New Article: Our Tikvah Future is Muscular Christianity: Religious Radicalism for Neo-Con Jews
David Shasha
Our Tikvah Future is Muscular Christianity: Religious Radicalism for Neo-Con Jews
In the previous This Week in The Tikvah Fund I presented the upcoming lecture series from Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, and The Tikvah Online Academy programs:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ik3PrDmt5KM
Here is the Soloveichik lecture series announcement:
And here are the Online Academy programs:
A week after Tikvah announced those programs, we got another letter from its very busy Executive Director announcing the Tikvah Scholars Program at Yale:
https://tikvahfund.org/hs/tsp2021/home/
I have included in this post Eric Cohen’s letter, and the details of the Yale program which features previous faculty members and select comments from alumni.
The alumni section features a couple of Sephardim, one an SY from the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School here in Brooklyn. And, apparently, a Christian who graduated from St. Mark’s High School in Texas.
Indeed, the entire constellation of names and institutions in the website listing is a veritable treasure trove of political Right Wing extremism from academia to our government wingnuts and assorted warmongers.
One big happy world!
The idea is not to educate the students, as much as it is to act as a Neo-Con networking process that will expose the children to the “correct” ideas. But more importantly, it is to have them meet face to face with those movers-and-shakers who can make their career moves that much more efficacious.
In this sense, the quote from SY YOFHS grad Ricky Sasson could not be more duplicitous:
Tikvah has taught me to develop my own set of beliefs and morals, while still approaching life with an open mind.
Nothing in the explanatory matter would indicate that the program will allow students to “develop” their “own set of beliefs and morals,” or allow them to exercise an “open mind.”
Modern Orthodox students like Sasson would not be able to understand what having an “open mind” actually means, given that they have been indoctrinated in the Washington Heights White Jewish Supremacy dogmatics for so many years. Indeed, the classical Sephardic heritage is alien to them; leaving the door wide open for the Tikvah radicalism.
It is truly a tightly-orchestrated program of Right Wing political indoctrination that presents a singular monocultural view of the world; a view processed through the lenses of radical religion and warmongering jingoism. Diverse points of view are emphatically not presented. They would defeat the entire purpose of the program.
We will note that many of the faculty members featured in the announcement are not even Jewish, and are very much part of the Christian Fundamentalist establishment.
I would like to focus specifically on one of those institutions, The Witherspoon Institute, that is represented on the Tikvah faculty listing by R.J. Snell and Sherif Girgis:
https://winst.org/about/#j-witherspoon
The Institute counts Eric Cohen as a Trustee:
https://winst.org/about/#fellows
Cohen has participated in the Institute’s religious attack on Human Cloning:
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/members-of-the-witherspoon-council-cloning-report
WI is dedicated to a Christian-based vision of American government and society, as can be seen in the biography of its namesake John Witherspoon:
The Institute is named for John Witherspoon, a leading member of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the sixth president of Princeton University, and a mentor to James Madison, the fourth president of the United States of America. As important as these credentials and his other accomplishments are, however, it is Witherspoon’s commitment to liberal education and republican government that inspires the Institute’s name.
Minister in the Church of Scotland
Witherspoon’s Scottish family formed him as an orthodox Calvinist, and his deep religious convictions would ultimately given rise to his vocation as a minister. His father, James Witherspoon, a man having no fewer talents than his son, acted as one of King George II’s chaplains in the parish of Yester, near Edinburgh, Scotland. The relation of his mother, Anne Walker, to John Knox also linked him to the Reformed tradition. After earning a degree at the University of Edinburgh, which was fermenting with Calvinist and British liberal ideas, Witherspoon became a Church of Scotland minister at the age of twenty-one. He then married Elizabeth Montgomery, with whom he would have ten children.
His ministry would be one of his driving concerns for his entire life, and the raging debates that then divided the Church of Scotland lent urgency to his convictions. Some thought that the Church should focus on the abstract rights of the personal conscience, while others fought for a communal focus on the enduring reality of universal laws. Witherspoon fought for the latter notion and became a leading spokesman for the evangelical Populist Party. His satire Ecclesiastical Characteristics and other religious writings garnered for him an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews. Yet his popularity did not arise from his writings alone. Although so unyielding a Calvinist as to win the monikers “Scotch Granite” and “John Knox redivivus,” Witherspoon was a solemn and graceful preacher so gifted with memory that he did not take notes into the pulpit.
