The Tikvah Podcast

By Tikvah

The Tikvah Fund is a philanthropic foundation and ideas institution committed to supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish State. Tikvah runs an... more

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The podcast currently has 501 episodes available.

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Number 1: Avi Shilon on the Legacy of the Altalena
By the spring of 1948, three armed Jewish militias had been fighting and working towards the birth of modern Israel. There was the Haganah, under David Ben-Gurion, which would become the core of the new Israel Defense Forces. There was the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and a smaller group, the Lehi. Begin agreed to dissolve the Irgun units operating in Israel into the new army, a decision he made in the name of national unity and cohesion even though tensions between the Irgun and the Haganah were deep, and Haganah operatives had previously informed on their counterparts in the Irgun to British officials. Even so, the Irgun had pledged to become a part of the IDF in the newly formed state of Israel. A month after Ben-Gurion declared independence, a ship named the Altalena set sail from France under the auspices of the Irgun, carrying rifles and some 900 immigrants, many of them survivors of the Shoah. The ship left port the same day a United Nations cease-fire took effect, a truce that barred the importation of any new arms or combatants into the country. When it reached the coast at Kfar Vitkin just north of Tel Aviv, a dispute broke out over how the weapons would be distributed, and in particular over Begin's insistence that a share go to an Irgun battalion in Jerusalem, which he argued stood outside the truce's terms since Jerusalem's status remained unsettled under the UN partition plan. The standoff turned violent onshore, and Begin ordered the ship to sail south, to Tel Aviv, in full view of the city and the international press. Near what is today Frishman Beach, Ben-Gurion gave the order to open fire on the ship, and by this time, with Begin aboard, on his main political rival. Two officers refused before a third accepted the command. Sixteen Irgun men and three IDF soldiers were killed. And Begin, standing on the burning deck with comrades dying around him, ordered his own men not to fire back. He would repeat that order over the radio that night: never, he said, could he condone a war between brothers. The specter of the Altalena has haunted Israeli politics ever since. It plays a potent and mythological role in the imagination of the political right as one of the earliest examples of a centralized government dominated by the political left that uses the power of the state against its domestic opponents. Now, six weeks before an Israeli election, the wreckage of the Altalena has been discovered. To discuss the ship's sinking and the significance of its recovery, Jonathan Silver, the host of the Tikvah podcast and the editor of Mosaic, is joined by the historian, educator, and writer Avi Shilon. Shilon is the author of, among other works of scholarship, the definitive biography of Menachem Begin, published in 2012 by Yale University Press.
August 28, 202653min
Number 2: Rachel Fish on the Corruption of Jewish Studies
Friends of Israel and enemies of Israel both commit the same mistake when they assume that, in American colleges and universities, the faculty hired to teach Jewish subjects are, in their own way, supportive of the Jewish state. The assumption is a reasonable one, and each side's error mirrors the other. The friends of Israel naturally suppose that academic scholars of Jewish history, Jewish thought, the history of Israel, and the arts and letters of Hebrew are there to offer context and support and are both capable of and inclined to explain Israel's case on campus. That doesn't mean that they would be expected to support any particular Israeli policy or Israeli politician or each and every maneuver of the Israeli military, but that they support Zionism in some fundamental sense. And Israel's enemies think that same thing, but of course from the opposite point of view, seeing in the entire enterprise of Jewish studies and all of its related fields and disciplines a vehicle for propaganda. It turns out that both are wrong. There's a good chance that an average member of a faculty of Jewish studies, Israel studies, Hebrew studies, or Holocaust studies holds a documented public position against Israel. Nearly four in ten of the professors specifically teaching Jewish civilization on American campuses are on the record as being hostile to Israel. Those data come from newly released findings of the largest audit yet undertaken of the views of professors of Jewish civilization in America, published recently by the Ronn Torossian Foundation and a publication called The Olam. The audit's own headline number is higher still—better than half, and past 70 percent at the Ivies—but that figure blends named professors together with institutional listings and petition tallies. The number above is the most important: faculty individually identified as teaching these subjects, and what they've put on the public record. To think through what this means, Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic and host of the Tikvah podcast, is joined by Rachel Fish. Fish is a scholar of modern Israel, Zionist thought, and contemporary anti-Semitism, and the incoming CEO of the Israel Institute. They discuss not just these numbers, but how a discipline built to study Jewish civilization on serious scholarly terms ends up, in a meaningful share of cases, working against that civilization's national survival. We talk about what it means for the pipeline that produces the next generation of professors: graduate admissions, dissertation topics, and the hiring committees that decide who gets to teach. And I ask her about what a Jewish family sending a child to campus in the coming weeks needs to understand before that student walks into the classroom.
