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 […]

While Rabbinic Judaism—the Judaism of everyday laws—has declined in the modern era, Prophetic Judaism—the Judaism of profound, universalist ethical proclamations—has risen to the forefront of Jewish self-understanding. Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution explains in this clip why Prophetic Judaism flourished after the Haskalah: Judaism as an ethical code was most compatible with the Jews’ […]

Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs, takes on the relationship between theory and practice. We tend to think that political theories are dreamed up absent society and then played out in a society. But, drawing on Burke and Tocqueville, Levin postulates that “the ways in which we understand ourselves become the ways in which we live.” […]

Is there an authentically Jewish view of economics? Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution argued during Tikvah’s advanced institute “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews” that there is and there isn’t. As with medical care, there are technical dilemmas in economics that do not have an authentically Jewish solution, like the granular questions of monetary policy […]

As part of Tikvah’s advanced institute “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews”, Tikvah’s executive director Eric Cohen offered two philosophical dilemmas for conservatives. The first is how to reconcile the tension between an economics that praises creative destruction and a preference for cultural, political, and religious continuity. The second is the dilemma of conservatism’s metaphysical roots: […]

In a discussion of the political thought of the Haggadah, Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution notices a recognition of the importance of the separate person—the individual—in the Passover teaching. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik concurs and offers a beautiful homily on the biblical preference for building with unique stones rather than uniform bricks. The best communities, […]

Does the Jewish tradition offer resources for thinking about political questions? Editor of The Weekly Standard William Kristol offers a hedging “yes” to that question. There are certainly lessons in the Bible and other texts, but, because the Rabbis did not hold political power, they rarely interpreted texts in this way.

To begin a close reading of one of Karl Marx’s most important early works, “On the Jewish Question”, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Berkowitz identified two kinds of emancipation Marx is concerned with. The first is political emancipation, or liberal democracy. But Marx sees that kind of freedom as insufficient; what is needed is “human emancipation.”

Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, Parisian radicals stormed the Bastille. To Thomas Paine, this inaugurated an “Age of Revolutions.” As part of Tikvah’s advanced institute on “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews”, Hoover Institution scholar Peter Berkowitz and National Affairs editor Yuval Levin reflected upon Thomas Paine’s arguments for the French Revolution and on the nature of […]

George Mason University’s Jeremy Rabkin reviewed Hoover Institution Scholar Peter Berkowitz’s Israel and the Struggle Over the International Laws of War in The Jewish Review of Books‘s Summer 2012 issue. Rabkin praises Berkowitz for his cogent defense of Israel against spurious claims that Israel violated internationally accepted laws of war, but Rabkin takes the debate one step further. […]