Even after traveling to America to accept his post as president of the College of New Jersey, Witherspoon advanced the cause of the Gospel, for he wanted to cause the knowledge of God to cover the earth as the waters cover the seas. He strengthened the College’s programs in English and rhetoric so that it might be better at educating clergy. He helped to unite the different Church of Scotland groups into the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A., whose first General Assembly he moderated in 1785. It was this assembly that provided the church with a confession, a catechism, and laws of governance.
“The knowledge of God and his truths have from the beginning of the world been chiefly, if not entirely confined to those parts of the earth where some degree of liberty and political justice were to be seen, and great were the difficulties with which they had to struggle, from the imperfection of human society, and the unjust decisions of usurped authority.”
– John Witherspoon: The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men – May, 1776
President of the College of New Jersey (Princeton University)
Despite his numerous accomplishments in ministry, Witherspoon was no mere preacher. He served as the College’s sixth president, heavily revising its curriculum and building up its resources. Upon his arrival in 1768, he found many of the students ill-prepared for university studies. Witherspoon’s consultations with friends of the College followed, as well as a visit to the College of William and Mary, where his itinerant preaching would reap a contingent of southern students for the College. With only two or three tutors to help, Witherspoon himself undertook the teaching in moral philosophy, divinity, rhetoric, history, and French, believing that the Christian liberal arts could guide a student to virtue. The College benefited from three hundred more books, the lecture format for classes, and the appointment of a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. Not least, with Witherspoon arrived the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, including John Locke’s conceptions of the liberty and natural rights of man and the notion of representative democracy.
Educator of Revolutionaries
Witherspoon sought to form students for ministry, farming, and public affairs alike. He introduced them to Locke and Berkeley, along with classical philosophers and other Enlightenment thinkers, but some of the most inspiring ideas he taught were those he himself held. He did not conceive of truth as abstract and ethereal but argued that it inheres in the concrete reality of the natural world. For him, faith and reason never clashed but converged and, joined to a common sense philosophy, helped to guide a life of virtue.
These ideas, along with Witherspoon’s conception of a just government, inspired many men. Under his tutelage would be formed twelve future Continental Congress members, forty-nine U.S. representatives, twenty-eight senators, three Supreme Court justices, and a secretary of state. Foremost among them was James Madison, who learned of the English dissenting tradition while he attended the College. Under Witherspoon’s direction, Madison also came to hold a view of human nature that emphasized both human dignity and human depravity; this understanding would later inform The Federalist. Witherspoon warned him of the evils of a tyrannical society ruled by demagogues and introduced him to the idea of a government of checks and balances. Madison also learned the lesson of prudence and the importance of admitting mistakes. Most fundamentally, nonetheless, Madison came to think that the state–when governed not merely by the will of the majority but by the higher authorities of natural and divine law–may support the life of virtue.
In addition to educating revolutionaries, Witherspoon himself was one. He signed the Declaration of Independence and participated in the Continental Congress. He saw that British policy conflicted with British liberty as expressed by the constitutional limitations of the Magna Carta, and he fought for that liberty, winning the respect of his colleagues through his own exercise of prudence.
Conclusion
Witherspoon’s many callings made his seventy-one years very rich ones. While he served his people as a statesman, professor, and minister, he also devoted himself to his wife, children, and farming. In his later years, he continued to organize and unite the Presbyterian church and served as a member of the convention that ratified the Constitution. As he proclaimed to a congregation in New Jersey in 1776, “I beseech you to make a wise improvement of the present threatening aspect of public affairs and to remember that your duty to God, to your country, to your families, and to yourselves, is the same.” Witherspoon embodied his words by fulfilling the many duties of his different callings while striving for a unified and ordered life.
In December 2014 I posted my article “The Central Place of Religious Humanism in Judaism and American Civilization: Episodes and Figures in Cultural History,” which was originally submitted to Daniel Ross Goodman when he was the editor of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah’s literary journal Milin Havivin:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/JPZFturnQkQ/m/FX8HLC0KgtoJ
It took Goodman a very short time to reject the piece for publication, advising me that it did not fit the criteria set out in the “Culture and Judaism” theme for the special issue of the journal.
