While today Israel enjoys wide support on both sides of the American political aisle, this was not always the case. Late in 1956 the eminent political theorist Leo Strauss took the unusual step of commenting on contemporary political affairs to come to Israel’s defense. Strauss was moved to write by attacks against the nascent Jewish state […]

Over the last decade, as the United States has reconsidered its role in the world and its place in the Middle East, academics and ideologues alike have turned their attention to America’s relationship with Israel and the power of an “Israel lobby.” Many American Christians and Jews are eager for a closer alliance between the […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher. In this podcast, Eric Cohen sits down with the legendary editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, to discuss his 2007 essay, “Jerusalem: The Scandal of Particularity.” The ancient capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem, has been the essential center of Jewish […]

As recently as the Cold War, the center-right and the center-left overcame their differences on other issues to oppose the enemies of the open society. In a lecture to alumni and guests of the Tikvah Fund, Standpoint editor Daniel Johnson argues that the center is failing to hold and that illiberalism’s many forms are on […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher. In this podcast, Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and prominent scholar and commentator on Middle Eastern affairs and world politics, talks with Tikvah’s Eric Cohen about a classic essay excoriating Western elites for misunderstanding the passions […]

In Mosaic this month, Martin Kramer honors Bernard Lewis’s centennial by explaining the enduring significance of Lewis’s legendary 1976 essay, “The Return of Islam.” The assumption in those days was that secularization was irresistible, that Arab nationalism was here to stay, and that, as a result, Islam meant less and less to the political lives of Muslims. Lewis challenged […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher. In this podcast, the Tikvah Fund’s Distinguished Senior Fellow, Ruth Wisse, joins Eric Cohen to discuss her 2015 Mosaic essay, “Anti-Semitism Goes to School.” Drawing on her experiences at Harvard University and elsewhere, Wisse argues that there has been a […]

Zionism was once a source of honor for American Jews. In 2008’s “Forgetting Zion,” Ruth Wisse tells the story of how that sense of triumph has unraveled, and how it has been replaced by susceptibility to shame in Jewish nationalism. With first-hand observations of the campuses and the institutions of American Judaism, Wisse recounts the change in popular […]

Realist foreign policy is premised on the idea that states always act in their own interest, as defined by the rational calculation of external threats from rival states. To scholars and practitioners of the realist school, America’s support for Israel is irrational, for in the support of the Jewish State realists see no benefit to […]

Nine years ago, two professors from the realist school of international relations published The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which argued that a small cadre of Washington influencers were responsible for America’s enduring support for Israel. In this essay, “The New Israel and the Old,” Walter Russell Mead offers a contrary view. America supports Israel because […]