Welcome to the Tikva podcast and Great Jewish Essays and Ideas.

I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

If you like listening to the podcast, you can 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 and Twitter. Our topic today is not

an essay or a single idea, but instead the career of a single man, a great man, a man of

Titanic significance at one of the darkest moments in the long and storied history of the West,

Winston Churchill, Nobel Prize-winning writer, soldier, government official, member of the darkest moments in the long and storied history of the West. Winston Churchill,

Nobel Prize-winning writer, soldier, government official, member of the House of Commons

from the age of 26 until his retirement from public life some six decades later,

along the way Churchill served twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and is rightly

remembered and revered for his courage and statesmanship in defending Britain

and leading the Allied forces in the Second World War. Churchill was born in 1874, and died in

1965, seen from the perspective of Jewish history. The years of Churchill's life were years of

consequence for the Jewish people. Those years saw the birth of modern Zionism, the organization

of a movement of political Zionistism, the organization of a movement

of political Zionist leaders, the settlement of the historic land of Israel, the catastrophe

of the Shoa, the birth of the Jewish state, and the fight for its life. So how did perhaps

the 20th century's greatest man think about the Jewish people? How do you think about their

desire for a national state? What were the sources of Churchill's views?

And what can aspiring Jewish leaders today learn from Churchill's relationship to the Jews of the diaspora

and the young state that he helped to bring about?

On this podcast, I'm joined by Dr. Michael Makovsky.

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