Johnnie Moore and Meir Soloveichik on Jews, Evangelicals, and Israel

Tikvah has campus chapters at many colleges and universities throughout the United States, and earlier this week we welcomed over 100 delegates from over 40 chapters to our annual college conference, the Redstone Leadership Forum. The closing session at that conference brought Reverend Johnnie Moore together with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik to discuss evangelical Christians, Israel, and the Jews. Moderating their discussion was Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic. A recording of that live conversation is our broadcast this week. This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Jessica and PJ Heyer. 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 June 22, 2025, the U.S. air force sent B2 bombers to destroy Iran's nuclear sites. Five days before that, on June 17, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, observing the extent of Israel's military operations inside of Iran and its destruction of Iran's proxy network, published an essay in Mosaic with a counterintuitive argument: Israel's devastating strikes on the Islamic Republic would not lead to an Arab embrace of the Jewish state. Most observers assumed the opposite, that weakening Iran would accelerate normalization and that gratitude and commercial interests would drive the Gulf states closer to Jerusalem. Mansour argued instead that removing the Iranian threat would reduce the incentives for the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel. Seven months later, Mansour has written a follow-up analysis showing that recent events have borne out his thesis—and indeed exceeded his cautious predictions. Saudi Arabia hasn't just declined to normalize with Israel. It has launched an aggressive regional repositioning campaign, weaponizing anti-Zionism as a competitive instrument against the first Abraham Accords signatory, the United Arab Emirates. Mansour's latest piece, published this week in his Abrahamic Metacritique Substack, proposes a new way to grapple with the reality of two major changes that are decisively shaping regional dynamics: first, the dismantling of Iran's axis of resistance, and second, the changing nature of America's role in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel now each conduct foreign policy in order to optimize their particular national advantages with neither a dominant common adversary, as Iran was, nor the common umbrella of American leadership. Under these circumstances, Mansour argues, anti-Zionism will remain strategically useful and even grow in its political utility. He discusses all of this with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver.  This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by David Bradlow. 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.

In December 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul reached an agreement with the New York state legislature to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act, which would legalize what proponents call "death with dignity" and what critics call physician-assisted suicide. About a dozen other states already permit doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients who request it. The state of Oregon pioneered this practice in 1994 and it has since spread across the Western world. Now, there are people who have an ailing parent or grandparent or, God forbid, a child who is genuinely suffering—suffering in agonizing ways that make the cessation of that suffering seem like the only humane response. It would be inhuman not to acknowledge the enormous emotional, psychological, and physical burdens of that pain, or to minimize it. But the question of physician-assisted suicide ultimately is one about medical ethics as upheld by the physician, the distorting market effects of this practice, and social policy. What happens when the state makes it possible for large numbers of people to receive this option from the very person whose profession calls on him to heal and not harm? What happens to the moral foundations of our culture when assisted death becomes something we learn to abide? The evidence from places like Canada and the Netherlands begins to answer those questions in deeply disturbing ways. What started as a carefully limited option for the terminally ill has expanded dramatically. In Canada, deaths from medically assisted dying rose from 4,480 in 2018 to over 10,000 in 2021—and by 2022 accounted for 4 percent of all deaths in the country. Patients are now approved for reasons of poverty, loneliness, and mental illness. Veterans seeking PTSD treatment are sometimes offered death instead. The physician and educator Leon Kass warned nearly 30 years ago that once we break the ancient taboo against doctors killing patients, the practice would prove "in principle unregulable." The evidence now seems to vindicate that warning. To discuss this topic, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Aaron Rothstein, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow in bioethics and American democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. They discuss the origins of the modern euthanasia movement, and the disturbing reality of how euthanasia functions once legalized. This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by David Bradlow. 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.

In 2025, we convened about 40 new conversations, taking up the great questions of modern Jewish life—questions of war and peace, providence and civilization, memory and meaning. This year, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver spoke to military strategists, scholars of religion, writers, historians, rabbis, one Catholic priest and two Catholic theologians, and professors whose students have become soldiers. The conversations ranged from urgent tactical questions facing Israeli commanders to the enduring theological debates that have shaped Western civilization. The most dramatic event of 2025 came in June, when American B-2 bombers struck three nuclear sites in Iran, neutralizing the Islamic Republic's nuclear-weapons program in what came to be known as Operation Midnight Hammer. This followed a coordinated Israeli-American campaign that, in twelve days, fundamentally altered the strategic landscape of the Middle East. By October, a fragile ceasefire had taken hold in Gaza, though the questions of what comes next—for the tunnels beneath Gaza, for the Palestinian national movement, for regional order—remained unresolved. The year also brought loss. In April, Pope Francis died after a prolonged illness, prompting reflection on the state of Jewish-Catholic relations and the church's posture toward Israel and the Jewish people. And in December, Norman Podhoretz, the great editor and defender of America and Israel, died at the age of ninety-five. Meanwhile, a disturbing season of anti-Semitic violence descended upon American Jews. Arson attacks, shootings, and other forms of terrorism made clear that the ideological ferment on campuses and in progressive circles had transformed into something more dangerous. Jewish students looked to their institutions for strength and clarity, and the results were mixed at best. Through it all, we asked: what does Israel's war reveal about providence and Jewish history? What does it mean to teach the Iliad to students who themselves are warriors? Can the collapse of a failed Palestinian nationalism open new possibilities for peace? How should Jews understand the resurgence of ancient Christian heresies that seek to sever the New Testament from the Hebrew Bible? Our primary aim has not been to chronicle events but to understand their deeper significance. Now that 2025 has come to an end, we're looking back at a number of clips from the past year in hopes that, as we plan another year of conversations in 2026, you'll return to our archive and listen to some of the most fascinating episodes we've already recorded. This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by David Bradlow. 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.

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.

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.