Is the Trump administration pro-Israel? There’s a great deal of evidence to believe it is. It’s given Israel the armaments and rhetorical support it needs to fight on until total victory in Gaza. It has targeted the Houthis in Yemen. It has a record of taking action—economic, diplomatic, and military—against Iran and so has a degree of credibility in countering Israel’s greatest external threat. The president has put champions of the U.S.-Israel relationship in key roles: the secretary of state, the national security advisor, and the secretary of defense are all on the record advocating even closer relations between Washington and Jerusalem. President Trump invited the Israeli prime minister for an extensive, private meeting in the Oval Office, the first such meeting of his second term. The Republican convention last year was perhaps the greatest single spectacle of American Zionism aired in prime time.

And yet, there are some who see in the Trump administration an equal measure of signs and portents that it will not strengthen but weaken the U.S.-Israel relationship. There is a current of isolationism within the administration and among its key supporters, combined with a strategic concept that weighs American investment in the confrontation with China against American investment in the Middle East. In senior and subcabinet appointments, as well as in the Trump coalition’s media environment, these voices have a significant presence as well. In addition, there has been a welling up of genuinely anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist passions and enmities from rightwing social media and from Trump-aligned populist figures with large online followings.

So what is it? Is the second Trump administration’s conception of an America-first foreign policy pro-Israel or isn’t it? The answer is that the administration contains both of these elements, and it’s the president’s job to manage the tensions between them. That tension—between those who see Israel as an asset to American interests and those who see it as a liability—has been present in every Republican administration since Israel was established in 1948.

To discuss what that debate has looked like in the past, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the presidential historian Tevi Troy. Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute, a senior scholar at the Straus Center at Yeshiva University, and a former deputy secretary of HHS. His most recent book is The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.

In the months leading up to the October 7 attacks, Israel was bitterly divided along the tribal lines that had been hardened by the government’s effort to reform the country’s judiciary. There were major protests, acts of civil disobedience, and boycotts, coupled with enormous frustration, distrust, anger, and resentment among Israelis. Then, as you might expect after suffering so grievous and unprovoked an attack as Israelis suffered on October 7, the country responded by unifying, displaying great civic strength. The invisible filaments that hold a society together were pulled taut by the war. Most everyone was a part of it and most everyone was together: volunteering, cooking, babysitting, working, cleaning, helping, schlepping, driving, organizing. When Israel’s men returned to the reserves and left their families, their businesses, their startups, and their careers, friends and neighbors became family and kept each other going.

Now, nearly eighteen months into this war, that momentary unity seems like a distant memory. The war continues, and Israeli society is again divided.

To discuss these civic tensions, the writer and teacher Micah Goodman joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver. Goodman is the author of seven books, most recently The Eighth Day: Israel After October 7, and in the course of the conversation he speaks about what he has learned in the last year-and-a-half about Zionism, the Israeli people, and the precious, resilient state that they’ve built.

This conversation was recorded live in Jerusalem in front of an intimate audience of students attending Tikvah’s Israel Fellowship, a program that overseas students studying in seminaries and yeshivot in Israel can use to supplement their religious study, as well as of members of the Tikvah Society.

To expect women and men of flesh and blood to live lives of ethical perfection is to expect too much. Lapses in judgment, ignorance, vice, and sin are inescapable parts of the human condition. Each year, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, we recite the Al Het prayer, enumerating over 40 sins that we have committed. Sinning is natural, or, as the poet Alexander Pope famously put it, “to err is human, to forgive divine.”

And there’s a deep truth to that, for while error and vice are natural to the human condition, religion has introduced into the moral landscape the human imitation of God’s compassion that releases us, and allows us to release one another, from the crushing burden of guilt and vice. That religious innovation is forgiveness, and it plays a central role in the ethical life of Jews and Christians.

