Since 2015, the Israeli writer Hillel Halkin has published a series of 10 essays in Mosaic

on seminal Hebrew writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

They've dealt with everyone from Smolenskin and Bialik to Agnone, the poet Rachel,

and Achad Ha'am. Those essays have been brought together and added to, in a newly published book,

The Lady of Hebrew and Her Lovers of Zion. Now, the act of writing such a book is itself an act of

cultural preservation to preserve and safeguard the Jewish people's signal achievements in literature,

poetry, essay writing, achievements through which we discovered ourselves as a modern nation in the

modern world. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. This week, to hear

Hal can talk about his new book, we're bringing you a fascinating conversation that he recently

had with Harvard Professor Emerita and Tikva Fund Distinguished Senior Fellow, Ruth Weiss. As you'll hear

in their conversation, these two interlocutors have been talking for decades, about literature,

yes, but also about the big questions of modern Jewish life that literature helps us understand,

Israel, assimilation, inheritance, tradition, religion, cultural fidelity. The conversation is but

a snapshot of a long-running discussion between these two giants of modern Jewish letters.

It was recorded over Zoom at a digital event co-sponsored by Bait Avichai and Mosaic.

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Here now is Hillel Halkin in conversation with Ruth Weiss.

Hillel and I are used to getting together at least once a year for this kind of conversation.

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