August 21, 202654min
Number 3: Eliana Aiken on the Information War against the Jews
Even the most casual consumer of social media has noticed it. The explosion of anti-Jewish memes, videos, grotesque jokes, snickering, trolling—and, in a different register, material that is quite a bit darker—has flooded our screens. Since October 7, we've grown accustomed to talking about the rise of anti-Semitism as though it were the weather, a cloudy mood that settled over American campuses and American streets that we can describe and deplore and hope that it passes. Today's guest argues that this way of thinking misses the point entirely, because much of what looks like weather is in fact the product of arson, much of what seems like spontaneous surges in anti-Semitism is in fact the deliberate practice of information warfare by Russia, Iran, and China against the United States. Eliana Aiken is a policy fellow at Defense Technology Alliance, and her August essay in Mosaic explores "Anti-Semitism as Information Warfare." The essay walks us through the machinery of this campaign in granular detail. It explains what troll farms and SIM farms are. It explains how bots manufacture the appearance of popularity. She reports on research that points toward the astroturfing of figures like Nick Fuentes, whose content is amplified at a rate no organic audience could produce. Aiken's argument is that, in anti-Semitism, America's adversaries have found a potent tool to divide Americans, sow confusion and disorder in American society, turn Americans against one another, and distract the country from their own offensive strategic maneuvering. She discusses that argument in conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver.
September 11, 20261h 2min
Number 4: Michael Weingrad on Contemporary Israeli Poetry
Man is a storytelling animal, and conveying the experience of the human condition in poetry and prose helps us understand and contend with it. That's true in all times and places, and it is why students of a society and its culture have much to learn from its poets. Contemporary Israel is one of the most interesting societies anywhere on earth, and its poets encompass the depth of its culture—God and man, the inescapability of war, human vices large and small. Today, we take a peek into their work. Making this possible is Michael Weingrad, a scholar of modern Hebrew and Jewish literature who is on the faculty of Hillsdale College, where he is helping to build a new undergraduate program in Judaism and Western Civilization. Weingrad recently founded an online publication, the New Jerusalem Review, where he publishes his translations of contemporary Hebrew verse into English. Today, he sat down with Jonathan Silver, the host of the Tikvah podcast and the editor of Mosaic, to introduce some of the most revealing selections from some of his favorite writers. The subject is important not only because of the intrinsic value of poetry, but also because anglophone literary culture has grown hostile to Israeli and Jewish writers, especially since October 7, and the poems Weingrad translates are not the safe, well-behaved kind of poetry that makes its way into the standard anthologies. They come out of a Hebrew-language literary world that most American readers, Jewish or Gentile, have almost no access to—a world that includes religious and secular, skeptics of multilateral summits and peace processes, and even conservatives. This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Kenneth Weiss in memory of his father, Eliezer Lipa ben Uri. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
September 04, 202654min
Number 5: Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin on the Legacy of Masada
In the spring of the year 73, after Jerusalem had already fallen to Roman forces, 960 Jews atop a desert fortress chose death by their own hand rather than surrender. We know the story because of Josephus, the 1st-century Jewish historian and former rebel commander who turned chronicler of the very revolt he had once been a part of. Yesterday was Tisha b'Av, which commemorates the destruction of the two Temples. Josephus records another catastrophe: Masada, the last stand of the Sicarii, the most militant faction of the Jewish rebels, against Rome, and a mass suicide that Jewish tradition has argued over ever since. Was it heroism? Was it madness? Should the Jews of Masada instead have followed in the path chosen by Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and the sages at Yavneh—accommodating the enemy to preserve the Torah? This week's podcast is an episode of The Pillars, a series produced by the Lobel Center for Jewish Classical Education and hosted by Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin. In this episode, Rabbi Rocklin takes up Josephus's account directly—what it asks of us, what the rabbis made of it, and what it has come to mean for the modern state of Israel. The episode first aired this past March, but its questions are the questions Jews are reflecting on during this week in the liturgical calendar, about the demands of Jewish sovereignty and God's providence in history.
July 24, 202630min