Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Next week, Jewish families will sit at their seder tables and relive the drama of Jewish liberation from Egyptian oppression. The text used, the Haggadah, is one of the most widely read works of the rabbinic tradition. It has an inescapably national aspect, and its main themes, when seen in the right perspective, suggest to the rabbi Meir Soloveichik that it can be understood as a preeminent work of Jewish political thought: freedom and oppression, covenant and constit ..read more

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Whether or not haredi Jews should be required to serve in the IDF is a perennial question of Israeli politics, one that has caused political parties to form and disband, governing coalitions to rise and fall. It was the subject of a 2021 episode of this podcast with the haredi judge, editor, and rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer. This question has taken on a new intensity lately, as the October 7 attacks and Israel’s war in Gaza have unified most of the country in a belie ..read more

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Nearly twenty-five years ago, at the turn of the new millennium, America came very close to selecting not only a Jewish vice president, but a proudly religious, Shabbat observing, kosher eating Jewish vice president: Joe Lieberman, senator from Connecticut. Lieberman, who died this week, epitomized a certain spirit in American public life, when the great debates over the conduct of American foreign policy and the management of domestic affairs still admitted heterodox dis ..read more

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Neighborhoods have always played a distinctly important role in American public life. The neighborhood is the most intimate public setting outside of the home, the place where mediating institutions of common life—schools, stores, gyms, houses of worship—connect citizens to each other. American neighborhoods, however, have lately grown fragile and unhealthy, reflecting the nation’s loneliness epidemic, its underwhelming public education system, its demoralized society ..read more

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  In 21st-century America, the formation of families has become less common, and when people do get married and have children, they have fewer of them. According to demographers, for a population to reproduce itself, each family in it must on average produce at least 2.1 children. Americans are now reproducing at well below that number, a trend that comes with economic, social, political, spiritual, and moral consequences. It’s possible that government initiatives and financi ..read more

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  During Israel’s war against Hamas, it has provided direct aid to Gazans, and it has allowed for the distribution of foreign aid. Hamas has accused Israeli soldiers of intentionally targeting Palestinians as they gather to receive food, most recently on February 29. The Israeli military released video evidence to the contrary, but by the time they did so, international impressions were already set, and Israelis now wonder why they’re volunteering the wellbeing of their own so ..read more

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  On February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine and thus escalated to a new level of violence and intensity a war that began in 2014. Estimates suggest that this war is responsible for tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties, and hundreds of thousands of military causalities. One day after this phase of the war began, on February 25, 2022, the writer, former Senate staff member, Navy reservist, and executive director of the KKR Global Institute Vance Serchuk&n ..read more

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Maimonides, the outstanding rabbinic authority and philosopher of the Middle Ages, was also a physician. After writing The Guide of the Perplexed, his great philosophical treatise, he turned his attention to composing works of medicine. He produced ten: On Hemorrhoids, On Cohabitation, On Asthma, On Poisons and Their Antidotes, Regimen of Health, On the Causes of Symptoms, Extracts from Galen, Medical Aphorisms, a Commentary on Hippocrates’ Aphorisms ..read more

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  In the 1850s, when a young Italian Jewish boy named Edgardo Mortara fell ill, his family’s Christian maid had secretly baptized him in hopes that he would be restored to health, or that if he died, his soul would be saved. This meant that when Edgardo survived and his baptism was revealed, the church saw him as a Christian child, not a Jewish one—and it was forbidden by Canon law for a Christian child to be raised by Jewish parents. So Edgardo, then six years old, was removed f ..read more

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  This week, the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic returns to the towering intellectual and religious sage of medieval Judaism, Moses Maimonides, the Rambam. In two previous conversations about his work, the professor of Judaism Yehuda Halper and podcast host Jonathan Silver focused on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, his code of law. This week, the two turn from the Mishneh Torah to Maimonides’s philosophical magnum opus, Moreh ha-N’vukhim, known in English as  ..read more