Rabbi Ben Elton on Australian Jewry after Bondi Beach

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 every week, 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Last week, Michael Smuss died at age ninety-nine. Born in 1926, he was the last surviving fighter of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. His passing marks the end of an era, and brings to a close a chapter of living memory. Now the responsibility to tell this story passes fully to us. In the spring of 1943, against impossible odds and with almost no weapons, a small group of young Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw staged a revolt that would reverberate through history. This was not just a military engagement, but a story of Jewish resistance, dignity, and moral choice under unimaginable circumstances. Before the war, Warsaw was home to nearly 400,000 Jews—the largest Jewish community in Europe. This was a vibrant, diverse Jewish population: workers and intellectuals, religious and secular, Yiddish-speakers and Polish-speakers. Jews published daily newspapers, ran theaters, fielded soccer teams. They were 40 percent of Warsaw's population. Then came September 1939. Within weeks, Warsaw fell to the Germans. Over the next year, the Nazis systematically stripped Jews of their rights—blocked bank accounts, forced them to wear special armbands, and conscripted them into slave labor. In November 1940, they sealed 400,000 Jews into a ghetto of just two square miles, then forced in 150,000 more from nearby towns and cities. With official rations of just 184 calories per day and no heating, 100,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. But 80 percent stayed alive through extraordinary resourcefulness—smuggling food, establishing soup kitchens, creating underground factories. This too was resistance. In July 1942, the Germans began mass deportations to Treblinka, where most were murdered upon arrival. Over seven weeks, they sent 300,000 Jews to the gas chambers, with the help of a Jewish police force. By September, only 60,000 remained. At that point, something shifted. Survivors asked why they hadn't fought back. The shame and anger became a catalyst. Between September and April, the ghetto prepared. They built 750 bunkers with electricity, water, and food stocks. When the Germans came on April 19, 1943, expecting to round up the Jews with no resistance, they were met with gunfire, grenades, and mines. The Germans thought it would take three days. It took 27—because the entire community had transformed the ghetto into a network of underground revolt. To tell this story, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Professor Samuel Kassow of Trinity College. They discuss the courage of the fighters as well as the resistance of those who built the bunkers, who preserved cultural life, who maintained their dignity in ways that have largely been forgotten. They also confront difficult questions about heroism, survival, and how to fulfill the sacred obligations of remembering.

Now that there is a fragile cease-fire in place, it's time to ask what to do with Gaza's intricate system of tunnels. There is, of course, nothing new about the use of tunnels in war. From ancient Jerusalem to Vietnam to Islamic State in Mosul, militaries have dealt with underground warfare for millennia. But the scale, purpose, and strategic role of Hamas's tunnel network is fundamentally different from anything we've seen before. Gaza is approximately 140 square miles, and there are at least 600 miles of tunnels below its terrain. Before the war began, there were likely more tunnels in Gaza than there were roads. But it's not just the density of Gaza's tunnels that is unprecedented. For the first time in history, a military force built its entire strategy around its subterranean defenses, deliberately constructing tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure—schools, hospitals, homes—not to protect civilians, but to use them as human shields. This wasn't merely a tactical decision; it was the primary means by which Hamas intended to achieve its political goals. John Spencer, a leading expert on urban warfare and military history and executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute, joins the Tikvah Podcast to discuss this unprecedented military challenge. He has visited Gaza six times since October 7, studying these tunnels firsthand and speaking with the Israeli commanders who've had to fight in them. Today, he walks us through how Israeli forces had to remap the battlefield and reimagine warfare, learning to fight simultaneously above and below ground. We'll discuss the psychological demands of entering these tunnels, the innovative tactics that turned Hamas's greatest defensive asset into an Israeli offensive advantage, and the immense challenge that remains: what do you do with hundreds of miles of tunnels now that active hostilities have paused?

"God created man in His image: in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." Thus reads verse 27 of the first chapter of Genesis, one of the most important lines ever written in history. The Hebrew phrase rendered as "in God's image" is b'tselem Elohim, and that is the title of a new book that traces the extraordinary career of this concept, known in Latin as imago Dei, throughout the course of Western civilization. Written by Tomer Persico, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, the book is the biography of the idea that all human beings—not just kings or heroes—are created in the image and likeness of God. At the heart of the book is a deep irony: the religious idea of imago Dei contains within it the seeds of secularization; this religious innovation developed into a concept that would marginalize religion itself. The very emphasis on individual conscience and human equality that Judaism and Christianity cultivated eventually led to further questioning of law, and then authority, and then even the disciplines of religious life. That is, over the course of millennia, one of God's pronouncements led some to question God's providence and even God's existence. Now, if you're listening as an orthodox believer or theological traditionalist, you may be tempted to object: surely modern secularism represents a betrayal of the biblical depiction of the human condition, not an outgrowth of it, and there is much truth to that position. But Persico's argument is directed primarily at the committed liberal democrat who believes deeply in individual rights, human dignity, and equality, but who may not realize where these convictions come from. To that person, Persico seems to be arguing: even you, especially you, are an inheritor of a biblical idea. Your deepest moral commitments didn't spring from nowhere. They have a genealogy that begins in Genesis. On today's podcast Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver sits down with Persico to discuss what all this implies.