A society without forgiveness, in which moral stain can never be wiped away, in which no mechanism for absolution exists, is a society that will grow fearful, fragmented, feeble, and frail. A society that is properly calibrated to the inescapable truths of human sin, and also has an instrument that absolves the sinner and and enable him or her to rejoin society, is resilient. A few years ago, American was bound up in a spate of so-called cancellations in which public figures stood accused of some wrong action, wrong statement, or wrong thought, and were deemed unfit for employment or standing in society. And, in the progressive circles that led these efforts to purify the public arena, no apology would suffice. No cleansing was sufficient to remove the stain: once a bigot, always a bigot.

It was around that time that a group of Jewish and Christian theologians began meeting to discuss the idea of forgiveness. Over the course of several years of study, reading, and discussion, a statement emerged. “Forgiveness: A Statement by Jews and Christians” was published in the February 2025 issue of First Things magazine.

But of course, something of civilizational significance happened while this group convened, and that was the October 7 Hamas attacks, and the adulation of the attackers by American and European activists. In the face of such evil, could forgiveness be offered? Should it be? What are the limitations on forgiveness and what are the moral obligations on the part of the penitent seeking forgiveness?

Two of the statement’s signatories, Tikvah’s chief education officer Rabbi Mark Gottlieb and the Villanova University professor Anna Moreland, join Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss these and related themes.

Today, as Jews celebrate the holiday of Purim, they’ll also study the book of Esther, named for the young queen whose Jewish identity was unknown to her husband—Persia's king—and his court. The book of Esther tells the story of how she and her cousin Mordechai outwitted the king's second-in-command, the vizier Haman, who sought to destroy the Persian Jews. Beloved among children and adults, the story has also been read by some as a manual for Jewish political survival in the Diaspora.

Ronna Burger of Tulane University, a professor of philosophy, also sees in Esther a commentary on the sources of human success: do humans accomplish their aims through sheer luck, divine help, or careful decision-making? In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, she walks through Esther, demonstrating how each of these elements—chance, providence, and prudence—emerge from the biblical text.

New York City in the 1970s and 1980s was, to put it lightly, not a very safe or nice place to live. Drugs, crime, and public-sector mismanagement made it dangerous and unpleasant, and even the very wealthy were not entirely immune from the disorder. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the city rebounded in an incredible way, and a great deal of that civic revitalization found its roots in the policy research of a small think tank focused on urban affairs, the Manhattan Institute. Utilizing new approaches to law enforcement and other governance matters that scholars at the Manhattan Institute incubated, Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg restored and improved New York.

Then came a wave of politicians in city hall and in Albany who forgot the hard-won lessons of the 90s revival, and the city in the last fifteen or so years has experienced a resurgence of crime, drug abuse, untreated mental illness, homelessness, and violence, along with the tell-tale signs of urban decay and disorder. In all of this, as ever, the Jewish community of New York served as the canary in the coal mine, and a spate of anti-Semitic violence preceded and then coincided with the general unraveling.

To discuss how this breakdown of order can be halted and reversed, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the irrepressible policy entrepreneur and conservative visionary, the fifth president of the Manhattan Institute, Reihan Salam. Together they address the civic health of New York, the most Jewish city in America; what it takes to re-moralize the culture; what urban conservatism is; and why Salam believes that the work he and his colleagues are doing at the Manhattan Institute could lay the groundwork for New York’s next come back.

This conversation was recorded live in Manhattan, in front of an intimate audience of members of the Tikvah Society, so you may hear sirens and street sounds—the soundtrack of New York.

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.

Last February, the Egyptian-American intellectual Hussein Aboubakr Mansour wrote an article in which he considered the possibility of a new idea of Palestinian nationalism. The IDF was destroying Hamas. The remnant of the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy and trust among the frustrated Palestinians—already weak—was decaying at an accelerated rate. The grotesque complicity of UNRWA in Hamas’s crimes might yet deal enough of a blow to the international Palestine-human-rights complex that Mansour could allow himself to hope that the old idea of Palestine might be susceptible to being replaced by something different, something more constructive. A consequence of Hamas activating a series of events that led to war and defeat and destruction might also lead to an opportunity to re-found Palestinian nationalism on healthier foundations.

One year later, after watching Palestinians in Gaza cheering the remains of the Bibas children, murdered in Gaza and then kept as monstrous ransom, Mansour recently revised the possibility of a renewed Palestinian nationalism, and in light of all that has transpired, came to a different conclusion altogether.