What I did not know then was that Goodman was a part of the WI Radical Christian family, which left my article without any real chance to get published, given my fidelity to Jewish Humanism and the Sephardic heritage:
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/author/daniel-ross-goodman/
It took me a few months to discover the WI connection, which I discussed in SHU 757:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/CzhGSc-T0L4/m/xcR5fq3CBgAJ
Here is the article that caught my eye then:
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/08/17402/
In SHU 870 I included his Jewish Review of Books essay “Torah U-Madda” which linked him with our other dear friend Zev Eleff:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/p9TkHy2aC8o/m/CKjoyouGBgAJ
It brought Witherspoon and Tikvah together, as can be seen from the Mosaic re-posting of the JRB essay:
Goodman’s 2019 Witherspoon article “The Ascent of Jewish Orthodoxy and Conservative Religion in Twenty-First Century America” is a perfect summation of these Neo-Con religious ideas, very much in the New Convivencia mode:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/J45rrr_1H14/m/ZY8a_1xhAAAJ
My personal interaction with Goodman helped me to better understand the nature of Jewish Conservative politics, and the ways in which institutions like YCT, Tikvah, and Witherspoon have created a fierce Intersectionality:
https://www.danielrossgoodman.com/about.html
His CV is a veritable template of the process:
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer, an ordained rabbi, and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) of America in New York. A former contributor to the Books & Arts section of The Weekly Standard and current contributor to the Washington Examiner, he has published in numerous academic and popular journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, Tablet, the Jewish Review of Books, and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. His short stories have appeared in over a dozen literary journals, including aaduna, The Cortland Review, Aurora Wolf, and The Acentos Review.
I recently included two Witherspoon articles in SHU 972 that reflect its Christian orientation, and the continued agony over Trumpism in the Right Wing religious world:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/sxJB4YH3jMk/m/Wre4gkhmAgAJ
We can see how Tikvah is using its substantial institutional platform, buoyed by some very deep financial pockets, to create a generation of young Jews – and apparently Christians as well – to function as automatons promoting its Neo-Con Party Line.
A recent article from Haaretz connects the necessary dots, linking together Tikvah with The Federalist Society, in a way that shows how the Right Wing religious radicals are seeking to effect permanent change in both America and Israel:
Tikvah then proudly took a bow!
It is this institutional infrastructure that provides the scaffolding for young Jews looking to get ahead in a world fraught with peril. Indeed, it is a brilliant strategy that promises them career security at a time of great uncertainty. The strategy also allows Tikvah to deploy the Jewish schools, particularly Modern Orthodox ones, as a convenient mechanism in its march to Jewish communal hegemony.
And it does remind us that Meir Soloveichik has checkmated the Sephardic heritage in a way that fully exposes our apathy and cowardice; a Might Makes Right value system which shows us to be abject failures who could not even think of challenging the Tikvah juggernaut.
David Shasha
Dear Friends,
I am excited to announce that applications are now open for our in-person, high
school student, Summer 2021 Tikvah Scholars Program at Yale. So let the late-night
arguments—Jews vs. Greeks, David Ben Gurion vs. Menachem Begin, Hamilton vs.
Jefferson, Maimonides vs. Halevi—begin again!
Housed at Yale University, the Tikvah Scholars Program has long been Tikvah’s
flagship residential institute for exceptional high school students from across
the country and around the world. We welcome students from all Jewish
backgrounds, and this year we are offering both a 9th/10th grade track and an
11th/12th grade track.
As a friend of Tikvah, you understand the importance of serious ideas and the
life-shaping possibilities of high-level seminar learning. Our animating
principle is this: the greatest intellectual gains are made when spirited,
wisdom-seeking, serious students encounter each other—guided by master
teachers—to discuss the foundational texts of the Jewish, Zionist, and Western
traditions.
Our teaching faculty includes some of the nation’s leading professors, rabbis, intellectuals, and policymakers, and the program is based in one of Yale University’s impressive residential colleges. All current high school students (currently in grades 9, 10, 11, or 12) are eligible to apply, regardless of educational or religious background. The application process is competitive, and we are seeking truly exceptional candidates. So spread the word, or apply yourself.
The Tikvah Scholars Program will have two summer sessions, and students can select their session of choice during the application process.
Session I: June 27–July 8, 2021
Session II: July 25–August 5, 2021
Space is highly limited. We
encourage applications and nominations as soon as possible, so explore our website and apply (or encourage a child,
grandchild, or student to apply) today!
As ever,
Eric Cohen
Executive Director
The Tikvah Fund
Program Overview
The Tikvah Scholars Program is an immersive, 12-day residential learning program located at Yale University. We bring together exceptional high school students from all Jewish backgrounds (offering both a 9th–10th grade track and an 11th–12th grade track) to consider the enduring questions of human life and the great challenges facing Jewish, American, and Israeli civilization. Our seminars tackle big themes carefully and yet boldly—such as war and peace, love and friendship, faith and reason, the individual and community—drawing upon the seminal texts of the Jewish, Western, and Zionist traditions.
Every class is a seminar, where hard questions are encouraged and vigorous debate and discussion are cultivated. In this civil yet spirited cauldron of ideas, lifelong friendships quickly develop, all in a college-like atmosphere that encourages reflection and community. Time for daily leisure, prayer, worship, and Shabbat—all at the appropriate level of the individual student—round out this transformative experience.
