The Tikvah Podcast

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.

Raphael Ben-Levy, a senior fellow and reserve IDF intelligence officer focused on national security and Zionist strategy, argues that recent US-Israel combat integration and regional shifts make traditional US grant aid outdated. He discusses operational interoperability, Israel’s growing strategic autonomy, how aid shapes policy, and what a mature, equal partnership without grant dependence might look like.

Something has been happening in Michigan politics that deserves the attention of everyone who cares about the health of American democracy. And, as they so often are, the Jews are at the center of events. Taking root in Michigan is a specific and serious ideological threat—Islamism—that is gaining influence inside the Democratic party. This is a story about what happens when that influence is unnamed, accommodated, and finally normalized. And it is a story with major national implications. Muslim Americans serve in the U.S. military, teach in schools, build businesses, raise families, and love this country. Presumably, most Muslim citizens of America see their futures as bound up with the future of this republic, with no sympathy for those who would undermine it. But a radical Islamic political ideology has taken hold in specific institutions, among them the Michigan Democratic party. In March of this year, a Hizballah-inspired attacker drove a truck into the largest Reform synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, when over a hundred children were inside. Two weeks later, the Michigan Democrats held their statewide convention, and the incumbent Jewish regent of the University of Michigan—a man whose home had been attacked, whose family had been terrorized—was denied renomination and replaced by a Dearborn attorney who had praised Hizballah on social media. The leading candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination excused the synagogue attacker. And the pro-Israel Senate candidate was booed by delegates when she addressed the Jewish Voters Caucus. To discuss this growing threat, our guest this week is Jesse Arm, who grew up in West Bloomfield and is now a vice-president at the Manhattan Institute. 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.

Roy Altman came to America as a little boy. He came from Venezuela, where his own grandparents had fled to during the Holocaust. Altman and his family arrived in the U.S. with very little and knowing almost no one. Some three decades later, the president of the United States nominated him to serve as a federal judge for the Southern District of Florida, where he became the youngest person ever to hold that position. Being an American has been, he says, among the great blessings of his life; a blessing he repaid in public service. Then came October 7. And what disturbed him was not only the massacre itself but the reaction in Western media, on college campuses, in institutions that he had assumed shared his most basic commitments. He found it, he says, first ridiculous, then disconcerting, and ultimately shocking. He set out to understand this reaction and then, as best he could, to counter it. The result is a new book called Israel on Trial, in which Judge Altman applies the methodology of the federal courtroom to the six most common legal charges leveled against the Jewish state: colonialism, illegitimate founding, blocking Palestinian statehood, illegally occupying Gaza, apartheid, and genocide. In this episode, Altman discusses the book with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver. Their conversation ranges beyond the book's core argument, paying particular attention to something Judge Altman observed about the 50 college and law-school campuses he has visited since October 7, something that points beyond a pathology specific to Israel to a broader crisis in American intellectual and moral life. Judge Altman has a striking way of evoking that crisis, rooted in his daily experience watching ordinary jurors reason their way to correct verdicts while educated young Americans somehow cannot reason their way through the difference between civilization and barbarism. 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.

Joshua Berman, Bible scholar and Bar-Ilan professor who wrote the Echoes of Egypt Haggadah, explores how the Exodus narrative borrows and flips Egyptian royal imagery. He traces phrases like "mighty hand and outstretched arm," compares tabernacle and Ramses' throne tent, and shows poetic parallels with Kadesh inscriptions. He also explains making archaeology accessible for the seder and why the story sustains communal memory.

Hussein Abdul-Hussain, Iraqi-born, Lebanon-raised researcher and author of The Arab Case for Israel, speaks from personal experience about Arab-Israeli relations. He recounts growing up amid Hezbollah, learning Hebrew through Israeli media, and shifting political views after the Iraq War. He argues Arab states can gain prosperity and security by engaging Israel and reframes dignity as practical national interest.

Yonah Jeremy Bob, senior military and intelligence analyst for the Jerusalem Post and author of Target Tehran, walks through decades of Mossad penetration of Iran. He discusses the 2018 archive theft, the Fakhrizadeh assassination, supply-chain infiltration at Natanz, and how human networks, tech, and covert routes like Azerbaijan made long-term operations possible.

At 1:15 in the morning on February 28, more than 200 Israeli Air Force jets took off from bases across the region, bound for Iran. They were soon joined by American B-2 and B-1 bombers and the full weight of U.S. air and naval power in the Middle East. Not long after in Tehran, the Iranian supreme leader was dead, along with dozens of the seniormost figures in his government. Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion had begun. Five days later, the Iranian missile arsenal is measurably degraded, the regime is in a succession crisis, Hizballah has entered the war from Lebanon, Kurdish forces have crossed the border from Iraq, a U.S. submarine has sunk an Iranian frigate in the Indian Ocean, and the Strait of Hormuz has effectively been closed to tanker traffic. The Middle East is in a different place than it was a week ago. On March 4, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver convened two trusted experts to discuss the context and strategic underpinning of these events: the theory of the campaign, what comes next inside Iran, and what this moment means for American power and the American right. Those experts were Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and the former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo. The conversation, broadcast live over Zoom for members of the Tikvah community, is this week's podcast. This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Julie Goldberg-Botvin in honor of the IDF and all the brave soldiers who are defending our country and the Jewish people all over the world. 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.

Bill Drexel, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who studies U.S.-India relations and technology in grand strategy, unpacks Modi's historic Knesset visit. He discusses the deepening Israel–India partnership, tech and defense complementarities, India's multi‑alignment diplomacy, domestic politics shaping ties, and regional dynamics involving China and Pakistan.

Yehoshua Pfeffer, founding editor of Tzarich Iyun and a Haredi public intellectual, discusses the violent Bnei Brak confrontation and its implications for Haredi relations with the state. He traces legal battles over conscription, moral changes in yeshiva culture, and how idleness and weakened rabbinic authority fuel unrest. He also notes emerging voices pushing for responsibility and communal reform.