The Tikvah Podcast

• Micah Goodman on What He’s Learned about Israel in the Past Year-and-a-Half

  In the months leading up to the October 7 attacks, Israel was bitterly divided along the tribal lines that had been hardened by the government’s effort to reform the country’s judiciary. There were major protests, acts of civil disobedience, and boycotts, coupled with enormous frustration, distrust, anger, and resentment among Israelis. Then, as you might expect after suffering so grievous and unprovoked an attack as Israelis suffered on October 7, the country responded by unifying, displaying great civic strength. The invisible filaments that hold a society together were pulled taut by the war. Most everyone was a part of it and most everyone was together: volunteering, cooking, babysitting, working, cleaning, helping, schlepping, driving, organizing. When Israel’s men returned to the reserves and left their families, their businesses, their startups, and their careers, friends and neighbors became family and kept each other going. Now, nearly eighteen months into this war, that momentary unity seems like a distant memory. The war continues, and Israeli society is again divided. To discuss these civic tensions, the writer and teacher Micah Goodman joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver. Goodman is the author of seven books, most recently The Eighth Day: Israel After October 7, and in the course of the conversation he speaks about what he has learned in the last year-and-a-half about Zionism, the Israeli people, and the precious, resilient state that they’ve built. This conversation was recorded live in Jerusalem in front of an intimate audience of students attending Tikvah’s Israel Fellowship, a program that overseas students studying in seminaries and yeshivot in Israel can use to supplement their religious study, as well as of members of the Tikvah Society.

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• Mark Gottlieb and Anna Moreland on Judaism, Christianity, and Forgiveness

  To expect women and men of flesh and blood to live lives of ethical perfection is to expect too much. Lapses in judgment, ignorance, vice, and sin are inescapable parts of the human condition. Each year, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, we recite the Al Het prayer, enumerating over 40 sins that we have committed. Sinning is natural, or, as the poet Alexander Pope famously put it, “to err is human, to forgive divine.” And there’s a deep truth to that, for while error and vice are natural to the human condition, religion has introduced into the moral landscape the human imitation of God’s compassion that releases us, and allows us to release one another, from the crushing burden of guilt and vice. That religious innovation is forgiveness, and it plays a central role in the ethical life of Jews and Christians. A society without forgiveness, in which moral stain can never be wiped away, in which no mechanism for absolution exists, is a society that will grow fearful, fragmented, feeble, and frail. A society that is properly calibrated to the inescapable truths of human sin, and also has an instrument that absolves the sinner and and enable him or her to rejoin society, is resilient. A few years ago, American was bound up in a spate of so-called cancellations in which public figures stood accused of some wrong action, wrong statement, or wrong thought, and were deemed unfit for employment or standing in society. And, in the progressive circles that led these efforts to purify the public arena, no apology would suffice. No cleansing was sufficient to remove the stain: once a bigot, always a bigot. It was around that time that a group of Jewish and Christian theologians began meeting to discuss the idea of forgiveness. Over the course of several years of study, reading, and discussion, a statement emerged. “Forgiveness: A Statement by Jews and Christians” was published in the February 2025 issue of First Things magazine. But of course, something of civilizational significance happened while this group convened, and that was the October 7 Hamas attacks, and the adulation of the attackers by American and European activists. In the face of such evil, could forgiveness be offered? Should it be? What are the limitations on forgiveness and what are the moral obligations on the part of the penitent seeking forgiveness? Two of the statement’s signatories, Tikvah’s chief education officer Rabbi Mark Gottlieb and the Villanova University professor Anna Moreland, join Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss these and related themes.

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• Ronna Burger on Reading Esther as a Philosopher (Rebroadcast)

  Today, as Jews celebrate the holiday of Purim, they’ll also study the book of Esther, named for the young queen whose Jewish identity was unknown to her husband—Persia's king—and his court. The book of Esther tells the story of how she and her cousin Mordechai outwitted the king's second-in-command, the vizier Haman, who sought to destroy the Persian Jews. Beloved among children and adults, the story has also been read by some as a manual for Jewish political survival in the Diaspora. Ronna Burger of Tulane University, a professor of philosophy, also sees in Esther a commentary on the sources of human success: do humans accomplish their aims through sheer luck, divine help, or careful decision-making? In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, she walks through Esther, demonstrating how each of these elements—chance, providence, and prudence—emerge from the biblical text.

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• Reihan Salam on Rebuilding Urban Conservatism

  New York City in the 1970s and 1980s was, to put it lightly, not a very safe or nice place to live. Drugs, crime, and public-sector mismanagement made it dangerous and unpleasant, and even the very wealthy were not entirely immune from the disorder. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the city rebounded in an incredible way, and a great deal of that civic revitalization found its roots in the policy research of a small think tank focused on urban affairs, the Manhattan Institute. Utilizing new approaches to law enforcement and other governance matters that scholars at the Manhattan Institute incubated, Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg restored and improved New York. Then came a wave of politicians in city hall and in Albany who forgot the hard-won lessons of the 90s revival, and the city in the last fifteen or so years has experienced a resurgence of crime, drug abuse, untreated mental illness, homelessness, and violence, along with the tell-tale signs of urban decay and disorder. In all of this, as ever, the Jewish community of New York served as the canary in the coal mine, and a spate of anti-Semitic violence preceded and then coincided with the general unraveling. To discuss how this breakdown of order can be halted and reversed, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the irrepressible policy entrepreneur and conservative visionary, the fifth president of the Manhattan Institute, Reihan Salam. Together they address the civic health of New York, the most Jewish city in America; what it takes to re-moralize the culture; what urban conservatism is; and why Salam believes that the work he and his colleagues are doing at the Manhattan Institute could lay the groundwork for New York’s next come back. This conversation was recorded live in Manhattan, in front of an intimate audience of members of the Tikvah Society, so you may hear sirens and street sounds—the soundtrack of New York. 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.

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  42:27
• Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on Why the End of Palestinian Nationalism Can Bring Hope to Palestinians

  Last February, the Egyptian-American intellectual Hussein Aboubakr Mansour wrote an article in which he considered the possibility of a new idea of Palestinian nationalism. The IDF was destroying Hamas. The remnant of the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy and trust among the frustrated Palestinians—already weak—was decaying at an accelerated rate. The grotesque complicity of UNRWA in Hamas’s crimes might yet deal enough of a blow to the international Palestine-human-rights complex that Mansour could allow himself to hope that the old idea of Palestine might be susceptible to being replaced by something different, something more constructive. A consequence of Hamas activating a series of events that led to war and defeat and destruction might also lead to an opportunity to re-found Palestinian nationalism on healthier foundations.   One year later, after watching Palestinians in Gaza cheering the remains of the Bibas children, murdered in Gaza and then kept as monstrous ransom, Mansour recently revised the possibility of a renewed Palestinian nationalism, and in light of all that has transpired, came to a different conclusion altogether.   Today, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy and contributor to Mosaic, joins Jonathan Silver to discuss his essay, “Why There Should Not Be a Palestine,” published on his Substack, the Abrahamic Critique and Digest.

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