Eric Cohen & Dan Senor on "American Jewry's Wake-Up Call"

Source: Tikvah

What is Tikvah? Tikvah’s purpose is to educate the rising generation of Jewish, Zionist, and American leaders and to advance the most serious thinking about the great challenges facing the Jewish people in the modern age. We seek to cultivate Jewish citizens with moral confidence and civic courage, informed by the hard-won lessons of Jewish history and devoted to strengthening Western civilization through Jewish ideas and institution-building.

A few days ago, Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen sat down with Call Me Back podcast host and author Dan Senor to discuss the great awakening of American Jewry.

They explored why Jews and Israel are suddenly at the center of the civilizational challenges facing the Western world; why many American universities are no longer worthy of Jewish creativity and talent; and why now is a time to build and renew the soul-shaping civic institutions that perpetuate our Jewish, Zionist, and American values. They also discussed Tikvah's plans and strategy for the years ahead—and why now, more than ever, Jewish ideas and Jewish leadership matter.

The response to the attack of October 7 has proven to be a wake-up call for American Jewry. We have witnessed legacy media outlets uncritically parrot Hamas propaganda; we've seen universities overrun with calls for "intifada" while their presidents prove unable to clearly condemn the anti-Semitism on their campuses; we've watched as violent anti-Israel protests sweep major cities across the nation. Presented with one of the clearest moral tests of our time, many of our leading institutions have failed the Jews, failed Israel, and failed the West.

How can we—as committed Jews, proud Zionists, and patriotic Americans—confront this crisis? And what is Tikvah doing to build new institutions that will proudly stand up for Israel and Western civilization?

In this conversation, Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen is joined by author and podcast host Dan Senor. They discuss what the aftermath of October 7 has revealed about the decay in American media, academia and culture; why our universities have failed so profoundly in this moment; and how Tikvah is working to fill the gap left by our fraying institutions and educate a new generation of young people who embrace their inheritance and Jews and Americans.

Recorded December 14, 2023.