We aim to select Tikvah Scholars who aspire to lives of meaning, integrity, and Jewish leadership. We believe that serious Jewish and intellectual inquiry is the best preparation for such a life, and we aim to inspire our students with the best of our traditions—Jewish, Zionist, American, and Western.
Led by master teachers, Tikvah students learn to take positions, formulate arguments, and articulate their commitments respectfully. In this way, students join the perennial conversations studied in our classes. Our seminar rooms foster deep intellectual friendships among serious young Jews from around the world.
Our curriculum centers around the following four areas, which we believe all serious young Jews should study:
Jewish Thought and Civilization
Zionism and Modern Israel
American Ideas and Institutions
Philosophy, Literature, and the Western Canon
Courses previously offered include:
Jewish Thought and Civilization
Zionism and Modern Israel
American Ideas and Institutions
Philosophy, Literature, and the Western Canon
Our Faculty
The Tikvah Scholars Program is anchored by a world-class faculty, selected for its breadth of scholarship and passion for seminar-style teaching. Under the leadership of our Dean, Rabbi Mark Gottlieb, our faculty is comprised of leading college professors, rabbis, journalists, public intellectuals, and key policy figures. The summer 2021 faculty will be announced shortly. Below, please find a partial listing of faculty members who have joined us in recent years.
Rabbi Mark Gottlieb
The Tikvah Fund
Rabbi Mark Gottlieb is Senior Director of the Tikvah Fund and founding Dean of the Tikvah Institute for High School Students at Yale University. Prior to joining Tikvah, Rabbi Gottlieb served as Head of School at Yeshiva University High School for Boys and Principal of the Maimonides School in Brookline, MA, and has taught at The Frisch School, Ida Crown Jewish Academy, Hebrew Theological College, Loyola University in Chicago, and the University of Chicago. He received his BA from Yeshiva College, rabbinical ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Chicago, where his doctoral studies focused on the moral and political thought of Alasdair MacIntyre. Rabbi Gottlieb is a member of the Orthodox Forum Steering Committee and serves on the Editorial Committee of Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought. He lives in Teaneck, NJ, with his wife and five children.
Daniel Mark
Villanova University
Daniel Mark is an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, where he teaches political theory, philosophy of law, American government, and politics and religion. He also chairs the nine-member, bipartisan United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, to which he was appointed by Speaker John Boehner. Dr. Mark is also an assistant editor of Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. There, he was affiliated with the Witherspoon Institute, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, the Program in Law and Public Affairs, and the Penn-Princeton Bioethics Forum. Before graduate school, he spent four years as a high school teacher. He also attended Yeshivat Har Etzion (Gush) in Israel.
Matthew Continetti
The Washington Free Beacon
Matthew Continetti is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where his work is focused on American political thought and history, with a particular emphasis on the development of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement in the twentieth century. Mr. Continetti was the founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he was opinion editor of The Weekly Standard.
Mr. Continetti is also a contributing editor at National Review and a columnist for Commentary magazine. He has been published in The Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among other outlets. He appears frequently on Meet the Press Daily and Special Report with Bret Baier. He is the author of two books and holds a degree in history from Columbia University.
Sherif Girgis
The Witherspoon Institute
Sherif Girgis, a Research Scholar of the Witherspoon Institute, is completing his PhD in philosophy at Princeton and recently completed his JD at Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. Last year, he clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals on the Washington, D.C. Circuit. He is coauthor of the book, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, cited by Justice Alito in United States v. Windsor, on which he has spoken at more than 70 lectures, conferences, and debates. His most recent book, coauthored with Ryan Anderson and John Corvino, is Debating Religious Liberty, Tolerance, and Bigotry (Oxford University Press, 2017). Sherif has written on social issues in academic and popular venues, including Public Discourse, National Review, Commonweal, the New York Times, the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and the Wall Street Journal. He is a 2008 Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Princeton, from which he went on to earn a master's degree in moral, political, and legal philosophy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
Kimberly Kagan
Founder and President, Institute for the Study of War
Kimberly Kagan is the founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War. She has taught at West Point, Yale, Georgetown, and American University. She is the author of The Eye of Command (2006) and The Surge: a Military History (2009), editor of The Imperial Moment (2010), and has published essays in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others.
Dr. Kagan served in Kabul for seventeen months from 2010 to 2012, working directly with General David H. Petraeus and General John Allen, and received the Distinguished Public Service Award for her voluntary deployment. She served as part of General Stanley McChrystal’s initial assessment team in Kabul in summer 2009. She also conducted many battlefield circulations of Iraq between 2007 and 2010. Dr. Kagan serves on the Academic Advisory Board at the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence at CENTCOM.
