The Tikvah Podcast

In April of this year, Israel's Foreign Ministry created a position that had never before existed: special envoy to the Christian world. The appointment came after a string of incidents that have strained Israel's standing with Christian communities: an IDF soldier destroyed a statue of Jesus in Lebanon; during the war with Iran, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pizzaballa, was barred for safety reasons from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; a nun was assaulted in Jerusalem; and videos of Jewish Israelis despicably spitting on Christians have gone viral on social media. There are not very many of these incidents, thankfully, but each and every one does enormous damage to Israel's standing and contradicts all of the good work that Israel does to keep its Christian minority safe. Aside from the publicity problems that they create, these incidents (with the exception of the protective measures that kept worshippers from Jerusalem's holy places during a ballistic-missile attack) are in and of themselves wrong. That's why they've been so roundly condemned by the highest levels of Israeli government, including by Prime Minister Netanyahu. In response, the foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar has appointed one person to mediate Israel's relationship with the Christian world as a full-time charge.

That person is George Deek, a veteran Israeli diplomat, an Arab Christian whose family has lived in Jaffa for hundreds of years, and the first Christian in Israel's history to reach ambassadorial rank, serving in Nigeria, Norway, and finally Azerbaijan before assuming this post.

In today's podcast, Ambassador Deek addresses those incidents directly, distinguishing isolated wrongdoing from patterns that demand real institutional response. He lays out an argument about why Israel's bond with the Christian world is simultaneously theological and strategic and delineates his strategy in relation to the major cultural crises of our moment: that the Middle East is losing its ancient minorities at the same time the West is losing its confidence, and that both crises stem from the same failure to answer honestly the question of what went wrong—a failure that too easily curdles into blame, and from blame into anti-Semitism.

This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jeffrey Druckman and Erica Goldman in memory of Vicki Frolich. 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.

When students begin to study international politics, they meet some very old and well-established schools of thought. These approaches disagree about a fundamental question: what is the most important kind of information to acquire? One school of thought recommends studying power: who holds the weapons, and who fears whom. From that, the thinking goes, you'll be able to map the hierarchies and relationships that tell you everything essential that you need to know. Another recommends studying the cultures and dominant ideas that constitute the spirit of a given regime—to try to understand the way a nation will behave based on what it loves, what it honors, and how it understands itself. 
Of course, ideally you would want to understand both. This week, I'm bringing together two of the most sophisticated, interesting analysts of the Middle East to discuss how they approach the region.
When Michael Doran looks at the Middle East, he focuses relative power. Doing so gives him the ability to separate the signal from the noise. The vitality of theological disputes and national cultures is constrained by the ability of the state to deploy force, whether in Iran, Egypt, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia. When Hussein Aboubakr Mansour looks at the Middle East, by contrast, he sees a set of ideologies whose provenance he traces back to European philosophy.
How do these two angles of vision relate to one another, and what does each offer? And what do they reflect back to us about America and the West? 
Michael Doran is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute, and host, together with Gadi Taub, of the podcast Israel Update, which is cosponsored by Hudson and Tablet.
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is a fellow at JINSA's Gemunder Center, a columnist at Mosaic, and the author of the Abrahamic Metacritique on Substack.
This conversation was recorded live in front of an audience of elite undergraduates, participating in this year's Beren Summer Fellowship, where this week, Michael Doran and Hussein Aboubakr Mansour have been resident faculty members.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Vicki Phillips in memory of Phyllis Bordorf. 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.

