The Tikvah Podcast

Israelis voted in national elections this week. There have been dozens of discussions about what the elections portend, what they reveal about the country and its future, the inadequacy of polling, the person of Benjamin Netanyahu, the political identity of Israeli Arabs, and much else. The larger question of who will form the next government remains unsettled.
But there is one conclusion that can be drawn definitively, and it contains an interesting political puzzle. The haredi population of Israel has grown, and continues to grow, both in absolute terms and in terms relative to the rest of the country. It would follow then, that with each election their political power would grow. Yet despite being, for decades, one of the most durable and significant forces in Israeli politics, the haredi parties emerge from the October 2026 elections significantly weakened. How did this happen? And what does it show us about the state of Israel's most politically interesting demographic?
For our analysis of the Israeli election, we're looking inside the haredi bloc with Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer, who leads the Iyun Institute and chairs the rabbinic committee of Hatzibur HaHaredi, one of four new haredi parties that entered this race. Readers of Mosaic will know his important essay, "Israel's Haredim Confront the Burdens of Jewish Self-Government," which makes the case for this new party's coming into being. In conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver, he explains how the haredi parties went from kingmakers to fixed members of Netanyahu's coalition, why Shas lost so much of its traditional Mizrahi following to Likud and to Otzma Yehudit, and why, at a moment of such evident disillusionment, none of the new parties, his own included, came close to the threshold.
This conversation was recorded on October 29, before the final results were certified and before efforts to form a government have officially begun.

A number of books have now been written about October 7, some of them very moving, even haunting. Today's podcast focuses on a different kind of October 7 book, and this one is valuable because it is a first cut of the history of what followed October 7, and focuses on decision-making and leadership in the war Israel waged against Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran. We get to see inside the decision-making process as the military and political leaders of Israel determined who would be fought first, how, and when, and how they argued, maneuvered, and bore the weight of those consequential decisions.
That focus invites a particular kind of reading. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides believed that the war between Athens and Sparta, for all its particularity, could instruct statesmen in the future. He called his history of the war "a possession for all time." Thucydides' method was to place before the reader the speeches and deliberations of the main actors as they happened, with imperfect information and without knowing how any campaign would turn out. A future general or statesman, pondering what he would have done in the same position, could use Thucydides' account to refine his own judgment.
Today's podcast treats the last three years of Israel's war in a similar way. Joining Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver are Yonah Jeremy Bob, senior military correspondent and intelligence analyst at the Jerusalem Post, and Elliot Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal. Their new book, In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight against Hamas and the Iranian Axis, draws on extensive access to Israel's political, military, and intelligence leadership, and to officials in the Biden and Trump administrations.
This episode takes up three of the war cabinet's decisions and tries, in each case, to understand the kind of problem the decision-makers thought they were responding to.
These decisions expose rivalries within the military establishment, that establishment's struggle with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the ways each side used the American alliance against the other. We also see a Netanyahu many will not recognize, one who began the war cautious and only gradually became the author of its boldest strokes in Lebanon and Iran.

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.

Fauda is one of the most surprising and interesting success stories of the streaming age. When conventional opinion looks with such studied contempt on Jewish expressions of strength and violence for the sake of national security, Netflix somehow greenlit a show that brings unvarnished depictions of precisely that to screens across the globe. It follows a unit of Israeli counterterrorism agents who embed among Arabic-speaking adversaries to gather intelligence and neutralize threats. The show is fabulously well done. And, well before October 7, 2023, one of its narrative arcs explored the presence of Hamas operatives in and underneath a major hospital complex in Gaza.
This week's podcast discusses the final episode of the latest season of Fauda, but not from the perspective of intelligence and counterintelligence, or from the perspective of Israeli security, or even from the perspective of the Zionist exercise of power—all of which would be worthy angles of analysis. This week, we discuss the latest season's final moments from the perspective of Jewish ritual and Jewish religious ideas
Today's guest is Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who has just published an article about Fauda in the October 2026 edition of Commentary, titled "This Is Not Fauda, This Is Real Life." We discuss the relationship of art to truth, kaddish and covenant, whether the Jewish state can ever be a normal state, operating in the normal canons of politics, and what Fauda reveals about the Jewish return to history.

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.