Our Favorite Conversations of 2023

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2024

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2023, host Jonathan Silver convened 47 new conversations probing some of the most interesting and consequential subjects in modern Jewish life, from theological and religious themes to political and military ones. He spoke to scholars, visual artists, rabbis, writers, soldiers, strategists, and generals. Now that 2023 has come to an end, he's looking back at a number of representative excerpts from the year past in hopes that, as we plan 40 or 50 more conversations in 2024, you’ll return to the archive and listen to some of the most fascinating conversations from this year.

In this episode, we present selections from some of our favorite 2023 conversations. Excerpts include the podcast host and president of Shalem College, Russ Roberts; the great American writer, Cynthia Ozick; the Hebrew calligrapher, Izzy Pludwinski; Peter Berkowitz and Gadi Taub debating judicial reform; Ran Baratz on the roots of Israel's rifts; Michael Doran comparing October's Hamas attacks with the Yom Kippur War; Meir Soloveichik on Jewish martyrs; and, discussing Mosaic's November essay on the Palestinian predicament, the scholar Shany Mor, the journalist Haviv Gur, and the intellectual Hussein Aboubakr.

Finally, this episode ends on a note of hope, sounded by the historian Rick Richman, whose book of biographical portraits, And None Shall Make Them Afraid, turns out to have been the book we most needed this year.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 2023, we convened 47 new conversations, probing some of the most interesting and consequential subjects in modern Jewish life,
0:16.6	from theological and religious themes to political and military ones.
0:22.1	I spoke to scholars,
0:28.2	visual artists, rabbis, writers, soldiers, strategists, and generals. For the first nine months of the year, the Jewish world was focused on one great Israeli challenge, the challenge of
0:33.0	judicial reform, the protest movement it brought out, and the counter-protest movement that was stimulated
0:39.3	by that one. By the summer and fall, the rifts in Israeli society had grown very deep,
0:45.4	and it was by then evident that debate over judicial reform was a concrete way for Israelis to
0:51.1	argue over competing visions about the purposes of the country. Thus did the
0:55.6	Jewish state confront the enduring dilemmas of freedom and the agonies of self-government.
1:01.0	On the morning of October 7th, this challenge was replaced by another, equally serious. If the first
1:07.6	great crisis was domestic and internal, the second posed a challenge to Israel's
1:12.7	national security. Chamas operatives invaded towns and villages in the area known as the Gaza envelope,
1:18.6	and slaughtered, raped, pillaged, and terrorized the Israelis living in the Western Negev.
1:24.9	Thus began the months-long campaign to liberate the hostages that
1:28.8	Hamas seized, some 130 of whom remain in captivity, restore deterrence against Israeli adversaries,
1:35.6	and impose again the kind of peaceful conditions that ordinary citizens can expect their
1:40.5	government to secure. As I'm recording this, that campaign is ongoing. And thus,
1:46.0	the second great Israeli challenge of 2023 was the challenge of order, contending with the forces
1:51.9	of malice and Jew hatred that were the very root justifications for Israel's establishment in the
1:57.7	first place. On the Tikva podcast, we took up these issues full on and in-depth,
2:03.0	freedom and order, the eternal polarities of Jewish life. I hope you've enjoyed these
2:08.5	conversations and learned as much about Jewish ideas and Jewish dilemmas as I have this year.
	...

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