The Tikvah Podcast

Friends of Israel and enemies of Israel both commit the same mistake when they assume that, in American colleges and universities, the faculty hired to teach Jewish subjects are, in their own way, supportive of the Jewish state. The assumption is a reasonable one, and each side's error mirrors the other. The friends of Israel naturally suppose that academic scholars of Jewish history, Jewish thought, the history of Israel, and the arts and letters of Hebrew are there to offer context and support and are both capable of and inclined to explain Israel's case on campus. That doesn't mean that they would be expected to support any particular Israeli policy or Israeli politician or each and every maneuver of the Israeli military, but that they support Zionism in some fundamental sense. And Israel's enemies think that same thing, but of course from the opposite point of view, seeing in the entire enterprise of Jewish studies and all of its related fields and disciplines a vehicle for propaganda. It turns out that both are wrong. There's a good chance that an average member of a faculty of Jewish studies, Israel studies, Hebrew studies, or Holocaust studies holds a documented public position against Israel. Nearly four in ten of the professors specifically teaching Jewish civilization on American campuses are on the record as being hostile to Israel.
Those data come from newly released findings of the largest audit yet undertaken of the views of professors of Jewish civilization in America, published recently by the Ronn Torossian Foundation and a publication called The Olam. The audit's own headline number is higher still—better than half, and past 70 percent at the Ivies—but that figure blends named professors together with institutional listings and petition tallies. The number above is the most important: faculty individually identified as teaching these subjects, and what they've put on the public record.
To think through what this means, Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic and host of the Tikvah podcast, is joined by Rachel Fish. Fish is a scholar of modern Israel, Zionist thought, and contemporary anti-Semitism, and the incoming CEO of the Israel Institute. They discuss not just these numbers, but how a discipline built to study Jewish civilization on serious scholarly terms ends up, in a meaningful share of cases, working against that civilization's national survival. We talk about what it means for the pipeline that produces the next generation of professors: graduate admissions, dissertation topics, and the hiring committees that decide who gets to teach. And I ask her about what a Jewish family sending a child to campus in the coming weeks needs to understand before that student walks into the classroom.

Visitors to Jerusalem's Old City see a marvelous religious diversity that is unique in the contemporary Middle East, and made possible by Israeli sovereignty. For most of Jewish history, the Jewish people have lived at the mercy of other nations, and the security of Jewish communities depended on the Christian or Muslim rulers in whose lands Jews lived. But in the Old City of Jerusalem, one walks around and sees so many religious sites, Christian and Muslim, of immense theological significance, all protected by the laws and law-enforcement officers of the Jewish state. Israel's commitment to the security of Christian and Muslim sites and worshipers is, seen through the eyes of history, a breathtaking accomplishment.
But an accomplishment of this kind is also a test. There are shocking reports of Christian worshippers and Christian clergy being harassed by Jewish Israelis. The Wall Street Journal and other outlets have recently reported on a spike of such abhorrent incidents. Israel's president, prime minister, and chief rabbis, along with several members of the Knesset and other prominent figures, have all condemned this behavior. But even if the perpetrators are not in any way representative of Israeli society as a whole, it is worth seeking to understand why these contemptible acts are happening and what they mean.
Rabbi Mark Dratch chairs the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations and has been writing about the ugly reports of spitting on Christian worshippers and on the damage and disrespect done to a Christian statue by an Israeli soldier in Lebanon. He joins the podcast today to discuss these topics with the host and editor of Mosaic Jonathan Silver. The primary subject of their conversation is not diplomacy or Israel's reputation abroad, though of course these things matter greatly. Instead, the focus of this episode is what the Jewish tradition calls hillul Hashem, desecration of God's name, and what it means for a people who spent thousands of years in exile to preside over religious minorities of the kind they once were.

Traditional Jews pray in a minyan, a quorum of ten men who form the communal setting in which an individual Jew prays as a part of the Jewish people. In January of 2021, a man named Daniel Grand sent an email to some of his friends, seeing if he could organize a minyan at his home. He lives in University Heights, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, too far from his synagogue to walk on Shabbat and holidays when driving is forbidden by Jewish law.
A neighbor saw the invitation and complained to the mayor's office, after which the city sent Grand a cease-and-desist letter. Praying with guests in his home, the city told him, made his house a place of worship, and a place of worship requires a zoning permit he did not have.
A public hearing followed, at which neighbors said, on the record, that they did not want the area known as a Jewish neighborhood. Without the proper zoning and permitting, the city arranged for police surveillance of Grand's house. His neighbors set up cameras to make sure that visitors would not come there to pray. And there was, in the fine print of the city's own code, a cruelty that reads almost like satire: had Grand actually won his permit, transforming his home into a house of worship, he and his family would have had to move, since a house of worship cannot also be a residence.
Grand sued the city, and his case was thrown out because the court held that it was not yet ripe, a legal term that refers to the fact that the local zoning board had not yet ruled against him, and was officially still considering his application. This December, the Supreme Court will consider the case of Grand v. University Heights.
To discuss this case, Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic and host of the Tikvah podcast, is joined by John Bursch, who is one of the attorneys representing Grand. Bursch is senior counsel and vice-president of appellate advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom and a veteran of many oral arguments before the Supreme Court, and formerly served as a solicitor general in the state of Michigan.

For half a century, Israel treated its adversaries as if their intentions could be tracked and might change according to circumstances. With the states surrounding it, that assumption largely held: Egypt, for instance, signed a peace treaty and kept it, whatever else occurred in the region. But with the radical forces that Iran built around Israel in the years before October 7, that same assumption proved catastrophic. Hamas, Hizballah, the Houthis, and the militias in Syria and Iraq do not vary in their commitment to Israel's destruction. What varies is only their capability. And so Israel has been forced to exchange a doctrine built on monitoring intention for one built on continually destroying capability, whatever the diplomatic cost, wherever preparations for war are found. Today's guest, Dan Schueftan, calls this doctrine preventive violence, or simply, violent maintenance.
Schueftan is the director of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa. In conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver, he lays out this doctrine, its roots, and the circumstances that forced Israel to adopt it. He then offers a threat assessment of Iran's proxy network as it stands today: in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq—before turning to the sepearate question of Turkey.

In the spring of the year 73, after Jerusalem had already fallen to Roman forces, 960 Jews atop a desert fortress chose death by their own hand rather than surrender. We know the story because of Josephus, the 1st-century Jewish historian and former rebel commander who turned chronicler of the very revolt he had once been a part of.
Yesterday was Tisha b'Av, which commemorates the destruction of the two Temples. Josephus records another catastrophe: Masada, the last stand of the Sicarii, the most militant faction of the Jewish rebels, against Rome, and a mass suicide that Jewish tradition has argued over ever since. Was it heroism? Was it madness? Should the Jews of Masada instead have followed in the path chosen by Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and the sages at Yavneh—accommodating the enemy to preserve the Torah?
This week's podcast is an episode of The Pillars, a series produced by the Lobel Center for Jewish Classical Education and hosted by Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin. In this episode, Rabbi Rocklin takes up Josephus's account directly—what it asks of us, what the rabbis made of it, and what it has come to mean for the modern state of Israel. The episode first aired this past March, but its questions are the questions Jews are reflecting on during this week in the liturgical calendar, about the demands of Jewish sovereignty and God's providence in history.