To open Tikvah’s advanced institute “Is Judaism a Religion?” Professor Leora Batnitzky of Princeton University defined her terms. Religion, she explains in this clip, is a modern term. In a pre-modern era, “Judaism” referred to the ways of semi-autonomous Jewish communities and a “Jew” referred to the member of such a community. In the modern […]

Possibly Leo Strauss’s greatest essay, “Progress or Return?” is crucial to understanding Strauss’s political thought, especially his famed reason/revelation distinction. In this clip, Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution summarizes the entire argument of the essay in four short propositions.

During Tikvah’s advanced institute “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews,” Eric Cohen, Yuval Levin, and Meir Soloveichik tried to sort through the deep dilemma facing the modern, post-Enlightenment Jew who also holds a Burkean respect for old ways. Eric Cohen began by pointing out how peculiar the claims of historical revelation are, so peculiar as to strain […]

For the advanced institute “The Jewish Idea of God”, founding CEO of the Ein Prat Academy Micah Goodman offered his interpretation of Spinoza. Goodman begins this clip by setting forth the proposition that humans are set apart by two qualities: we are the only animals aware that there is a future and we also know […]

Drawing on Rabbi Akiva’s aphorism that “everything is foreseen but free will is given,” novelist Dara Horn eloquently describes the tension at the heart of Jewish family life. The tension in theology between what is given to fate and what to free will is mirrored in parenting by the tension between what is innate and what […]

In a discussion of Sholem Aleichem, Dara Horn elucidates two classic theories of humor. The first, from the literary critic Henri Bergson, states that we laugh when something “mechanical” is “encrusted on the living.” We laugh at others’ expense. The other theory, authored by Sigmund Freud, involves laughing at ourselves to release ourselves from a […]

During Tikvah’s advanced institute on the “Jewish Idea of God”, Ein Prat Academy’s founding CEO Micah Goodman presented some of the challenges associated with Maimonides’s Aristotelian understanding of God. Perhaps most problematic is the question of whether this vision of a static and unchanging God is really compatible with the Bible’s depiction of a God […]

Founding CEO of Ein Prat Academy Micah Goodman discusses the move from polytheism to monotheism as a revolutionary transition. This transition was much more than the simple exchange of a belief in many gods for a belief in One. The more radical and consequential break—pointing us to the very heart of the Jewish idea of […]

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 Rabbi Eliezer dissents, first appealing to logic but then appealing to miracles. “If the law is as […]

Does Judaism conceive of God as having a dwelling place here on earth? During the course of Tikvah’s advanced institute on “The Jewish Idea of God,” Micah Goodman, founding CEO of Ein Prat, explores a tension between the account of the tabernacle in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers and the account of the tabernacle in Deuteronomy. […]