The Tikvah Podcast

On September 30, 2026, a flight took off from Dubai International Airport for Tel Aviv, with 174 passengers and a crew of six. Over the skies of Saudi Arabia, Flydubai Flight 1073's first officer stabbed the captain and tried to hijack the plane in order to crash it into the earth. The plane dove from 34,000 feet to 17,000 feet in less than a minute.
Despite suffering from stab wounds, the captain was able to unlock the cockpit door and some of the Israeli passengers on board managed to restrain the assailant, level off the plane, and treat the pilot while the plane was brought to an emergency landing. All 180 passengers and crew survived what was very nearly a catastrophic act of terrorism.
Today's conversation was recorded in the weeks between two anniversaries. September 11, 2001 is now a quarter-century behind us, and October 7, 2023 took place three years ago. For those of us old enough to remember 9/11, the weeks between these two dark days are something of a season of remembrance. That remembrance helps to put this foiled attack into perspective
Earlier this week, the assailant attempted to turn a passenger jet into a weapon, as the terrorists did on 9/11. And the people who prevented him from succeeding belong to the nation that was attacked on October 7. These two anniversaries and last week's attack are all connected—just as America (the "great Satan") and Israel (the "lesser Satan") are connected in the minds of our mutual adversaries.
They're connected in other ways, too, and how such events are remembered is the subject of this week's conversation with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, a fellow at JINSA's Gemunder Center and the author of the Abrahamic Metacritique Substack. In the latest installment of his Mosaic column, Via Maris, Hussein, explored "How October 7th Inherited the Guilt of September 11th." He observes that in a growing number of quarters in American life, September 11 is remembered less as an atrocity committed against Americans than as the first chapter of a story about American wrongdoing.
That same inversion, of an attacked party being accused as the author of the attack against it, is also the story of Israel after October 7, and in Hussein's analysis, the pattern that took a quarter of a century to fall into place after 9/11 was already set to spring into action when Hamas invaded Israel. Today, he joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss that pattern and how it took hold.

Last week Mosaic convened an important discussion about Turkey, Israel, and the Middle East, framed by the Turkish-Israeli analyst Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak's September essay, "How Turkey Is Forging a New Ring of Fire around Israel." Joining Yanarocak and Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver were the Israeli strategist Dan Schueftan, and the American Hudson Institute scholar Michael Doran.
The day before that conversation took place, video footage emerged out of Saudi Arabia showing an intercepted drone that was aimed at Mecca. The Saudis claim that the drone was fired by the Houthis, the Iranian proxy in Yemen. And now, aside from being the holiest city in Islam, Mecca is also the name of a new defense pact that Saudi Arabia signed just over a month ago with Turkey and Pakistan.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement is modeled after NATO's Article 5, which treats an attack on one as an attack on all. The first test has arrived, and its partners offered statements of condemnation, but not much more. Turkish and Pakistani officials have told reporters that they haven't been asked for help, and that the alliance still needs to be institutionalized. Yet, as Yanarocak points out, the Mecca pact is one of several frameworks Ankara has created that by design exclude Israel. In his view, that fact, combined with the Turkish military presence in Syria, is far more disquieting than any of the inflamed rhetoric coming from Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Yanarocak thus asks us to take seriously a scenario that Bernard Lewis put to him personally, more than a decade ago: Turkey and Iran might one day exchange roles as the primary strategic threat to Israel.
This week, we bring you the full proceedings of his discussion about that question with Michael Doran and Dan Schueftan. You can also read the transcript, or watch the video, on the Mosaic website.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Marina Solovey and Leo Goldstein in honor of the yahrzeit of Isidoro Solovey (alav ha-shalom). If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.

