The Tikvah Podcast

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.

From the phone that sits in his pocket, a person can now order almost anything online and have it delivered to his door the next morning. For all of human history, no one on earth had that kind of power, and now, within a single lifetime, every middle-class American has it. Walmart or Amazon or other major e-commerce platforms will bring you whatever you want: a vintage edition of a particular book, a specific article of clothing in a specific size, same-day delivery of kosher pastrami from Costco. Americans are now used to getting what they want, when they want it, with very little delay.
That's because the interpretation of vast amounts of data has already told retailers that a person is likely to want diapers and baby formula, or the new Winston Churchill biography, or, having bought a new phone, an extra phone charger, already prepositioned in nearby warehouses, just waiting for someone to want it and press "ship."
As a result, it's hard for us to understand intuitively why some things take time to manufacture, and why, when we read reports of missile and interceptor stockpiles, the American military, with all its might, can't just order up another arsenal and have it at the ready. After this spring's combat operations against Iran, the U.S. has used up a lot of missiles.
Here are some numbers, drawn from analysis published this spring by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In the course of Operation Epic Fury, the United States fired over 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles from a prewar inventory of approximately 3,100. Recent annual production is less than 200, and replacement is not projected until late 2030.
Up to 1,430 Patriot interceptors were expended from a prewar inventory of roughly 2,330, at a production rate of 650 per year—half of which go to allied nations.
And 290 of America's 360 interceptors for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense—the most advanced missile-defense system we field, known as THAAD—were fired. We produce about 96 of these interceptors per year.
Needless to say, there are other things that we need those missiles for. And some strategists believe that China or another adversary might look at the state of American munitions and decide that a window of opportunity has opened up.
How did the most powerful military in the history of the world arrive at this moment? What does the supply chain behind a Patriot missile actually look like, all the way down to the raw materials? And what would serious industrial mobilization require?
These are among the questions that Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver takes up with Ryan McBeth. McBeth spent twenty years in the U.S Army as an infantryman, and is now an intelligence analyst with a popular YouTube channel he uses to explain military affairs to non-specialists. You can learn more about him, and follow his work, at ryanmcbeth.substack.com. In today's podcast, McBeth explains why he is not quite so worried about the state of the American arsenal.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Robert and Ilana Saposh. 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.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, grew up in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to escape an arranged marriage, became a member of the Dutch parliament, and collaborated with the filmmaker Theo van Gogh on a short film about the treatment of women under Islam. Ever since Van Gogh was murdered by a Dutch Islamist on an Amsterdam street in 2004, with a death threat addressed to her pinned to his chest with a knife, she has lived under security protection.
She is the author of several books, among them Infidel, her memoir, and Heretic, in which she argued that Islam requires a reformation from within if it is to be compatible with liberal democratic civilization. For twenty years she was among the world's most prominent atheists—not merely in her personal convictions but in her public arguments, which held that reason and individual freedom were incompatible with religious submission of any kind.
In November of 2023, she announced that she had become a Christian.
That announcement, and the essay she wrote explaining it, raised one of the most searching questions in contemporary intellectual life: what does a civilization require in order to defend itself, and can secular liberalism supply it?
This week, Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins the Tikvah Podcast to discuss her diagnosis of what political Islam is doing to Europe and to America—a diagnosis that has only sharpened since October 7—and her argument that the assault on Jews and Jewish life is not merely a Jewish problem but a leading indicator of a broader civilizational vulnerability.
This conversation was recorded live before members of the Tikvah Society in New York City. If you'd like information about joining the Tikvah Society, write to us at [email protected] and we'll get right back to you.
This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin 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.

On May 4, President Trump issued a proclamation which reads:
In special honor of 250 glorious years of American independence and on the weekend of Rededicate 250—a national jubilee of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving—Jewish Americans are encouraged to observe a national Sabbath. From sundown on May 15 to nightfall on May 16, friends, families, and communities of all backgrounds may come together in gratitude for our great Nation. This day will recognize the sacred Jewish tradition of setting aside time for rest, reflection, and gratitude to the Almighty. 
It is worth pausing on what an astonishing thing that is.
For most of Jewish history, when the most powerful ruler in the world turned his attention to the Jews, it was not to encourage their devotion to Jewish law. It was to constrain the Jews, to tax them, to suppress them, to expel them, or to put an end to the miraculous story of the Jews in history. So did Pharaoh, Antiochus, Hadrian, the kings of England and Spain, and the tsars. Even more benign monarchs—the Habsburg emperors, or Napoleon—conditioned the protections of civic life on the Jews giving up some of their distinctiveness.
America is exceptional. And now, in the year of America's 250th birthday, the incumbent of the most powerful office on earth has issued a formal proclamation encouraging the Jews to be more Jewish.
To discuss this momentous occurrence, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the historian, writer, former government official, and Washington insider Tevi Troy, who recently wrote an article titled, "A National Sabbath for American Jews." The article appeared on May 14, 2026 in the Wall Street Journal, and is the point of departure for today's discussion.

Every year on Shavuot, many Jews have the custom of reading the book of Ruth. The holiday commemorates the giving of the Torah at Sinai—the moment when the Jewish people gathered at the foot of the mountain and declared, "we will do and we will listen." The rabbis paired Sinai with Ruth for a reason. Sinai is the national conversion story, in which the whole people, swept up in thunder and fire, accept the covenant. Ruth is a more intimate counterpart: a tale of one woman, at the lowest possible moment, with every worldly reason to return to the clan of her birth, who decides instead to join the same covenant. "Your people shall be my people," she says to Naomi, "and your God shall be my God." Ruth was not drawn toward the Jewish people at their moment of triumph but in her and her chosen family's hour of despair.
That tension, between being drawn to Judaism and being pushed toward it, between choosing a people and being chosen, is at the heart of today's conversation with the Daily Wire reporter and video journalist Kassy Akiva, who converted to Judaism in April 2023. In an essay in the October 2024 issue of Commentary—written while she was a Tikvah Krauthammer fellow—Akiva reflected on the long road that brought her to Judaism: the hate mail, the death threats, the stalker who went to federal prison, the years of traveling to Israel before she was Jewish, the beit din, the seminary in Jerusalem, the mikveh. The essay, titled "Anti-Semitism Helped Make Me a Jew," was composed in the immediate aftermath of October 7, not long after a visit to the Gaza border. The intensity of that moment was bound up with her conversion.
We are now a few years further on. The vicious anti-Israel activism that followed in the wake of Hamas's attack on southern Israel has not dissappeared, but it has, for many, settled into something less acute. In that context, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Siliver has invited Akiva to return to that essay and its argument, and to discuss whether anti-Semitism was the engine of her Jewish life or merely the road sign that pointed her toward it, what ordinary Jewish life looks like now that the adrenaline of that first year has either deepened or faded, and what she makes of the convert's particular vantage point—as someone who, only a few months into being a Jew, was asked by people who had been Jewish their whole lives how to handle the anti-Semitism she had already been forced to learn how to carry. 
This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin 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.