The Tikvah Podcast

Jewish Americans have been loyally voting for Democratic presidential candidates since the early decades of the 20th century. And a very great many Jews supported Vice-President Harris in the election earlier this month. But the exit-poll results reported by most news outlets—that 79 percent of the Jewish voting public cast their ballots for Harris—are, at the very least, open to some very serious questions, and probably altogether unrepresentative. The poll that generated the figure of 79-percent Jewish support for the Democratic nominee, it turns out, does not include results from the states of New York, New Jersey, and California—three states that contain some of the most densely populated Jewish voting districts, and that are homes to those Jewish subpopulations that are a great deal more likely to support Republican policies and Republican candidates. A poll that excludes the most populous Jewish cities, and that excludes most Orthodox communities, is a poll that necessarily will reveal a distorted picture that privileges Jewish populations that tend to vote for Democrats. Fortunately, other information is available. Maury Litwack is the founder and CEO of Teach Coalition, a lobbying organization active in at least seven states that aims to make it easier for religious parents to send their children to religious schools. He and his team conducted their own exit poll of Jewish voters, looking at places that tend to have a higher concentration of Jewish citizens—the swing state of Pennsylvania and the swing Congressional districts in New York State. The Teach Coalition poll found that Harris did not win more than 50 percent of the Jewish vote in those districts. On this week’s podcast, Litwack joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss his analysis of these data. He does not see evidence that all Jews are becoming Republican, or that they all support President Trump, or that all Orthodox Jews are doing so. There are certainly trends that point in that direction, but they’re not sustained by the findings of this poll. What is sustained by the findings of this poll is that the Jewish vote is up for grabs—and that both parties ought to be competing for it. Thus the Democratic party that has the most to lose if it believes that it still has the Jewish vote in its pocket—an unfounded belief that is reinforced every time the figure of 79 percent is repeated.

This week, in their liturgical recitation and study of the Hebrew Bible, Jewish communities all over the world will relive the terrifying moment when God commands Abraham to take his son, his beloved son, who was to be his heir and fulfill his deepest dreams for family transmission and ancestry, Isaac, and sacrifice him. What is this passage all about? What does it mean? What can be learned about Abraham, about Isaac, or about God by reading it carefully? Joining Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to discuss these questions on this week’s podcast (originally broadcast in 2023) is Jon D. Levenson, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School and frequent Mosaic contributor. Levenson has written about this episode in several books, including The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son published in 1993 by Yale University Press, and also in Inheriting Abraham, published in 2012 by Princeton University Press. Akeidat Yitzḥak, the binding of Isaac, as the Jewish people traditionally refer to this episode, has a long afterlife in Christian and Muslim traditions; it is also a centerpiece of philosophical reflection among modern thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard. Reading the text now in the aftermath of those later reflections, it’s difficult to retrieve its original meaning. The temptation is overwhelming to propose moral justifications for Abraham and for God, to excuse or at least to try to soften the drama of Genesis 22. To hear what the text of the Hebrew Bible really might have to say in response to that temptation requires undoing some modern assumptions—a task that Levenson and Silver take up.

America has just elected a new president, or rather, a new-old president. Donald Trump will be the first American president since Grover Cleveland to be elected to non-consecutive terms. All transitions between presidential administrations have an awkward aspect, felt especially during the months between the election and when the incumbent takes office. This period, when the successor has already been named by the electorate but does not yet have any official power, is when a lame-duck session of Congress meets, and the president himself is called a lame-duck president. During this period, the president—while retaining all of his constitutional authority—nevertheless tends to diminish in the power hierarchy of Washington. Presidential power is based, to a very large degree, on the possibility of promising something in the future, and lame-duck presidents don’t have a future in which they can fulfill any promises. It can also be a period when, unconstrained by the need to run for office again, a president can put executive orders and other kinds of policies in place without worrying about their political consequences. So it can be a period of troublemaking. Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), fears that a lame-duck Biden administration might decide to target Israel with executive action in very damaging ways. Dubowitz has spent decades working on financial warfare and sanctions in and out of government, and he is an expert on Iran’s nuclear program. In order to follow this conversation, there are a couple of things it helps to know. First, in December 2016, during President Obama's lame-duck period, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2334, which conveyed that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem are illegal. The U.S. could have vetoed the resolution, but instead abstained. The second is Executive Order 14115, which President Biden signed back in February, which gives the State and Treasury Departments authorization to sanction individuals and entities who undermine peace and security in the very areas Security Council Resolution 2334 determined Israelis may not live in. Sanctions have already been levied against some Israelis—some of whom genuinely do undermine peace, and some of whom do not. Dubowitz joins Jonathan Silver to warn of the danger that the president will use the last weeks of his term to take accelerated action under these authorities. 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.

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 attacks between Israel and Iran has captured the world’s attention, and for good reason: Iran is a nuclear-threshold state operating in close coordination with Russia. This shift in attention has taken media coverage away from Lebanon, but in fact, the Israeli military’s operational successes in that country over the last month raise some very important questions. Hizballah has been degraded significantly—its arsenal diminished, its leadership eliminated, its command structure disrupted, its lines of communication fractured, its decision-making process broken, its finances destroyed. How, in light of this, does Hizballah continue to operate? And how does Israel leverage these impressive tactical successes into a strategic victory that will allow the citizens of the Galilee and the Golan to return to their homes? Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury Department senior official and the author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, discusses these questions and others with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.