The Tikvah Podcast

Norman Podhoretz, z"l, died on December 16 at the age of ninety-five. For more than three decades, he served as editor of Commentary, transforming it into what Irving Kristol deemed the most influential magazine in Jewish history. He was a literary critic, a political essayist, and one of the fathers of the orientation toward public affairs that came to be known as neoconservatism. In 2004, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. What fueled these accomplishments —his books, his essays, his editing —was a commitment to tell the truth, however unpopular, and to defend the things he loved, however much it cost him. Norman Podhoretz loved America. He believed in the justice of Israel. He was grateful to have been acculturated into the civilizing traditions of the West. And he was willing to break ranks and turn friends into ex-friends in order to defend all three. On this episode, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Ruth Wisse to pay tribute to this great American, and to examine his legacy. Ruth Wisse is one of the longest-tenured regular contributors to Commentary and, after a career at McGill and Harvard, is now a senior fellow at Tikvah. We live in a moment when moral confidence is in short supply, when our institutions betray their animating purposes, and when social-media cleverness and clickbait substitute for serious thinking. Norman Podhoretz was different and his example can show us a better way to think and to argue; and because we live in a democratic country that requires us to persuade our compatriots, in helping us think and argue differently he can help us meet the challenges of democratic citizenship as Jews and as Americans. This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Richard Moldawsky in memory of Martin Moldawsky. 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 the evening of December 14, 2025—the first night of Hanukkah—Rabbi Benjamin Elton was driving home from performing a wedding, looking forward to lighting candles with his family. Then his phone began to explode with messages. There were gunmen at Bondi Beach. His wife and children were in lockdown at a nearby event. Names of the dead were coming through—colleagues, community members. For several terrible minutes, he couldn't reach his wife. And he wondered whether he was going to come home to find that he had lost his family. By the time the shooting stopped, fifteen people were dead, among them two rabbis, an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor, and a ten-year-old girl. They had been gunned down at a public Hanukkah celebration on one of Australia's most iconic beaches, before a large crowd of Jews who had gathered to light the menorah in the open air—because that's what confident, integrated diaspora communities do. The massacre at Bondi Beach was the culmination of two years of escalating anti-Semitism that the community had been warning about since October 7. Synagogues firebombed with congregants inside. Cars set ablaze in Jewish neighborhoods. Swastikas painted on schools and daycares. Weekly pro-Palestinian marches past synagogues, with chants of "globalize the intifada." A van discovered full of explosives along with a list of the addresses of Jewish institutions. And through it all, a government that offered sympathy and money for security, but never quite confronted the deeper problem. Until, finally, the community's darkest warnings came true. Rabbi Benjamin Elton is the chief minister of the Great Synagogue in Sydney—Australia's oldest Jewish congregation, founded in the 1820s, whose pulpit has traditionally made its occupant a primary representative of Judaism to the wider society. He holds a PhD in Jewish history from the University of London, and before entering the rabbinate, he worked in Britain's Ministry of Justice. He is a scholar of Anglo-Jewish history, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Sacks scholar, and, just over a decade ago, spent a year in residence as a fellow at Tikvah. This week, Rabbi Elton has been burying his friends. He joined Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic, to discuss the recent trials of his family and community, and the growing threat to Australian Jewish security.

