In Sholem Aleichem’s short story “Today’s Children,” Tevye’s eldest daughter Tsaytl yearns to marry a lowly tailor over a wealthy butcher. For her father Tevye this poses a real dilemma. In this clip the novelist Dara Horn discusses the sorts of questions we must ask to evaluate Tevye with the participants in Tikvah’s advanced institute […]

Yuval Levin of National Affairs and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik explore in this clip the tensions between the social aim of liberty and the need for child-rearing. Bringing in Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and John Locke, Levin and Soloveichik show how this tension comes down to the foundational question of the nature of man. How much […]

Dara Horn tells the tale of Sholem Aleichem to the participants in Tikvah’s advanced institute “The Future of the Family.” Brought up in a shtetl—and Horn clarifies just what a shtetl is—Aleichem came by chance into fortune and lost it all. Much of his life was spent moving from place to place to dodge his […]

Do individuals get married or are families joined? That’s a tension evident in many Yiddish stories, including Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye stories. As Dara Horn explains, Tevye speaks as if he is going to be married because he abides by a traditional, family-joining idea of marriage exemplified by the unique-to-Yiddish word, “machatunum.” Prompted by a participant question, […]

The Tikvah Fund’s executive director Eric Cohen explored the deeper meaning and practical consequences of eight significant transformation in Western family life: the invention of contraceptive technologies, the advance of women in the workplace, the expansion of the state’s role in caring for the very young and the elderly, increased divorce and non-marriage, decreased fertility, […]

Drawing on Rabbi Akiva’s aphorism that “everything is foreseen but free will is given,” novelist Dara Horn eloquently describes the tension at the heart of Jewish family life. The tension in theology between what is given to fate and what to free will is mirrored in parenting by the tension between what is innate and what […]

To open Tikvah’s advanced institute “The Future of the Family”, Tikvah’s executive director Eric Cohen identified the grand rivals to a life oriented to home and hearth: a warrior’s life, a statesman’s life, a holy man’s life, a philosopher’s life, a scientist’s life, and so on and so forth. But Valparaiso professor Gilbert Meilaender offered […]

As part of Tikvah’s advanced institute on “The Future of the Family”, the University of Virginia’s W. Bradford Wilcox catalogs the economic and other structural reasons for declining fertility and marriage rates. But we cannot forget important cultural factors. The size and stability of our families is affected by the way we think about men […]

Is there a philosophical or theological justification for the traditional Jewish doctrine of matrilineal descent? Meir Soloveichik, in an article published in Azure in 2005, makes the case that there is, drawing together phenomenological observations and rabbinical sources to illuminate the distinct dignity of mothers and fathers. Rabbi Soloveichik will be teaching in a Tikvah Advanced Institute this summer called The Future of the Family, alongside Eric Cohen, Gil Meilaender, Dara Horn, and others.