The Tikvah Podcast The Tikvah Fund

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.

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.