Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  On December 19 of last year, President Donald Trump made a surprise announcement: the United States would withdraw American troops from Syria. What was the strategic thinking behind this withdrawal? What did it mean […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play.  In the decades since Israel’s founding, the United Nations has been a hostile environment for the Jewish state first recognized by 33 sovereign nations in the U.N. General Assembly. For many years, it has seemed that […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  From the Pittsburgh shooting to rising anti-Semitism in Europe, from the U.S. embassy move to the Trump Administration’s exit from the Iran deal, from Michael Chabon’s controversial speech at Hebrew Union College to Israel’s new nation-state law, 2018 has […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  Chapter 1: The Eve of the Suez Crisis Chapter 2: Personal Suffering, Collective Suffering, and the Shoah Chapter 3: The Six Knocks Chapter 4: Responding to God, Responding the Fellow Jews “Hark, my beloved knocks! ‘Let me in, my […]

In the first two years of his administration, President Donald Trump has already redefined the American approach to Israel and the Middle East: fulfilling his promise to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, working to dismantle the Iran nuclear deal, confronting anti-Israel sentiment at the U.N., and promising to put forward a new approach to […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  Chapter 1: The Protestant Fundamentalists Chapter 2: The Protestant Modernists Chapter 3: The Cold War, Jacksonianism, and Russia Chapter 4: Zionism and American Foreign Policy America is living through a partisan age, with the seemingly intractable divides between Republicans […]

Jerusalem—the “eternal capital” of the Jewish people—is at once the cultural, spiritual, and strategic center of the modern Jewish state. Ambassador Dore Gold is one of Jerusalem’s greatest guardians, and his wide-ranging perspective is remarkable: senior advisor to the prime minister, representative of Israel on the world stage, strategic thinker about the future of the […]

In 1998, as the State of Israel turned fifty years old, Charles Krauthammer penned his seminal essay, “At Last, Zion.” Wide-ranging and provocative, the piece takes an unvarnished look at the existential crisis of Diaspora Jewry as well as what Krauthammer calls the “Israeli exception” to the assimilationist trend. However, the re-centering of Jewish life […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  This week, instead of one of our regular conversations on great Jewish essays and ideas, we are pleased to introduce you to a brand new podcast, Kikar: Conversations in the Jewish Public Square, produced by our partners at the Jewish Leadership […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  Chapter 1: Conversion and Restoration Chapter 2: Mordecai Manuel Noah and Ararat Chapter 3: Scripture, the Geneva Bible, and the Catholic Church Chapter 4: Is American Christianity Different? Chapter 5: Blackstone, Fosdick, and Niebuhr  Chapter 6: The Christian Right […]