Eric Cohen, executive director of the Tikvah Fund, delivered some of the most powerful remarks of the fund’s Jewish Leadership Conference at the beginning of the event on Dec. 8 in Manhattan. Only after reading them did he reveal that he was quoting Norman Podhoretz’s 1982 Commentary article “J’Accuse.”
“I charge here that the antisemitic attacks on Israel are also a cover. They are a cover for a loss of American nerve. They are a cover for acquiescence in terrorism. They are a cover for the appeasement of totalitarianism,” he quoted, almost verbatim. “I accuse all those who have joined in these attacks not merely of antisemitism but of the broader sin of faithlessness to the interests of the United States and indeed to the values of Western civilization as a whole.”
Cohen’s remarks, in addition to those of many of the other speakers at the event, which Tikvah said raised “a record $1.8 million” and drew its largest ever audience (1,000), often connected the interests of the Jewish people, Israel and the Western world.
“Before you give me any credit for those words, I have to make a confession,” Cohen said, after the audience applauded Podhoretz’s writing. “His assessment was true back then 40 years ago, and it is true today and surely more so,” Cohen said, this time in his own words.
“The attack on the Jews, on Israel and on Judaism itself is an attack on America, the West and the Hebraic way of life that we hold dear,” he added. “The only question that matters is what shall we do in response?”
At Tikvah, he said, “we try to prepare young Jews for the summons of history with knowledge, with clarity and with courage.”
“America needs the Jews as much as the Jews need America,” he added, noting that a “three-headed monster” was at the root of surging Jew-hatred.
Attacks on Jews are an attack on the “Hebraic vision of human life,” he said. “It is an effort to send Abraham back to his pagan land. To slay Isaac on the mountain in the name of Ishmael. To shatter the tablets of Moses. To rewrite the holy code of Leviticus. To neutralize Joshua. To replace the redemptive yearning of David’s psalms with violent rage and nihilistic despair.”
The other two “heads” of Jew-hatred are an attack on free society—especially meritocracy—and an attack on Israel, Cohen said.
Those themes resurfaced often during the day-long event, during which Tikvah bestowed its 2024 Herzl Prize on Ben Sasse, a former U.S. senator and former president of the University of Florida. Sasse addressed the audience, as did former U.S. ambassadors Nikki Haley and Michael Oren; the scholars Ruth Wisse and Yuval Levin; Rabbi Meir Soloveichik; former U.S. education official Kenneth L. Marcus and Tikvah alumnus Shabbos Kestenbaum. (Melanie Phillips and Alex Traiman, both of JNS, addressed the audience as well.)
At the event, Tikvah also announced a new bachelor’s program, which it launched with the University of Florida. “This bold initiative will recruit exceptional students for an intensive undergraduate program on Jewish and Western civilization,” Tikvah stated.
‘Vilna on the Hudson’
“We, who are gathered here, certainly testify to the opportunities that this country gives us to sustain Jewish life and to make our case in the public square,” Ruth Wisse, distinguished Tikvah senior fellow and professor emerita of Yiddish literature and comparative literature at Harvard University, told the audience.
“In the United States, Jews have political agency that we never had before,” she said. “Jews used to depend on the shtadlan, the intercessor who negotiated for their security with rulers on their behalf. Because democracy is so much messier than autocracy and despotism, its hundreds of elected rulers needed a huge lobbying framework, so AIPAC was built in the 1950s and ’60s.”
“We know that it was successful because being attacked is the surest sign of Jewish success,” she said. “We American Jews have built Federations, community centers, schools, synagogues, organizations, research institutes.”
Tikvah gives “incredible evidence of how to build a Jewish presence and future” in America, she added, referring to the establishment of the State of Israel as “the most hopeful sign of civilization since the dove returned with an olive leaf to Noah’s ark.”
Amid surging Jew-hatred, Wisse told the audience of Israel that “as a people, we are done with running. Migration is no longer a national option.” Stateside, Tikvah is helping create “a new Vilna on the Hudson,” she added. “We help America, approaching its 250 years, push through to its first millennium and beyond. We Jews are the blue and white in the red, white and blue.”
Yuval Levin—director of social, cultural and constitutional studies, public policy chair at the American Enterprise Institute, and founder and editor of National Affairs—told the audience that “Tikvah is aptly named. It gives me hope.”
Citing the biblical example of Nehemiah, he said it is necessary to have both builders and fighters—those who hold a trowel in one hand and a spear in the other—to take on the threats facing Jews.
“Fighting and building are two very different kinds of work, but they are inexorably connected to each other,” Levin said. “The work of renewal doesn’t mean that some of us get to be fighters without needing to build and some of us get to be builders without needing to fight. Every person must do both.”
“This ambidextrous work of renewal is essential to the proper formation of the people involved,” he said. “To fight without building can deform our soul and make us forget why we fight.”
The opposite, he added, is “to lose sight of the need to be practical and realistic, courageous and strategic in a hostile world. To let others handle the fighting while pretending we are too good for it ourselves is to mistake cowardice for high-mindedness.”
Inquisitions, struggle sessions
In winning Tikvah’s 2024 Herzl Prize, the fund’s “highest honor, given every year to a leader who embodies our highest ideals as patriotic Americans, proud Zionists and committed Jews,” Sasse joins Natan Sharansky (2018), Podhoretz (2019), Wisse (2021), Roger Hertog (2022) and Leon Kass (2023).
