Welcome to the Tikva podcast and great Jewish essays and ideas.

I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

If you like listening to our podcast, I invite you to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher,

and I hope you'll leave us a rating and a review.

If you want to learn more

about our work at Tikva, you can visit our website, TikvaFund.org, and follow us on Facebook or

Twitter. The premise of this podcast is that to understand ourselves and to understand what is required

for Jewish flourishing in the modern age, it's necessary to seek out and revisit over and again the most penetrating

analyses of the Jewish and the human condition, to think clearly about Jewish politics

and public policy, security and strategy, the family and society, education, and the search for

wisdom, and perhaps above all, to think clearly about the legal obligations

and theological beliefs of the Jewish people, to think clearly about these things requires

us to seek out wise teachers.

Now often, those teachers present what they have to say in writing, and most of our conversations

have focused on 20th century essays, because over the last decades,

the form of the essay has been a uniquely powerful teacher.

But there are also wise women and men whose very lives and careers can instruct us by example.

Today's podcast is a conversation with Elliot Abrams, former member of the Bush administration's

National Security Council, veteran of the Reagan State Department, senior fellow at the Council on

Foreign Relations, one of the wise men of the Washington foreign policy establishment.

Mr. Abrams joined me back in July of 2017 to discuss his callings and career and his Jewish life in the arena of American

foreign policy. This conversation was recorded live at one of Tikva's student programs in New

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