The Tikvah Podcast

On January 26, 2026, after 844 days, the body of Ran Gvili was brought home to Israel for burial. Of the hostages taken on October 7, his remains were the last still kept in Gaza. And when you factor in the hostages taken to Gaza before October 7, Gvili's return marked the first time since 2014 that no Israeli hostage or hostage remains are being held captive, to torture and torment Israelis, in the Gaza Strip.
 
The operation to recover him involved hundreds of soldiers, excavators, and dentists who examined hundreds bodies in a Gazan cemetery. When they found him, the soldiers gathered and sang the song Ani Ma'amin—arms around each other, voices rising together—"I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the messiah, and even though he may tarry, I will wait for him every day."
 
It's a song that Jews sang walking to the gas chambers during the Shoah. But there's something in that song, in its very structure, that speaks to how the Israeli soldiers experienced this moment.
 
Ani Ma'amin contains within it the hope for the eventual coming of the messiah, yes, but also the sober recognition that right now we live in pre-messianic times. Not outside of history, but within it. The soldiers singing that song were acknowledging that the relief and closure they felt was not an escapist delusion that they had suddently entered a new phase of history, or that, with the outbreak of peace, history had ended. No, while we hope one day to be at peace, we understand that this tragedy, and the hard-won deliverance that followed, occurred in history. The end of days is coming—but not yet. It was a note of hope and sobriety uttered by a war-weary army.
 
For two years, yellow ribbons hung from every street sign and telephone pole in Israel. Empty chairs stood at tables in restaurants and homes. The hostages were present in daily Israeli consciousness in ways that are difficult to convey to those who weren't there.
 
What can we learn about Israeli society from the psychic and social attention it paid to these hostages? Where does this commitment to bring everyone home come from? What does it cost? And what does this moment of closure—bittersweet, sobering, deeply felt—reveal about how Israelis understand their obligations to one another and their place in history?
 
To discuss these questions, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Russ Roberts, president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. An American immigrant to Israel, Roberts has lived in Jerusalem throughout the duration of this war.

Tikvah has campus chapters at many colleges and universities throughout the United States, and earlier this week we welcomed over 100 delegates from over 40 chapters to our annual college conference, the Redstone Leadership Forum. The closing session at that conference brought Reverend Johnnie Moore together with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik to discuss evangelical Christians, Israel, and the Jews. Moderating their discussion was Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic. A recording of that live conversation is our broadcast this week.
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.

On June 22, 2025, the U.S. air force sent B2 bombers to destroy Iran's nuclear sites. Five days before that, on June 17, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, observing the extent of Israel's military operations inside of Iran and its destruction of Iran's proxy network, published an essay in Mosaic with a counterintuitive argument: Israel's devastating strikes on the Islamic Republic would not lead to an Arab embrace of the Jewish state. Most observers assumed the opposite, that weakening Iran would accelerate normalization and that gratitude and commercial interests would drive the Gulf states closer to Jerusalem. Mansour argued instead that removing the Iranian threat would reduce the incentives for the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel.
Seven months later, Mansour has written a follow-up analysis showing that recent events have borne out his thesis—and indeed exceeded his cautious predictions. Saudi Arabia hasn't just declined to normalize with Israel. It has launched an aggressive regional repositioning campaign, weaponizing anti-Zionism as a competitive instrument against the first Abraham Accords signatory, the United Arab Emirates.
Mansour's latest piece, published this week in his Abrahamic Metacritique Substack, proposes a new way to grapple with the reality of two major changes that are decisively shaping regional dynamics: first, the dismantling of Iran's axis of resistance, and second, the changing nature of America's role in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel now each conduct foreign policy in order to optimize their particular national advantages with neither a dominant common adversary, as Iran was, nor the common umbrella of American leadership.
Under these circumstances, Mansour argues, anti-Zionism will remain strategically useful and even grow in its political utility. He discusses all of this with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver. 
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by David Bradlow. 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 December 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul reached an agreement with the New York state legislature to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act, which would legalize what proponents call "death with dignity" and what critics call physician-assisted suicide. About a dozen other states already permit doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients who request it. The state of Oregon pioneered this practice in 1994 and it has since spread across the Western world.
Now, there are people who have an ailing parent or grandparent or, God forbid, a child who is genuinely suffering—suffering in agonizing ways that make the cessation of that suffering seem like the only humane response. It would be inhuman not to acknowledge the enormous emotional, psychological, and physical burdens of that pain, or to minimize it.
But the question of physician-assisted suicide ultimately is one about medical ethics as upheld by the physician, the distorting market effects of this practice, and social policy. What happens when the state makes it possible for large numbers of people to receive this option from the very person whose profession calls on him to heal and not harm? What happens to the moral foundations of our culture when assisted death becomes something we learn to abide?
The evidence from places like Canada and the Netherlands begins to answer those questions in deeply disturbing ways. What started as a carefully limited option for the terminally ill has expanded dramatically. In Canada, deaths from medically assisted dying rose from 4,480 in 2018 to over 10,000 in 2021—and by 2022 accounted for 4 percent of all deaths in the country. Patients are now approved for reasons of poverty, loneliness, and mental illness. Veterans seeking PTSD treatment are sometimes offered death instead.
The physician and educator Leon Kass warned nearly 30 years ago that once we break the ancient taboo against doctors killing patients, the practice would prove "in principle unregulable." The evidence now seems to vindicate that warning.
To discuss this topic, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Aaron Rothstein, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow in bioethics and American democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. They discuss the origins of the modern euthanasia movement, and the disturbing reality of how euthanasia functions once legalized.
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by David Bradlow. 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 2025, we convened about 40 new conversations, taking up the great questions of modern Jewish life—questions of war and peace, providence and civilization, memory and meaning. This year, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver spoke to military strategists, scholars of religion, writers, historians, rabbis, one Catholic priest and two Catholic theologians, and professors whose students have become soldiers. The conversations ranged from urgent tactical questions facing Israeli commanders to the enduring theological debates that have shaped Western civilization.
The most dramatic event of 2025 came in June, when American B-2 bombers struck three nuclear sites in Iran, neutralizing the Islamic Republic's nuclear-weapons program in what came to be known as Operation Midnight Hammer. This followed a coordinated Israeli-American campaign that, in twelve days, fundamentally altered the strategic landscape of the Middle East. By October, a fragile ceasefire had taken hold in Gaza, though the questions of what comes next—for the tunnels beneath Gaza, for the Palestinian national movement, for regional order—remained unresolved.
The year also brought loss. In April, Pope Francis died after a prolonged illness, prompting reflection on the state of Jewish-Catholic relations and the church's posture toward Israel and the Jewish people. And in December, Norman Podhoretz, the great editor and defender of America and Israel, died at the age of ninety-five.
Meanwhile, a disturbing season of anti-Semitic violence descended upon American Jews. Arson attacks, shootings, and other forms of terrorism made clear that the ideological ferment on campuses and in progressive circles had transformed into something more dangerous. Jewish students looked to their institutions for strength and clarity, and the results were mixed at best.
Through it all, we asked: what does Israel's war reveal about providence and Jewish history? What does it mean to teach the Iliad to students who themselves are warriors? Can the collapse of a failed Palestinian nationalism open new possibilities for peace? How should Jews understand the resurgence of ancient Christian heresies that seek to sever the New Testament from the Hebrew Bible? Our primary aim has not been to chronicle events but to understand their deeper significance.
Now that 2025 has come to an end, we're looking back at a number of clips from the past year in hopes that, as we plan another year of conversations in 2026, you'll return to our archive and listen to some of the most fascinating episodes we've already recorded.
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by David Bradlow. 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.