Today, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy and contributor to Mosaic, joins Jonathan Silver to discuss his essay, “Why There Should Not Be a Palestine,” published on his Substack, the Abrahamic Critique and Digest.

A few weeks ago, this podcast featured a conversation between Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, moderated by Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver. The subject was Douthat’s new book, Believe, a work of monotheistic apologetics, which argues that everyone should be religious. Among the many topics discussed was the remarkable revival of spiritual energy in America.

At present we are living through a kind of religious awakening, one that shares some features with the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, despite some fundamental differences. Previous surges in American religious life were, to put it plainly, much more conventionally Christian. This one is a great deal more complicated, and it is fractured in the same way that our culture is fractured.

Some forms of Christianity are indeed growing, while many traditional Christian confessions continue to shrink. A good deal of the spiritual energy in America is not channeled into any recognizable Christian form: wellness culture, identity politics, occultism, and other phenomena have all taken on some aspects of religion, and are accorded sanctity by their devotees.

This week, we turn that general question to the Jewish community, and in particular, to American Orthodox Judaism. To what extent do the trends of American religious life and American spiritual dynamics affect Orthodox communities? What are some of the sociological, communal, liturgical, and institutional changes that are taking place there? How has October 7 affected the religious consciousness of American orthodoxy?

To explore these questions, Jonathan Silver speaks with Rabbi David Bashevkin, the director of education for NCSY, the youth movement of the Orthodox Union; a professor at Yeshiva University; and the founder and host of the Jewish media company and podcast, 18Forty. American Orthodoxy is itself remarkably diverse, and this conversation focuses mostly on modern or centrist Orthodox institutions, whose limits and contours Rabbi Bashevkin helps to dimension.

On February 8, 2025, three hostages ascended from the dungeons of Hamas and returned to freedom in Israel: Eli Sharabi, age fifty-two; Or Levy, age thirty-four; and Ohad Ben Ami, age fifty-six. They had been held captive for sixteen months.

When the three men were first seen, and their images instantly projected onto social media and news sites and television sets across the world, many viewers had a similar reaction. They were so gaunt, so emaciated, so frail, that they reminded Israeli government ministers, news analysts, even the president of the United States, of Holocaust survivors.

Survivors of the Nazi war against the Jews were, upon their liberation in 1945, indeed often starved and skeletal, and when we think of the women and men who endured the miserable slavery of the concentration camps, we think of their suffering. There are vanishingly few survivors of the Shoah still alive with us now some 80 years after the camps were liberated. And of course we who are their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren have an obligation to redeem their suffering with life, with holiness, and with strength.

Even so, alongside and among the suffering victims, the prisoners, the Jews who were oppressed by the Nazis and their collaborators, there were countless examples of Jewish resistance, of Jewish heroism and courage that tell a very different story about the Shoah.

Today’s podcast traces the life and defiant wartime story of Joseph Scheinmann, born in Munich in 1915, who fled with his family to France in 1933, where he was assigned a new identity and a new name. From that moment on, Joseph—now Andre—would work to undermine, sabotage, subvert, surveil, and debilitate the Nazis.

Andre, the name he kept even after the war, the name he used to build a life in America, is the grandfather of Gabriel Scheinmann, a foreign-policy analyst and the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society. He joins the podcast alongside Diana Mara Henry, the author of a new book about Gabriel’s grandfather, I am Andre: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy, based on Andre’s own recollections and memoir.

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.

