Best Raphael Kirsch Podcasts (2024)

1
Matthew Levitt on Israel’s War with Hizballah: How the terrorist group continues on despite its catastrophic losses. 45:45

1h ago45:45

45:45

On October 25 of this year, Israel carried out a series of retaliatory strikes on military targets in Iran. The Iranian supreme leader has made public pronouncements ordering his military to prepare a series of counterstrikes, though, as of this recording, those counterstrikes have not yet commenced. The prospect of a continued exchange of aerial a…

1
Meir Soloveichik on the Meaning of the Jewish Calendar 46:41

17d ago46:41

46:41

The Zionist writer Ahad Ha’am famously remarked that more than the Jewish people kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jewish people. There is a deep truth that is embedded in the organization of time, the ritualization of communal ceremonies of remembrance and praise, and the recapitulation of the traumas and triumphs of the past: that the calendar c…

1
Elliott Abrams on Whether American Jewry Can Restore Its Sense of Peoplehood 55:07

19d ago55:07

55:07

That the Jews have survived is one of the great mysteries of history, and for some theologians, Jewish survival is even an indication of God’s providence. The stronger the force against the Jews, the more miraculous their resilience and endurance. But that mystery has another dimension to it–because in America, the Jewish community is not doing wel…

1
Assaf Orion on Israel’s War with Hizballah 46:15

1M ago46:15

46:15

From exploding pagers to airstrikes and a possible ground invasion, what are the IDF’s goals in Lebanon? Everyone knows that on October 7, Hamas perpetrated a horrible, genocidal attack on Israel. In response to that attack, Israel committed itself to neutralizing the military threat from Gaza. On October 8, not wanting to seem any less committed t…

1
Abe Unger on America's First Jewish Classical School 36:55

1M ago36:55

36:55

A few weeks ago on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a new school opened its doors and welcomed its inaugural classes of students. Emet Classical Academy is America’s first Jewish classical school and a project of Tikvah. It’s designed for 5th- to 12th-grade students, and is an animated by a vision of the importance of Western civilization, the responsi…

1
Marc Novicoff on Why Elite Colleges Were More Likely to Protest Israel 33:43

2M ago33:43

33:43

The academic year of 2023-2024 was an annus horribilis for Jewish students on American campuses. But, for all the attention paid to the likes of Columbia and UCLA, one can zoom out and ask whether the protest activity was evenly distributed across American colleges and universities, or whether it was concentrated at certain kinds of schools? Marc N…

1
Liel Leibovitz on What the Protests in Israel Mean 46:31

2M ago46:31

46:31

For a while after October 7, the war produced an atmosphere of national solidarity in Israel, quieting some of the tensions that had divided Israelis from one another with a special intensity throughout the previous year. That quiet now seems to be ending. There was always bound to be a tension between two of the Israeli government’s primary war ai…

1
Gary Saul Morson on Alexander Solzhenitsyn and His Warning to America 39:25

2M ago39:25

39:25

On June 8, 1978, Harvard University invited the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to deliver a major commencement address. Solzhenitsyn was, by this time, a world famous figure who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Some two and a half decades earlier, while serving in the Soviet army during World War II, he was arrested and sent to t…

1
Adam Kirsch on Settler Colonialism 28:25

2M ago28:25

28:25

Israel’s critics today like to argue that the country is illegitimate because it is the product of what they call settler colonialism. They consider non-Jewish Arab peoples the native inhabitants of the land—inhabitants who were displaced by the appearance of Jewish immigrants over the last 150 years. The great colonial moment was capped in 1948, w…

1
Raphael BenLevi, Hanin Ghaddar, and Richard Goldberg on the Looming War in Lebanon 1:15:55

3M ago1:15:55

1:15:55

Right now, over 50,000 Israelis from the northern reaches of the country are not living in their homes. The intensity of rocket fire from Hizballah, arrayed across the Lebanese border, is too dangerous. For that reason and several others relating to Hizballah's patron, Iran, a war to Israel's north looms. In April of this year, the Israeli security…

