The Tikvah Podcast

If you have been following the news from France over the last few weeks, you have seen the images of cities in flames and high-school students in the streets. And if you have been reading the American press, you have probably read that these protests began with teachers striking over the conditions in their schools. There are too many children in the classrooms, too few teachers, the buildings are falling apart, and it was too hot this summer to learn. All that may be true, but this account appears to leave out quite a lot about what really matters. Looking at the protests, one sees Palestinian flags, not French flags, and keffiyehs draped over the shoulders and shrouding the faces of the demonstrators. What on earth do these symbols have to do with school buildings and faculty-to-student ratios in France? Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and previously led the American Jewish Committee's work in Europe for many years. Earlier this month she published an essay in the Free Press called "Why France Is Burning," and recently joined the Tikvah Podcast to delve into the different forces at work. With Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver, Rodan-Benzaquen explores the political logic of these protests, the economic reality that underlies them, the generational anxieties that are being expressed there, and why a whole amalgam of French grievances are arrayed against the Jews and the Jewish state.

On September 30, 2026, a flight took off from Dubai International Airport for Tel Aviv, with 174 passengers and a crew of six. Over the skies of Saudi Arabia, Flydubai Flight 1073's first officer stabbed the captain and tried to hijack the plane in order to crash it into the earth. The plane dove from 34,000 feet to 17,000 feet in less than a minute. Despite suffering from stab wounds, the captain was able to unlock the cockpit door and some of the Israeli passengers on board managed to restrain the assailant, level off the plane, and treat the pilot while the plane was brought to an emergency landing. All 180 passengers and crew survived what was very nearly a catastrophic act of terrorism. Today's conversation was recorded in the weeks between two anniversaries. September 11, 2001 is now a quarter-century behind us, and October 7, 2023 took place three years ago. For those of us old enough to remember 9/11, the weeks between these two dark days are something of a season of remembrance. That remembrance helps to put this foiled attack into perspective Earlier this week, the assailant attempted to turn a passenger jet into a weapon, as the terrorists did on 9/11. And the people who prevented him from succeeding belong to the nation that was attacked on October 7. These two anniversaries and last week's attack are all connected—just as America (the "great Satan") and Israel (the "lesser Satan") are connected in the minds of our mutual adversaries. They're connected in other ways, too, and how such events are remembered is the subject of this week's conversation with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a fellow at JINSA's Gemunder Center and the author of the Abrahamic Metacritique Substack. In the latest installment of his Mosaic column, Via Maris, Hussein, explored "How October 7th Inherited the Guilt of September 11th." He observes that in a growing number of quarters in American life, September 11 is remembered less as an atrocity committed against Americans than as the first chapter of a story about American wrongdoing. That same inversion, of an attacked party being accused as the author of the attack against it, is also the story of Israel after October 7, and in Hussein's analysis, the pattern that took a quarter of a century to fall into place after 9/11 was already set to spring into action when Hamas invaded Israel. Today, he joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss that pattern and how it took hold.

"I cried to the Lord out of my distress, and he heard me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried and Thou didst hear my voice. For Thou didst cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all Thy billows and Thy waves passed over me." This is from the book of Jonah, and in these verses from its second chapter we find the prophet from the Galilee praying from inside a great fish that had swallowed him in the ocean. "The waters compassed me about, to the point of death;" Jonah said, "the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars closed on me forever: yet hast Thou brought up my life from the pit." Jonah is a short book, four chapters, and one of the most unusual in the prophetic corpus. A prophet is commanded to go and warn a great and hostile city, and instead of arguing with God, the way Moses and Jeremiah do when they are summoned to prophesy, Jonah flees in the opposite direction. He ends up in the belly of a fish, offering words of thanksgiving for a rescue that has not yet happened. When God does save him, and Jonah finally delivers his warning, the city repents completely, expressing contrition and donning sackcloth. But Jonah is disappointed that his prophecy of destruction did not come true. The book ends with God asking Jonah a question that he doesn't answer. To try to make sense of this puzzling book, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver spoke with Jon D. Levenson, the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School. This conversation airs just before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, when the book of Jonah is typically recited. Levenson and Silver discuss the pagan sailors on Jonah's ship who behave, by any ordinary measure, more piously than the prophet does; what it means that Jonah identifies himself to those sailors as a Hebrew, and what that word signified to them. They also address the book's satirical qualities, and look closely at this biblical portrait of a man whose perception of the world is so markedly limited, so at odds with what God wants from him. In short, they seek to uncover the strangeness of Jonah son of Amittai.

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.

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.

Traditional Jews pray in a minyan, a quorum of ten men who form the communal setting in which an individual Jew prays as a part of the Jewish people. In January of 2021, a man named Daniel Grand sent an email to some of his friends, seeing if he could organize a minyan at his home. He lives in University Heights, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, too far from his synagogue to walk on Shabbat and holidays when driving is forbidden by Jewish law. A neighbor saw the invitation and complained to the mayor's office, after which the city sent Grand a cease-and-desist letter. Praying with guests in his home, the city told him, made his house a place of worship, and a place of worship requires a zoning permit he did not have. A public hearing followed, at which neighbors said, on the record, that they did not want the area known as a Jewish neighborhood. Without the proper zoning and permitting, the city arranged for police surveillance of Grand's house. His neighbors set up cameras to make sure that visitors would not come there to pray. And there was, in the fine print of the city's own code, a cruelty that reads almost like satire: had Grand actually won his permit, transforming his home into a house of worship, he and his family would have had to move, since a house of worship cannot also be a residence. Grand sued the city, and his case was thrown out because the court held that it was not yet ripe, a legal term that refers to the fact that the local zoning board had not yet ruled against him, and was officially still considering his application. This December, the Supreme Court will consider the case of Grand v. University Heights. To discuss this case, Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic and host of the Tikvah podcast, is joined by John Bursch, who is one of the attorneys representing Grand. Bursch is senior counsel and vice-president of appellate advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom and a veteran of many oral arguments before the Supreme Court, and formerly served as a solicitor general in the state of Michigan.

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.