"I cried to the Lord out of my distress, and he heard me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried and Thou didst hear my voice. For Thou didst cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all Thy billows and Thy waves passed over me." This is from the book of Jonah, and in these verses from its second chapter we find the prophet from the Galilee praying from inside a great fish that had swallowed him in the ocean. "The waters compassed me about, to the point of death;" Jonah said, "the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars closed on me forever: yet hast Thou brought up my life from the pit."
Jonah is a short book, four chapters, and one of the most unusual in the prophetic corpus. A prophet is commanded to go and warn a great and hostile city, and instead of arguing with God, the way Moses and Jeremiah do when they are summoned to prophesy, Jonah flees in the opposite direction. He ends up in the belly of a fish, offering words of thanksgiving for a rescue that has not yet happened. When God does save him, and Jonah finally delivers his warning, the city repents completely, expressing contrition and donning sackcloth. But Jonah is disappointed that his prophecy of destruction did not come true. The book ends with God asking Jonah a question that he doesn't answer.
To try to make sense of this puzzling book, Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver spoke with Jon D. Levenson, the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School.
This conversation airs just before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, when the book of Jonah is typically recited. Levenson and Silver discuss the pagan sailors on Jonah's ship who behave, by any ordinary measure, more piously than the prophet does; what it means that Jonah identifies himself to those sailors as a Hebrew, and what that word signified to them. They also address the book's satirical qualities, and look closely at this biblical portrait of a man whose perception of the world is so markedly limited, so at odds with what God wants from him. In short, they seek to uncover the strangeness of Jonah son of Amittai.

Even the most casual consumer of social media has noticed it. The explosion of anti-Jewish memes, videos, grotesque jokes, snickering, trolling—and, in a different register, material that is quite a bit darker—has flooded our screens. Since October 7, we've grown accustomed to talking about the rise of anti-Semitism as though it were the weather, a cloudy mood that settled over American campuses and American streets that we can describe and deplore and hope that it passes. Today's guest argues that this way of thinking misses the point entirely, because much of what looks like weather is in fact the product of arson, much of what seems like spontaneous surges in anti-Semitism is in fact the deliberate practice of information warfare by Russia, Iran, and China against the United States.
Eliana Aiken is a policy fellow at Defense Technology Alliance, and her August essay in Mosaic explores "Anti-Semitism as Information Warfare."
The essay walks us through the machinery of this campaign in granular detail. It explains what troll farms and SIM farms are. It explains how bots manufacture the appearance of popularity. She reports on research that points toward the astroturfing of figures like Nick Fuentes, whose content is amplified at a rate no organic audience could produce.
Aiken's argument is that, in anti-Semitism, America's adversaries have found a potent tool to divide Americans, sow confusion and disorder in American society, turn Americans against one another, and distract the country from their own offensive strategic maneuvering. She discusses that argument in conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver.

Man is a storytelling animal, and conveying the experience of the human condition in poetry and prose helps us understand and contend with it. That's true in all times and places, and it is why students of a society and its culture have much to learn from its poets. Contemporary Israel is one of the most interesting societies anywhere on earth, and its poets encompass the depth of its culture—God and man, the inescapability of war, human vices large and small. Today, we take a peek into their work.
Making this possible is Michael Weingrad, a scholar of modern Hebrew and Jewish literature who is on the faculty of Hillsdale College, where he is helping to build a new undergraduate program in Judaism and Western Civilization. Weingrad recently founded an online publication, the New Jerusalem Review, where he publishes his translations of contemporary Hebrew verse into English. Today, he sat down with Jonathan Silver, the host of the Tikvah podcast and the editor of Mosaic, to introduce some of the most revealing selections from some of his favorite writers.
The subject is important not only because of the intrinsic value of poetry, but also because anglophone literary culture has grown hostile to Israeli and Jewish writers, especially since October 7, and the poems Weingrad translates are not the safe, well-behaved kind of poetry that makes its way into the standard anthologies. They come out of a Hebrew-language literary world that most American readers, Jewish or Gentile, have almost no access to—a world that includes religious and secular, skeptics of multilateral summits and peace processes, and even conservatives.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Kenneth Weiss in memory of his father, Eliezer Lipa ben Uri. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.