Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  News recently broke that China had mediated a restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Subsequently, analysts of the Middle East wondered what that means for the quiet relations that Israel and Saudi Arabia had been […]

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.  This year, Koren Publishers released a new edition of the Book of Esther. It contains the complete, unabridged Hebrew text of Esther, the same text found in any other volume of the Hebrew Bible. But the rest of it […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  One of the great debates in the history of Jewish theology is about how to reconcile two contradictory truths. First, that God is beyond human comprehension, and—unlike pagan deities—does not have a corporeal presence and is not subject […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  When the United States entered the Second World War, it needed to fight against both the Nazis in Europe and the Middle East and the Japanese in the Pacific. To manage that gargantuan task, American military planners divided the […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  “Prayer is the language of the soul in conversation with God. It is the most intimate gesture of the religious life, and the most transformative.” Those lines are from an essay called “Understanding Jewish Prayer” by Jonathan Sacks, […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  To understand the inner life of the biblical world, one must look to Egypt. In the Hebrew Bible, it plays a role in the psyche of the Jews as the great other, the great alternative. Thus, when the […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  As 2023 began, Israeli opponents of the new government have been organizing protests and demonstrations. Manifest there, and in the newspapers and magazines and television programs of the center and left, is the fevered and frustrated political rhetoric […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  The Uighur people is an ethnic group historically located in central and east Asia; the bulk of its population lives in western China. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has severely restricted Uighur religious life and has […]

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 […]