the CEO of Bnai Zion, the rabbi and scholar Ari Lamm—who has thought deeply about the biblical text, its drama, and its cultural and religious significance—discusses these questions with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

Jewish Americans have been loyally voting for Democratic presidential candidates since the early decades of the 20th century. And a very great many Jews supported Vice-President Harris in the election earlier this month. But the exit-poll results reported by most news outlets—that 79 percent of the Jewish voting public cast their ballots for Harris—are, at the very least, open to some very serious questions, and probably altogether unrepresentative.

The poll that generated the figure of 79-percent Jewish support for the Democratic nominee, it turns out, does not include results from the states of New York, New Jersey, and California—three states that contain some of the most densely populated Jewish voting districts, and that are homes to those Jewish subpopulations that are a great deal more likely to support Republican policies and Republican candidates. A poll that excludes the most populous Jewish cities, and that excludes most Orthodox communities, is a poll that necessarily will reveal a distorted picture that privileges Jewish populations that tend to vote for Democrats.

Fortunately, other information is available. Maury Litwack is the founder and CEO of Teach Coalition, a lobbying organization active in at least seven states that aims to make it easier for religious parents to send their children to religious schools. He and his team conducted their own exit poll of Jewish voters, looking at places that tend to have a higher concentration of Jewish citizens—the swing state of Pennsylvania and the swing Congressional districts in New York State. The Teach Coalition poll found that Harris did not win more than 50 percent of the Jewish vote in those districts.

On this week’s podcast, Litwack joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his analysis of these data. He does not see evidence that all Jews are becoming Republican, or that they all support President Trump, or that all Orthodox Jews are doing so. There are certainly trends that point in that direction, but they’re not sustained by the findings of this poll. What is sustained by the findings of this poll is that the Jewish vote is up for grabs—and that both parties ought to be competing for it. Thus the Democratic party that has the most to lose if it believes that it still has the Jewish vote in its pocket—an unfounded belief that is reinforced every time the figure of 79 percent is repeated.

This week, in their liturgical recitation and study of the Hebrew Bible, Jewish communities all over the world will relive the terrifying moment when God commands Abraham to take his son, his beloved son, who was to be his heir and fulfill his deepest dreams for family transmission and ancestry, Isaac, and sacrifice him.

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 to discuss these questions on this week’s podcast (originally broadcast in 2023) 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.

America has just elected a new president, or rather, a new-old president. Donald Trump will be the first American president since Grover Cleveland to be elected to non-consecutive terms. All transitions between presidential administrations have an awkward aspect, felt especially during the months between the election and when the incumbent takes office. This period, when the successor has already been named by the electorate but does not yet have any official power, is when a lame-duck session of Congress meets, and the president himself is called a lame-duck president.

During this period, the president—while retaining all of his constitutional authority—nevertheless tends to diminish in the power hierarchy of Washington. Presidential power is based, to a very large degree, on the possibility of promising something in the future, and lame-duck presidents don’t have a future in which they can fulfill any promises. It can also be a period when, unconstrained by the need to run for office again, a president can put executive orders and other kinds of policies in place without worrying about their political consequences. So it can be a period of troublemaking.

Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), fears that a lame-duck Biden administration might decide to target Israel with executive action in very damaging ways. Dubowitz has spent decades working on financial warfare and sanctions in and out of government, and he is an expert on Iran’s nuclear program.

In order to follow this conversation, there are a couple of things it helps to know. First, in December 2016, during President Obama's lame-duck period, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2334, which conveyed that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem are illegal. The U.S. could have vetoed the resolution, but instead abstained.

The second is Executive Order 14115, which President Biden signed back in February, which gives the State and Treasury Departments authorization to sanction individuals and entities who undermine peace and security in the very areas Security Council Resolution 2334 determined Israelis may not live in. Sanctions have already been levied against some Israelis—some of whom genuinely do undermine peace, and some of whom do not. Dubowitz joins Jonathan Silver to warn of the danger that the president will use the last weeks of his term to take accelerated action under these authorities.

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 25 of this year, Israel carried out a series of retaliatory strikes on military targets in Iran. The Iranian supreme leader has made public pronouncements ordering his military to prepare a series of counterstrikes, though, as of this recording, those counterstrikes have not yet commenced. The prospect of a continued exchange of aerial attacks between Israel and Iran has captured the world’s attention, and for good reason: Iran is a nuclear-threshold state operating in close coordination with Russia.

This shift in attention has taken media coverage away from Lebanon, but in fact, the Israeli military’s operational successes in that country over the last month raise some very important questions. Hizballah has been degraded significantly—its arsenal diminished, its leadership eliminated, its command structure disrupted, its lines of communication fractured, its decision-making process broken, its finances destroyed.

How, in light of this, does Hizballah continue to operate? And how does Israel leverage these impressive tactical successes into a strategic victory that will allow the citizens of the Galilee and the Golan to return to their homes?

Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury Department senior official and the author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, discusses these questions and others with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

The Zionist writer Ahad Ha’am famously remarked that more than the Jewish people kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jewish people. There is a deep truth that is embedded in the organization of time, the ritualization of communal ceremonies of remembrance and praise, and the recapitulation of the traumas and triumphs of the past: that the calendar can function as a source of national solidarity. Living in rhythm with the Jewish calendar and all that entails is what makes Jews, Jews. The calendar is the instrument that the Jewish people developed to teach our children Jewish history and the fundamental principles of Judaism, and it is what sustains and reinforces those principles throughout the span of a person’s life. It serves, you might say, as a strategy for national cohesion. Jewish nationhood depends on the organization of Jewish hours, days, weeks, and months.

In this episode of the Tikvah Podcast, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver speaks with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who has just published a new book that interprets each of the Jewish holidays in light of how it contributes to Jewish national belonging. Rabbi Soloveichik leads Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue; is the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University; and is the impresario of the website MeirSoloveichik.com, where you can find all of his writing along with his many video courses and podcasts, including his daily commentary on the Hebrew Bible, Bible365. His new book Sacred Time was published in 2024 by Koren.

That the Jews have survived is one of the great mysteries of history, and for some theologians, Jewish survival is even an indication of God’s providence. The stronger the force against the Jews, the more miraculous their resilience and endurance.

But that mystery has another dimension to it–because in America, the Jewish community is not doing well at all. And that’s not because America is like Egypt or Spain or Germany–in fact it’s precisely because America is so decent, so good, and so welcoming that the Jewish community finds itself contracting and growing shallower.

There is a powerful countertrend among the Orthodox subpopulations of American Jewry. Their rates of generational retention and inmarriage are high. Jewish education is advanced, and even flourishing. The U.S.-Israel relationship tends to be a salient issue in their approach to public affairs. But the Orthodox segment of American Jewry is very small. What about the other 85 or 90 percent?

Elliott Abrams, the chairman of Tikvah and a distinguished foreign-policy expert, is the author of a new book addressing these topics, If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century. Abrams takes comprehensive stock of the available data on American Jewish communal life and then poses a question. The Orthodox Jews of America have a formula that works. But what can be done to strengthen the Jewish attachments and Jewish identities of the non-Orthodox? What do the data tell us? Abrams joins Mosaic‘s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss If You Will 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.