The Book of Ruth tells one of the Hebrew Bible’s most beautiful and beloved stories—chronicling how a childless widow from a foreign land rises to become the ancestress of Israel’s greatest king. But as Dr. Leon Kass and his coauthor (and granddaughter) Hannah Mandelbaum demonstrate in their new book, Reading Ruth: Birth, Redemption, and the […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  Very few contemporary public figures have had as many successes in as many fields as Michael Oren. A writer-statesman in the model of Thucydides, Oren was Israel’s ambassador to the United States during the Obama […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  During this year of lockdowns, shuttered businesses, and working from home, people have made time for many new habits and hobbies, from baking bread to reorganizing closets. In this podcast, Jewish literary and political […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Since 2015, the Israeli writer and translator Hillel Halkin has published a series of ten essays in Mosaic on the seminal Hebrew writers of the 19th and early-20th centuries. They dealt with everyone from […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Born in 1915 to a traditional Jewish family recently arrived from Russia, Saul Bellow was raised in Chicago and soon became “part of a circle of brainy Jewish teenagers who read and debated weighty […]

In 2019, 40 different guests came on the Tikvah Podcast to engage in serious conversations about Jewish ideas, Jewish texts, and Jewish public affairs. This year we covered everything from diplomacy to defense, from Jewish philosophy to Jewish food, from anti-Semitism to Jewish heroism.

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Oceans of ink have been spilled seeking to answer this question, first posed by the early Church father Tertullian. How do the two intellectual pillars of Western […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Would you want to live forever? What would your spouse, your children, your friends mean to you if you knew you would outlive them all? Is our mortality a problem to be solved, or […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  Chapter 1: One Who Was Born in Jerusalem Chapter 2: The Last Hebrew Classic Chapter 3: Scholem, Bialik, and Agnon on Hebrew’s Revival  Chapter 4: The Still Small Voice Chapter 5: Agnon’s Significance Today Shmuel Yosef Agnon was one […]

“All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” So mused Mark Twain in the nineteenth century. One such “secret” surely resides in the immortal language that the Jewish people kept alive—and that in many senses kept them alive—throughout their history. In his new book, The Story of Hebrew, Dartmouth College’s […]