Today's conversation is about a publishing project: the Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel. The concept of the series is that it takes the books of the Hebrew Bible and sets them back down in the world that produced them—in the Land of Israel, and in the economic, political, theological, and cultural setting of the ancient Near East. Around each verse it gathers what is known about that world: its archaeology and geography, the languages and the treaties and the pantheon of gods of the tribes and nations and empires among whom Israel was situated. In its modest form, the claim behind all this is one almost no one would dispute: to know the world a text came from can help you understand the text better.
But a less modest claim is folded inside the modest one. For roughly two centuries, the academic study of the Bible used much of this same material—archaeology, comparisons with other sources from the ancient Near East—to take the text apart: to dissolve it into sources and redactors, to historicize revelation until what remained was an artifact of clumsy human pastiche. This series takes up the same tools and turns them to the opposite purpose. Here the history does not dissolve the text. It mediates the text, and more intimate knowledge of the ancient world carries the reader toward the integrity of the Tanakh, rather than away from it. The instruments that an earlier generation of scholars deployed to disenchant the Hebrew Bible are, in this series, put into the service of reading it with intellectual and religious integrity.
And, now that Koren has published all five volumes of the Humash (the Five Books of Moses), as well as the books of Samuel, something else becomes clear. Proximity to the Land of Israel itself helps to open up the meaning of the text. If knowing how a field was watered, or how a city withstood a siege, brings the verse nearer, then the return to the Land of Israel is not only a political restoration. It is also a condition for reading our sacred scripture with greater fidelity. For most of our history, most Jews studied Torah in exile, praying and longing for, but at a great distance from, places in which the story of ancient Israel unfurls. Conversely, the ingathering of the Jews in the land of their fathers can change the way they read the text, so that Zionism itself enhances the learning of Torah.
The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel is a marvelous accomplishment, and it has been captained by the series's editor, David Arnovitz. Arnovitz joins the Tikvah Podcast this week to discuss the book of Deuteronomy, the series as a whole, and the wager it makes about history, about the land, and about the rediscovery of the Hebrew Bible.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Vicki Phillips in memory of Stanley Bordorf. 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.

This week we bring you a conversation between Eric Cohen, president and CEO of Tikvah, and the former vice-president of the United States, Mike Pence. The conversation was recorded before a live audience at the Fund for American Studies, and we are grateful to our friends at TFAS for the invitation and for the work they do: forming young leaders in the principles of individual liberty, free markets, and honorable leadership, and sending them out to advance the cause of a free society in their communities and around the world.
The conversation opens where so much American reflection on these questions begins, with George Washington's letters to the Jews of Newport and Savannah—the promise of religious liberty on the one hand, and the vision of America as a providential, almost-chosen nation on the other. Those two ideas do not sit together easily, and Cohen and the vice-president think together about what they mean and how they relate: the biblical sources of the founding, the place of Scripture in American education, the case for school choice and the renewal of the universities, and the meaning of federalism in the conservative project.
At the heart of this conversation is a fascinating discussion about American expressions of Christianity. Cohen, speaking as a religious Jew, believes that the strengthening of American Christianity is the surest hope for American renewal, and he also warns that a strain of anti-Semitism now gathering strength on the political right would turn that Christianity to perverse ends. To these comments Vice-President Pence adds his reflections about religious culture, and together, Cohen and Pence arrive at a description of a Hebraic Christianity and a Hebraic America—a country that understands the Hebrew Bible not as an atavistic relic, but as the foundation it has in fact always been.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jessica and PJ Heyer. 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.

In 2024, the Atlantic ran a splashy feature titled "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books." Professors at the Ivy League and at other elite universities reported that their students, among the most credentialed young people in the country, could no longer make their way through a whole book. One Columbia professor described his bewilderment when a student told him she had never once been assigned a full book in high school.
At Tikvah we work with hundreds of educators, and they have observed that it's not only the skill of reading that is in decline; it's also the culture around reading, the patience and attention and habits of the mind that really important books demand.
That is where Rabbi Mark Gottlieb begins the conversation you are about to hear. Rabbi Gottlieb has been a guest on the Tikvah Podcast before. He is a senior adviser and treasured colleague at Tikvah, and the head of school at the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson School in Las Vegas, Nevada.
At the most recent Marom conference, the annual Tikvah gathering of Jewish day-school leaders, he sat down with Shilo Brooks for a session called "A Republic of Readers: Why Great Books Make Good Citizens." Dr. Brooks runs the George W. Bush Presidential Center and hosts the Free Press podcast Old School. He is also living proof of the stakes. As he tells it, the great books did not merely educate him. They saved his life.
Tikvah does not want simply want to air complaints about how the culture of reading has eroded, but to do something about it. This summer, Tikvah Online Academy is running a series of book-clubs for rising sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, live over Zoom. They will tackle The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Phantom Tollbooth, Tom Sawyer, The Life of Frederick Douglass, and more. Applications are open now at Tikvah.org/TOA.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Ilene and David Siscovick and family. 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.