Jewish Political Thought

During Tikvah’s advanced institute on “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews”, Hoover Institution scholar Peter Berkowitz discussed Michael Walzer’s account of the Talmudic parable of the oven of Akhnai. Is the oven pure? The rabbis say it is, but…

Both liberals and conservatives have good arguments for the idea of federalism, but they typically defend different things. As Tikvah’s executive director Eric Cohen and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol discuss, liberals praise moral freedom and cultural pluralism, while conservatives…

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik argues that the Passover Haggadah should be viewed as the key—and perhaps only—work of Jewish political thought for the hundreds of years between the Tanakh and Maimonides. No other text focuses as much on what…

As part of the advanced institute on "Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews," Tikvah hosted the legendary editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz has been a partisan of the left, the right, and, most of all, the Jews. In…

In a discussion of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Tikvah executive director Eric Cohen wonders how modern Zionism relates to the principles of Burkean conservatism. In a time of severe insecurity—like many Jews found themselves at the…

During our Advanced Institute, The Future of the Israeli Economy, we were honored to have Ambassador Ron Demer join us. Dermer, a close adviser for many years to Benjamin Netanyahu discussed the Prime Minister's role in enacting free…

Lord Acton famously proposed that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse provides an analysis of Jewish history that suggests the exact opposite. Join us at 5:30PM to reconsider…

Nineteenth century political emancipation brought citizenship rights to European Jews. In How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky explores how this new political reality affected Jewish philosophy and the Jewish people. The prospect of…

Americans marked the birthday of the Sixteenth President of the United States yesterday, Abraham Lincoln. In honor of this, we share here a recent scholarly article by Matthew Holbreich of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought…

A dilemma: What do you do when the categories in which you are accustomed to think already commit you to certain conclusions - conclusions  that, when stated explicitly, you are inclined to resist? Such a dilemma is at…

Dr. Yuval Levin, Editor of National Affairs and a former domestic policy advisor to President George W. Bush,  has an idea about the fundamental commitments that lay beneath the policy issues that divide liberals and…

One winter after an unusually heavy run of funerals, the rabbi of our Montreal synagogue reminded the congregation that in traditional Judaism, dying was only a minhag (custom); it was not a mitzva. I would like to extend…