Israel is an incredible place, where it is not uncommon for contemporary events to evoke fundamental human questions and fundamental questions about the nature of Judaism. One such event is the opening of Shalem College, the country’s first liberal arts college, which not only puts such great questions front and center in its curriculum but also represents, itself, a statement about Jewish national identity and the vexed question of the universal and the particular.

Princeton Alumni Weekly just ran an excellent profile of Shalem, its history, and its goals.

Last week, Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael Doran taught in our ongoing Advanced Institute entitled “Moments of Decision, Great Debates.” His subject was the 1948 Israeli war of independence and the fierce debate that surrounds it. While he was at the Tikvah Center, he sat down with Tikvah’s Executive Director Eric Cohen for an exclusive interview. The discussion ranged from parallels between the Eisenhower and Obama administrations’ approach to the Middle East, to the principles of American foreign policy under President Bush and President Obama to Dr. Doran’s analysis of contemporary crises in Syria and Iran.

“We have ceded to Iran an enormous amount of leverage. Iran has given up no leverage over us whatsoever. With respect to their nuclear program, they are at first and goal. What they have agreed to with this agreement is to stay at first and goal… the leverage that they have over us is constant.”

But, he adds,  it’s not the end of the world… Listen in to see why.

One of the most remarkable things about the Jewish and Christian traditions is that they both revere figures who predated the central events of their redemptive histories. Both hold in high esteem the patriarchs of Genesis—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob— even though these figures precede Moses or Jesus. The cases of Isaac and Jacob are complicated […]