1
Josh Kraushaar on the Democratic Party’s Veepstakes and American Jewry 38:29

3M ago38:29

38:29

Earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she’d invited the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, to be her running mate in this fall’s presidential election. Walz has pretty conventional views of Israel for a Democrat: he believes in Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself, he has previously spoken at an AIPAC gathering, he co…

1
J.J. Schacter on the First Tisha b'Av Since October 7 40:43

3M ago40:43

40:43

On the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av in the year 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian forces destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Since then, Tisha b’Av has served as a day of commemorating Jewish tragedy, a day when Jews remember those killed for being Jews and recite kinnot, elegies recounting the sacrifice and suffering that is an inesca…

1
Noah Rothman on Kamala Harris’s Views of Israel and the Middle East 49:13

3M ago49:13

49:13

Suddenly, Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic party’s candidate for president. She’s been in the public eye for much less time than Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and much less is known about her views on many subjects—including on the U.S.-Israel relationship or America’s posture in the Middle East. For instance, as Israel’s war in Gaza ram…

1
Avi Weiss on the AMIA Bombing 30 Years Later (Rebroadcast) 49:05

4M ago49:05

49:05

In April 2024, a court in Argentina ruled that the 1994 bombing of the AMIA, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, was directed by Iran and carried out by Hezbollah. It was an official government acknowledgement of what was long thought to be true, and certainly the conclusion that the Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman had arrived at prior…

1
Melanie Phillips on the British Election and the Jews 53:57

4M ago53:57

53:57

This month, Keir Starmer was elected prime minister of the UK. He is something of a reformer in the Labor party, which, before him, had been led by Jeremy Corbyn. The two have a different public temperament and different public persona. They have a different attitude toward the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Corbyn normalized a degree of anti-…

1
Mark Cohn on the Reform Movement and Intermarriage 49:09

4M ago49:09

49:09

For years, the Reform movement in America has allowed marriage between a Jewish and non-Jewish spouse, as long as the couple commits to raising their children as Jews. But a cultural taboo against intermarriage remained for Reform clergy, a taboo reinforced by admissions and ordination standards at the Hebrew Union College, the movement’s main semi…

1
Jeffrey Saks on the Genius of S.Y. Agnon 54:59

4M ago54:59

54:59

Shmuel Yosef Agnon is one of the masters of modern Hebrew fiction, who helped to spark the revival of modern Hebrew literature in Israel and around the world. His work is not only beloved, but also profound, laden with many allusions to the vast canon of traditional Jewish text that shaped his literary imagination: one hears in Agnon’s work echoes …

1
Shlomo Brody on What the Jewish Tradition Says about Going to War 37:31

4M ago37:31

37:31

Last month, host Jonathan Silver spoke with the rabbi Shlomo Brody about Jewish military ethics. They spoke, in particular, about the Jewish ethical tradition’s conception of right conduct once a war has begun: how one ought to calibrate the force of a maneuver to the threat it is meant to neutralize, how one ought to balance collateral damage and …

1
Chaim Saiman on the Roots and Basis of Jewish Law (Rebroadcast) 47:23

5M ago47:23

47:23

Jewish communities have just concluded the celebration of Shavuot, a pilgrimage festival in times of the Temple and the moment when, fifty days after the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt, God revealed the Ten Commandments to Moses. Those commandments form the foundation of the many rules and obligations inflected throughout the Jewish tradition. I…

1
Elliott Abrams on American Jewish Anti-Zionists 38:45

5M ago38:45

38:45

Since the attacks of October 7 and since the Gaza war began, a small but vocal segment of American Jews have joined in with the anti-Israel protests convulsing American cities and campuses. What are their ideas and where do they come from? Elliott Abrams is the author of If You Will It, a book coming this fall on Jewish peoplehood. Also the chairma…

