Join Rabbi Meir Soloveichik as he talks with the nation’s leading writers, thinkers, and statesmen about the state of religious faith in the United States, and about why we continue to have in the American promise.
Recent Episodes
Guest: Professor Wilfred M. McClay
April 2021
In this episode, Rabbi Soloveichik is joined by the historian Wilfred McClay, one of the most insightful writers today about the American story. In their conversation, they discuss some of the central questions facing our culture. What does it mean to speak of America as both a country and an idea? How ought we respond to the recent attempts to delegitimize the American Founding? Why can America still be considered, to quote McClay, a Land of Hope?
Wilfred M. McClay is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and the Director of the Center for the History of Liberty. His book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America was awarded the Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. Among his other books are The Student’s Guide to U.S. History, Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Public Life in Modern America, and Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.
Prof. McClay served on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities, for eleven years. He is a member of the U.S. Commission on the Semi-quincentennial, which has been charged with planning the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education. He is a graduate of St. John’s College (Annapolis) and received his PhD in History from the Johns Hopkins University.
Previous Episodes
Guest: Professor Ruth Wisse
March 2021
Preeminent teacher and scholar Ruth Wisse serves as the Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund and Professor Emerita of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. In this fascinating conversation with Rabbi Soloveichik, Professor Wisse discusses growing up Jewish in Montreal, her relationship with Leonard Cohen, the failure of Yiddishists to preserve enduring Jewish commitment, how Harvard lost its faith in America, and what Jerusalem taught her about God.
Professor Wisse’s books on literary subjects include an edition of Jacob Glatstein’s two-volume fictional memoir, The Glatstein Chronicles, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Literature and Culture, and A Little Love in Big Manhattan. She is also the author of two political studies, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews and Jews and Power. Her most recent book, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, a volume in the Tikvah Fund’s Library of Jewish Ideas, was published by Princeton University Press.
Guest: Ross Douthat
February, 2021
Ross Douthat is an opinion columnist for the New York Times, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and one of the nation’s leading conservative thinkers on the place of religion in American public life. In this inaugural conversation in Rabbi Meir Soloveichik’s series on “Faith in America,” Douthat joins Rabbi Soloveichik for a candid and wide-ranging discussion on the state of religion in America, how one engages the broader culture while raising religious children, the differences and similarities between the Jewish and Catholic communities, the debates within American Catholicism today, and what the West might be able to learn from Israel’s achievements.
A prolific writer, Mr. Douthat has written for the Atlantic and National Review and has been published widely in the popular press. He is the author of five books: The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success; To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism; Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics; Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, which he co-authored with Reihan Salam; and Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class.
About Rabbi Soloveichik
Rabbi Dr. Meir Y. Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish community in the United States, founded in 1654. He is also director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. Rabbi Soloveichik has lectured internationally to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences on topics relating to faith in America, the Hebraic roots of the American founding, Jewish theology, bioethics, wartime ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Mosaic, the Jewish Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, Azure, Tradition, and the Torah U-Madda Journal. Rabbi Soloveichik is a descendent of one of the great dynasties of Orthodox Judaism. He graduated summa cum laude from Yeshiva University, received his rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and studied at its Beren Kollel Elyon. He has also studied at Yale Divinity School, and in 2010, he received his doctorate in religion from Princeton University.