The Tikvah Podcast The Tikvah Fund

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.