The previous laureates are “a good deal more interesting and a good deal more thoughtful than I am,” Sasse told the audience. When he heard from Tikvah that he was to be this year’s winner, “I thought they were very confused and had dialed the wrong number.”
“I thought it was strange. Why would you be calling a Christian kid, who grew up working on farms in the Midwest, to New York to win a major Jewish intellectual prize?” he said. “My wife also was very confused.”
“Another way of saying this is what hath Fremont, Neb., to do with New York or Jerusalem?” Sasse said, adapting the question of the early church father Tertullian.
The former senator spoke about four revolutions that he believes are simultaneously ongoing: in technology and economics, consciousness and attention, politics and educational institutions. The educational one, he said, “is more impressionistic,” while the others are better understood.
Future historians will look back on today not for contemporary politics, according to Sasse. “They will talk about the fact that we were living through a digital revolution that didn’t really fully apprehend,” he said, noting that a previously scarce economy based on atoms will be computer-bit-based and about abundance.
Amid these changes, academia has lost its way, according to Sasse. “Institutions ostensibly dedicated to the search for truth and to the exploration of ideals and to the advancement of human flourishing instead have devoted themselves to inquisitions and struggle sessions,” he said. “Students are urged to catalog microaggressions and to conflate comfort with safety. Faculty, who dare to treat students like adults with a sense of grit and a grand sense of potential, face professional consequences. Administrators police language.”
After Hamas’s terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, colleges and universities decided how to respond to students based on the speaker. “We could spend a whole day on the absurdities just a few dozen blocks north of here at Columbia University,” he said. “Constant antisemitic babble. Taking janitors hostage. Disrupting classes. Vandalizing buildings. No real consequences.”
The good news is that Americans now see the absurdity and want something better, Sasse said.
While Sasse spoke about domestic news, Abrams asked Haley questions about foreign policy, starting with the recent news of Bashar Assad’s regime falling in Syria. “It came out of the strength of Israel,” Haley said of the rebels deposing Assad. “Hezbollah had fallen. Iran was weakened. Russia was distracted. And Turkey saw an opportunity.”
“Had Israel not been so strong,” she said, “all of a sudden, you see Assad is begging everyone for help. Iran is literally pulling members out. Russia is saying, ‘I don’t have time.’ He literally attempted to call Israel. He got the message on that one, and he fled.”
“Today, it’s a net positive for Israel,” she added at the Dec. 8 event. “We don’t want to see ISIS go back in there. We don’t want to see some faction of Al-Qaeda go back in there. Turkey says they don’t want that either.”
What the administration should do, according to Haley, “and I’m saying the Trump administration because he has already started to make moves, and I think he should go ahead and step in.” She said “America and Israel should immediately reach out to Turkey and say, ‘What should we be doing right now to make sure the Iranian interest doesn’t grow stronger?’ Because if we don’t do it Russia will do it.”
Speaking broadly about the current administration, Haley noted that “Biden said all the right things. He didn’t do all the right things.”
America needs to relearn what it means to be a friend to its allies and to re-earn the latter’s trust, she added.
“The United Nations is such a farce,” she said of the global body where she served as U.S. envoy. “It’s a ridiculous place.” She added that many of the countries who are part of the United Nations regularly put Israel down to try to make themselves look good.
Seinfeld I, Seinfeld II
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, as well as a Tikvah faculty member, riffed on his great uncle, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s concept of a biblical Adam I and Adam II, which he defined in his 1965 article “The Lonely Man of Faith.” (The essay was published as a book in 1992.)
Where the Rav, as Soloveitchik is affectionately called, responded to two different sorts of narratives in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 about the biblical Adam, Soloveichik applied the template to Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian and actor in—and co-creator and co-writer of—his eponymous TV sit-com. Seinfeld has been one of the Jewish state’s staunchest supporters since Oct. 7.
“The Jew who perhaps achieved more cultural success than any other in America in the 1990s” would have been know in American Jewish history—had his story ended when his successful television show came to an end—as “a very successful man, who was living the American dream while remaining in the Jewish neighborhood of the Upper West Side where he grew up,” Soloveitchik said.
“What we now know is that is not all he is and that the path that he has taken after Oct. 7 has therefore been so striking, especially compared to other American Jews that have cultural stature and success comparable to his,” he said. “Seinfeld stood with his people in their moment of crisis against the antisemites, and did so fearlessly as an American and as a Jew.”
“Adam I is the man of the world. Adam II is the man of covenantal identity. We are called to embrace both, to be part of the world while embracing with courage our covenantal claims of the Jewish people,” Soloveichik said of his great-uncle’s writings on the twofold responsibility of Jews.
“And so ladies and gentlemen, building on Adam I and Adam II, I would like to offer an even more sophisticated version today of this with parallels of our times—Seinfeld I and Seinfeld II,” he said to laughter from the crowd. “Seinfeld I gave us one of the most popular series in American history. I’ll leave it to you to judge the value of that. But Seinfeld II has been the one that we have seen post-Oct. 7.”
“We know which achievements will truly matter,” he said.