On October 6, 2023, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik sat at his desk facing a deadline for his monthly column. Israel's citizens were then furiously debating judicial reform, but he'd already had his say on that matter. He decided to write about something else instead: a Jeopardy episode where three educated contestants stared blankly when asked to identify the source of this line: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." This, among the most famous images in all of Western literature, comes of course from Psalm 23. And none of the contestants knew it.   Rabbi Soloveichik submitted the piece on October 6, hours before the festival of Shemini Atzeret. The next morning, October 7, the Jewish people would be thrust into the valley of the shadow of death. T'hillim, as the Psalm are known in Hebrew, would, over the following weeks and months, accompany the Jewish people's every thought. Their distress could be articulated in David's very own words, linking their pain to his pain, their redemptive dreams to his redemptive dreams, their future to his future.   In his new podcast, "Poetry and Prayer: A Daily Journey Through the Psalms," Soloveichik walks listeners through all 150 psalms, one by one. For today's episode, he sits down with Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic, to discuss this ambitious project. He puts forward a striking claim in the course of the conversation: the Psalms represent something unprecedented in ancient literature. While Homer or Gilgamesh depict external action—heroic deeds, cosmic battles—the Psalms take their reader (or reciter) inside someone else's soul. The Psalmist explores the full range of human emotion—doubt and faith, despair and joy, rage and delight—all while maintaining an awareness of God's presence. It's the first example in world literature of what the critic Edward Cahill calls "the eye of interiority."   When Iranian missiles fell on their cities at 2:00 am one night, Israelis immediately Googled "T'hillim" on their iPhones. An IDF soldier named Yossi Hershkovitz composed a new melody to Psalm 23 while serving in Gaza, and was killed days later—his tune surviving because a comrade taught it to his children. In America, the Psalms shaped the country's founding, from the First Continental Congress reading Psalm 35 to Lincoln quoting from the book in his Second Inaugural. More recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a speech in Jerusalem's City of David connecting American exceptionalism to the very site where the Psalms were written.   This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is sponsored by Samuel and Malka Harris Susswein in honor of Sam Susswein's birthday. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of this podcast, or of any other in Tikvah's growing podcast network, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle.  

It's now December, and thus a natural time to look back and think about all that's changed in 2025. What did the Middle East and the world look like at this time a year ago? President Biden was in the Oval Office and President Trump was both the former president and the president-elect. Hamas still held hostages taken on October 7. Iran's regional proxies, though weakened, still threatened both Israel and American interests across the Middle East. Fast forward to today, and the landscape looks dramatically different. Israel has achieved stunning military victories. The United States Air Force bombed nuclear sites in Iran. New diplomatic possibilities have opened up. The balance of power in the region has shifted in ways that seemed unimaginable just twelve months ago. And yet, like the laws of physics, the iron laws of politics have asserted themselves: there are unintended consequences even, and especially, of those very stunning military victories. Despite wounding their shared adversary, the Israelis and Saudis have not normalized relations and in fact may be further from rapprochement than when the threat from Iran was at its height. Israel's victory has come at a cost of political and popular support in the United States. The Trump administration's management of the hostages' homecoming, and the terms of the cease-fire, have left Hamas in place, with no external peacekeeping force other than the IDF itself willing to restore order. To help us understand these developments, we're rebroadcasting a conversation Mosaic's editor, Jonathan Silver, had at the 2025 Jewish Leadership Conference with Walter Russell Mead and Elliott Abrams—two of America's leading voices on Middle East strategy. They discussed the new regional order, the opportunities and vulnerabilities it presents for America and Israel, and how all of this fits into the broader competition between the United States and China.

For many Jewish parents and grandparents, Hillel holds a special place in their memories of college life. Founded in 1923 above a barbershop at the University of Illinois, Hillel grew into a leading Jewish campus organization, now present at hundreds of colleges. For generations, it was where Jewish students found community, celebrated Shabbat, and felt at home as Jews while navigating the challenges of university life. But today, Hillel faces a crisis. That's the view of the writer and former Krauthammer fellow Josh Tolle. Now Tikvah's associate director of university programs, Tolle worked at Hillel for three years, and saw the organization's reaction to October 7 and all the campus frenzy that would come after it up close. In his essay "If Hillel Is Not for Jews, Who Will Be?"—which appeared in the December 2025 issue of Commentary—Tolle examines how progressive ideology has weakened Hillel's ability to serve its own students, especially in the days, weeks, and months after October 7, when Jewish institutions were most needed. Tolle explains how Jewish students, galvanized by October 7, looked to their campus Hillels seeking clarity and strength, only to encounter what he calls "muddled objectives and self-defeating strategies." Tolle calls attention to the ways Hillel has strayed from its mission precisely because he believes that mission is worth restoring. Hillel's crisis, he argues, reflects a larger condition in American Jewish life, particularly among pluralistic institutions, and that condition must be remedied for these institutions to remain capable of serving the rising generation. In this episode, Tolle discusses his essay and the experiences that led him to write it in conversation with Jonathan Silver.