In July of the year 1263, the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani met to debate Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, sometimes known as Nahmanides, to discuss whether Jesus was the messiah, and thus whether Christianity or Judaism had a greater claim to truth. They conducted this debate in the court of King James of Aragon, who famously guaranteed the rabbi’s freedom of speech, allowing Nahmanides to advance even arguments that, being regarded as heretical by Christian clergy, would have otherwise caused him to be imprisoned or worse. These proceedings are known, famously, in history as the Disputation of Barcelona. To understand fully the context of this debate, one has to know something more about the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani: he was not born Pablo Christiani. In fact, he was born as a Sephardi Jew with the birth name of Saul. Only later in life, having lived as a Jewish man and having been exposed to some Jewish learning, did he convert to Catholicism. Joining the Dominican order as a friar, Saul—newly dubbed Pablo—dedicated his life to converting the Jews, possibly with argument and persuasion—he liked to use statements from talmudic texts as evidence for Christian theology—but also through the threat of violence and force. What is it that would so compel a person to turn against his own family, his own teachers, his own neighbors, his own religion—and not as a matter of indifference but as a matter of revenge on the sources of his own formation? That is one of the questions that runs underneath a new story by the legendary essayist, novelist, and short-story writer Cynthia Ozick. This work is called “The Conversion of the Jews,” and it was published in Harper's in May 2023. Ozick’s “The Conversion of the Jews” follows a twenty-four-year-old scholar of words and languages named Solomon Adelberg, as he, in the early 1930s, attempts to discover how and why Christiani undertook his conversion. These questions lead Adelberg to a hollowed-out monastery in the Judean desert, through the occult world of mysticism and magic, and eventually to attempting a séance with the icon of a saint in his Lower East Side apartment. To discuss that story, and the many ideas, themes, and questions it raises, Cynthia Ozick joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver on our podcast (originally broadcast in 2023).

On January 15, Israel and Hamas agreed to a temporary cease-fire. About 30 Israeli hostages would be released, each one in exchange for some 30 to 50 convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Of course, this is a controversial arrangement that sets a terrible precedent to incentivize future hostage-taking.

At the same time, imagine if your mother or father or daughter or friend were among the hostages. Then you wouldn’t really care about that future risk when confronted with the chance to return your own loved one to safety. As many have said, it is a very bad deal, and it is easy to understand why Israelis would support it, even in full knowledge of the risk.

There have by now been many discussions and analyses of this deal and what it means. I recently hosted one of those discussions with the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and the former American special representative for Iran, Elliott Abrams. Today’s conversation is meant to be a little different. It takes a broader, more capacious historical view of how Israel has dealt with this tragic dilemma over the last five decades.

Israel for many years has insisted that it would not negotiate with terrorists. It said that when planes full of Israeli hostages were taken in the late 1960s and it has developed a reputation for this tough-minded, hard-headed position. At the same time, it has always negotiated with terrorists, starting with the planes full of hostages taken in the late 1960s. In this its rhetorical position and its actions have always been at odds and remain so today. That’s the messiness of practical, prudential judgment in a democracy when the lives of citizens are at stake. To understand this history, and unpack the dilemma at its heart, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the Israeli journalist Amit Segal, who can be seen on Israel’s Channel 12 and whose work can be read in the pages of Yedioth Ahronoth.

Ross Douthat occupies one of the most fascinating roles in the religious life of the American public. He is a serious Christian, a devout Catholic, a learned student of American religious history, and a perspicacious observer of the spiritual drives that are an inescapable aspect of the human condition. But what makes his role so fascinating is that he is also an opinion columnist at the New York Times. And readers of the New York Times tend to be considerably less religious, and if religious, then considerably less traditional in their religious habits and beliefs, than Douthat. So there are times when he stands on the fault line between two different epistemological universes, called on to explain the world of faith to progressive America.

In a couple of weeks he will publish Believe, a new book that takes notice of the longing for spiritual transcendence among non-religious Americans, people who look to exercise regimens, or astrology, or claims of extraterrestrial life to engage in a kind of spiritual play. To them, Believe has an arresting argument, which is that in light of what we now know about the universe, the claims of religion—not of occult and supernatural paganism but traditional, monotheistic religion—are a great deal more persuasive. Believe is a form of contemporary, monotheistic apologetics.

Earlier this week, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver hosted Ross Douthat together with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik for a keynote discussion at the Redstone Leadership Forum. Rabbi Soloveichik is the leader of Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. The Redstone Leadership Forum is Tikvah’s flagship gathering of some 100 student delegates from our college chapters at over 30 campuses.

This week, we bring you the recording from that live event.