Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  The 1st-century Roman essayist and philosopher Plutarch is perhaps most famous today for his stylized, paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen. In Plutarch’s parallel lives, Alexander, who conquered the Mediterranean world, is compared to Julius Caesar, who did […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Patriotism—or one form of it at least—is an acknowledgment of the obligations that flow from recognizing all that one owes to previous generations and what they undertook and passed down. And if one wanted to inculcate that form […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Recently, Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “The Solution to Israel’s Crisis Might Be in America’s Constitution.” That essay forms the point of departure for this discussion with Levin himself. Levin […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Nearly 75 years ago, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s sovereignty: a renewed Jewish state, the political expression of the national home of the Jewish people, located in their ancestral homeland. Many essays and books have […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Part of what animates the two sides in Israel’s current judicial-reform crisis has to do with the specific proposals that the Knesset is currently debating. But the crisis is not only about these concrete constitutional issues. It is also a proxy […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  To understand the dramas, disagreements, and protests roiling Israeli politics at this moment requires an understanding of the government’s proposed judicial reforms, as well as the history of Israel’s Supreme Court and its relationship to the Knesset. It also […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Benjamin Netanyahu was Israel’s prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and then again from 2009 to 2021. Already Israel’s longest-tenured leader, he just won another electoral victory and is expected to take office again later this week. Netanyahu […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  On February 24, when Russian president Vladimir Putin began his country’s invasion of Ukraine, Jewish leaders found themselves caught on opposing sides of an active war. Ukrainian rabbis have suggested that the war is a holy fight between […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  There are major concerns facing Israel’s democracy today. Some have to do with voting and Israel’s system of electoral representation. Others relate to Israel’s judiciary. Champions of the current configuration of the Israeli judiciary believe that its famous independence is a […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Some of today’s most important ideas were first born in little magazines—magazines, that is to say, like Mosaic. How does that happen? And what is the role of a magazine editor, and does that role differ if the magazine […]