Podcast: Michael Oren on Writing Fiction and Serving Israel
January 21, 2021 | By: Michael Oren

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 […]
Read MorePodcast: Ruth Wisse on Five Books Every Jew Should Read
October 8, 2020 | By: Ruth Wisse

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 […]
Read MorePodcast: Ruth Wisse & Hillel Halkin on the Authors Who Created Modern Hebrew Literature
September 9, 2020 | By: Ruth Wisse & Hillel Halkin

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 […]
Read MorePodcast: Ruth Wisse on What Saul Bellow Saw
February 5, 2020 | By: Ruth Wisse

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 […]
Read MorePodcast: Best of 2019 at the Tikvah Podcast
December 31, 2019

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.
Read MorePodcast: Jacob Howland—The Philosopher Who Reads the Talmud
October 30, 2019 | By: Jacob Howland

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 […]
Read MorePodcast: Dara Horn on Eternal Life
July 10, 2019 | By: Dara Horn

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 […]
Read MorePodcast: Jeffrey Saks on Shmuel Yosef Agnon
April 30, 2018 | By: Jeffrey Saks

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 […]
Read MoreThe Story of Hebrew and the Story of Judaism
August 3, 2017 | By: Lewis Glinert

“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 […]
Read MorePodcast: Liel Leibovitz on the Jewish Poetry of Leonard Cohen
June 23, 2017 | By: Liel Leibovitz

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher. Chapter 1: Leonard Cohen—Jewish Prophet Chapter 2: Fathers and Sons Chapter 3: “Hineni” Chapter 4: Cohen’s Jewish Particularism Chapter 5: A Broken Hallelujah How do poetry and song convey Jewish meaning? Does Jewish poetry have to be liturgical? At the […]
Read More
Sign up for our e-newsletter
Stay up to date on events, institutes, fellowships, and new digital content from the Tikvah Center.