The Tikvah Podcast

• Walter Russel Mead and Elliott Abrams on Navigating the New Middle East

  It's now December, and thus a natural time to look back and think about all that's changed in 2024. 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.

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• Josh Tolle on the State of Hillel on Campus

  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.

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• R.J. Snell on Modern Expressions of the Marcionite Heresy

  This episode of the Tikvah Podcast might be the first dedicated entirely to Christian theology. Why would a Jewish podcast devote so much attention to a theological debate that took place among Christians in the 2nd century? First, because it contributed to the canonization of Christian scripture and defined forever the Christian attitude toward the Hebrew Bible. But more importantly, because we are witnessing today the reemergence of some of the very ideas that the Church fathers of that time declared heretical. The figure at the center of this conversation is a Christian thinker name Marcion, who lived from 85 to 160 CE. He taught that there were not one but two gods: the creator God of the Hebrew Bible—a violent, vengeful, tribal demiurge—and the true God that is revealed to humankind by Jesus. To Marcion, the Christian God alone is a God of love and mercy. Therefore, he concluded, Christianity should detach itself entirely from the Hebrew Bible. Most people have heard some version of the idea that the Hebrew God is vindictive, unforgiving, and particularistic, and that the Christian God teaches grace and mercy. But the notion that they're radically distinct has now returned. The prominent Internet talk-show host Tucker Carlson has spoken on numerous occasions about disconnecting the Hebrew Bible from the New Testament. On the August 25, 2025 episode of his show, he explained that he had just read what Christians called the Old Testament and "was pretty shocked by—as I think many people who read it are—by the violence in it, and shocked by the revenge in it, the genocide in it." Then, in conversation with Megyn Kelly on November 6, he said that "Western civilization is derived from the New Testament. It is based on Christian ethics. And the core difference between the West and the rest of the world—not just Israel but every other country—is that we don't believe in collective punishment because we don't believe in blood guilt." It's important to draw a distinction between Marcionism and the doctrine of supersessionism, historically accepted by some Christian theologians. Supersessionism claims that God's covenant with Israel has been replaced, or superseded, by the universal redemption brought about by Jesus. Marcion, by contrast, says something else: that the God who established a covenant with the children of Israel is not the same as the Christian God at all, but a lesser, wicked deity. The idea that the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament are motivated by different ethics and aim at different moral teachings is not especially controversial. After all, that is a conventional Jewish understanding of the New Testament. But the early church fathers decisively rejected Marcion's ideas: both his dualism and his attempt to remove the story of Israel from the Christian Bible. One, Tertullian, wrote five books refuting him. Another foundational Christian thinker, Irenaeus, declared Marcion a heretic. By rejecting his teachings, Christianity made a defining choice to accept that the God of creation and the God of Christian redemption are, for Christians, one and the same. And because one of the most popular anti-Jewish voices is sounding some of those very notes right now, a deeper, Christian context seems necessary to help Jews understand the nature of the new assault against them. To this end, the Christian philosopher R.J. Snell joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to explain that context. Snell is the director of academic programs at Princeton University's Witherspoon Institute and the editor in chief of its publication, Public Discourse. He delves into what Marcion believed, why the church rejected him, and what was at stake in that rejection—then and now.

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• Ambassador Ron Dermer Looks Back on His Years in Washington (Rebroadcast)

  This week, Ron Dermer resigned from the Israeli cabinet, stepping down as minister of strategic affairs after years of working closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu to guide Israel through this last harrowing chapter of the country's history. It's a moment of transition—and it brings to mind another such moment, five years ago, when Dermer prepared to leave his post as Israel's ambassador to the United States. In December 2020, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver sat with the departing ambassador and asked him to reflect on his eight years in Washington—years that saw the nuclear deal with Iran, the rise and fall of Islamic State, and the signing of the Abraham Accords. Much has changed since then. October 7 shattered assumptions about Israel's security. The war in Gaza has tested the U.S.-Israel relationship in ways that seemed unimaginable in 2020. And yet, much has also endured. The alliance itself remains. The strategic logic Dermer articulates in this conversation—about shared interests, shared values, shared aspirations, shared threats—hasn't disappeared either. Indeed, that strategic logic has become easier to see, not harder. As Ron Dermer steps back once again, we thought it worth revisiting this earlier moment—to reinhabit the U.S.-Israel relationship before October 7, and to hear one of Israel's great public servants explain why he believed then, and still believes, that it can weather the storms that lie ahead.

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• Jonathan Leaf on What New Research about Men and Apes Says about Human Nature

  Every schoolboy has been told that, to understand human nature, we must look to our closest genetic relatives—the chimpanzees. Jane Goodall's pioneering research revealed that chimps use tools, hunt cooperatively, and engage in violent activity that looks like warfare. And from these observations, she and generations of scientists who followed in her wake have concluded that humans are essentially advanced primates, and that our behaviors—from violence to sexuality—flow from this genetic inheritance.   But what if this foundational assumption is wrong?   The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature is a new book by the playwright and critic Jonathan Leaf. Based on vast quantities of scientific literature, Leaf argues that recent genetic and neuroscientific discoveries are overturning decades of conventional wisdom. A landmark study published in April 2025 revealed that humans share only 86.5 percent of our genes with chimpanzees—not the 98.6 percent we've long believed. More importantly, the differences are concentrated precisely where they matter most: in the structures of our brains that govern cooperation, empathy, and language.   Leaf's thesis is both scientific and moral. If humans are not primarily aggressive primates but rather cooperative pack animals—closer in crucial ways to dolphins and wolves than to chimps—then it's high time to reconsider the natural impulses that lie at the roots of war, family, and human flourishing.   Leaf joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his book and its implications.

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