1
Andrew Doran on Why He Thinks the Roots of Civilization Are Jewish 50:11

5M ago50:11

50:11

Traditional readers of the Hebrew Bible, reinforced by rabbinic commentary, condemn the bloodlust, cruelty, exploitation of the weak, and exaltation of the strong that is on display in the Amalekite attack on Israel in the book of Exodus. But it’s not the Amalekites, the nomadic enemies of the Israelites, who are shocking for their sacralized viole…

1
Haisam Hassanein on How Egypt Sees Gaza 35:59

5M ago35:59

35:59

A stable if somewhat cold peace has endured between Egypt and Israel for nearly fifty years, a peace that includes serious diplomatic and security cooperation. Much of that has to do with Gaza. After Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel and Egypt jointly imposed a blockade and began to control its borders, since each had its own reasons to fe…

1
Asael Abelman on the History of “Hatikvah” 40:01

6M ago40:01

40:01

Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” has a long and poignant history that traces back to a poem originally written by Naftali Herz Imber called “Tikvateinu.” This week, to mark the 76th anniversary of Israel’s founding, the historian and author Asael Abelman joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to investigate that history. Together, they look at …

1
Shlomo Brody on Jewish Ethics in War 47:27

6M ago47:27

47:27

After a long delay, the Israeli military’s advance into Rafah, the city in southern Gaza that is the last stronghold of Hamas’s fighting force and that now also hosts many civilian refugees from the rest of Gaza, may now be underway. Many in the U.S. are concerned that an Israeli push into Rafah will incur high numbers of civilian casualties. How d…

1
Ruth Wisse on the Explosion of Anti-Israel Protests on Campus 51:39

6M ago51:39

51:39

Anti-Israel campus activism has never been more popular or unpleasant than it is right now. In years past, much of this activism was mixed up with nods to the desire for peace and a two-state solution that would allow for Palestinians to enjoy their own sovereignty alongside a secure Israel. That isn’t happening now. It certainly isn’t what is mean…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Raphael Kirsch Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

1
The Tikvah Podcast

The Tikvah Fund

1
Matthew Levitt on Israel’s War with Hizballah: How the terrorist group continues on despite its catastrophic losses. 45:45

1
Meir Soloveichik on the Meaning of the Jewish Calendar 46:41

1
Elliott Abrams on Whether American Jewry Can Restore Its Sense of Peoplehood 55:07

1
Assaf Orion on Israel’s War with Hizballah 46:15

1
Abe Unger on America's First Jewish Classical School 36:55

1
Marc Novicoff on Why Elite Colleges Were More Likely to Protest Israel 33:43

1
Liel Leibovitz on What the Protests in Israel Mean 46:31

1
Gary Saul Morson on Alexander Solzhenitsyn and His Warning to America 39:25

1
Adam Kirsch on Settler Colonialism 28:25

1
Raphael BenLevi, Hanin Ghaddar, and Richard Goldberg on the Looming War in Lebanon 1:15:55

1
Josh Kraushaar on the Democratic Party’s Veepstakes and American Jewry 38:29

1
J.J. Schacter on the First Tisha b'Av Since October 7 40:43

1
Noah Rothman on Kamala Harris’s Views of Israel and the Middle East 49:13

1
Avi Weiss on the AMIA Bombing 30 Years Later (Rebroadcast) 49:05

1
Melanie Phillips on the British Election and the Jews 53:57

1
Mark Cohn on the Reform Movement and Intermarriage 49:09

1
Jeffrey Saks on the Genius of S.Y. Agnon 54:59

1
Shlomo Brody on What the Jewish Tradition Says about Going to War 37:31

1
Chaim Saiman on the Roots and Basis of Jewish Law (Rebroadcast) 47:23

1
Elliott Abrams on American Jewish Anti-Zionists 38:45

1
Andrew Doran on Why He Thinks the Roots of Civilization Are Jewish 50:11

1
Haisam Hassanein on How Egypt Sees Gaza 35:59

1
Asael Abelman on the History of “Hatikvah” 40:01

1
Shlomo Brody on Jewish Ethics in War 47:27

1
Ruth Wisse on the Explosion of Anti-Israel Protests on Campus 51:39

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