She received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University and had Olin postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Yale.
Dr. Anna Moreland
Villanova University
Anna Bonta Moreland is the Anne Quinn Welsh Endowed Director of the Honors Program at Villanova University. She received her B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Boston College. Anna Bonta Moreland’s areas of research include faith and reason, medieval theology with an emphasis on Thomas Aquinas, the theology of religious pluralism, and comparative theology, especially between Christianity and Islam. She has written Known by Nature: Thomas Aquinas on Natural Knowledge of God (Herder & Herder, 2010), and edited New Voices in Catholic Theology (Herder & Herder, 2012), and has recently completed Muhammad Reconsidered: A Christian Perspective on Islamic Prophecy (University of Notre Dame, 2020). She is currently co-authoring A College Guide to Adulting: How to Major in Life with her colleague Dr. Thomas Smith, and working toward a book length study of methods in comparative theology.
James Otteson
Wake Forest University
Dr. James Otteson joined Wake Forest in the fall of 2013 as Executive Director of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism and Teaching Professor of Political Economy. Before coming to Wake Forest, Dr. Otteson was joint professor of philosophy and economics, and philosophy department chair, at Yeshiva University. He has taught previously at New York University, Georgetown University, and the University of Alabama. He also serves currently as a Research Professor in the Freedom Center and in the Philosophy Department at the University of Arizona, and he is a Senior Scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. Dr. Otteson’s scholarship focuses on political economy, political philosophy, history and philosophy of economics, and eighteenth-century moral and political thought. He is an expert on Adam Smith, on the moral foundations of capitalism, and on the comparative evaluation of competing systems of political economy.
Daniel Polisar
Shalem College
Daniel Polisar is co-founder and Executive Vice President of Shalem College in Jerusalem, Israel’s first liberal arts college. He previously served as President of the Shalem Center from 2002-2013 and also as its Director of Research, Academic Director, and Editor-in-Chief of its journal, Azure. From 2006 to 2009, he served as the founding chairman, within the Office of the Israeli Prime Minister, of the National Council for the Commemoration of the Legacy of Theodor Herzl. Dr. Polisar received his BA in politics from Princeton University and his PhD in government from Harvard University, where he was the recipient of Truman and Fulbright scholarships, as well as of a Mellon Fellowship. His research interests include Zionist history and thought, Israeli constitutional development, and the history and philosophy of higher education.
Mitchell Rocklin
Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yeshiva University’s Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education. His current research focuses on the history and practical implementation of classical education in a Jewish setting, and he is both writing a book on the subject and implementing a pilot program for the first integrated classical curriculum in a Jewish school in decades, which was recently featured by The Wall Street Journal. He is also writing a book on Judaism and the history of economic freedom. Prior to his current position, Rabbi Dr. Rocklin was a Resident Research Fellow at the Tikvah Fund and a synagogue rabbi in Connecticut. He is also a Chaplain in the Army National Guard with the rank of Major, as well as the President of the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty. He holds a B.A. in History and Political Science from Yeshiva University, rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University’s affiliated theological seminary, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His writings have appeared in a number of publications, including The Los Angeles Times, National Review Online, The Forward, and Mosaic.
Gabriel Scheinmann
The Alexander Hamilton Society
Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann is the Executive Director of the Alexander Hamilton Society, an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit, membership organization dedicated to promoting constructive debate on basic principles and contemporary issues in foreign, economic, and national security policy. Before joining AHS, Dr. Scheinmann worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies as a research analyst and then served as the policy director at the Jewish Policy Center where he co-edited a journal of international affairs. He is a widely published author on U.S. national security and foreign policy, including in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs. He received his PhD and MA from Georgetown University and his BA from Harvard College.
Dr. R.J. Snell
Witherspoon Institute
R. J. Snell directs the Center on Ethics and the University at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ, and is senior fellow at the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. Prior to those appointments he was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College. He earned his MA in philosophy at Boston College, and his PhD in philosophy at Marquette University. Research interests include the liberal arts, ethics, natural law theory, Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ. He is the author of Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing without a God’s-eye View (Marquette, 2006), Authentic Cosmopolitanism (with Steve Cone, Pickwick, 2013), The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode (Pickwick, 2014), Acedia and Its Discontents (Angelico, 2015), and co-editor of Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern and Nature: Ancient and Modern, as well as articles, chapters, and essays in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. He and his family reside in the Princeton area.
Shuli Taubes
SAR High School
Shuli Taubes received her Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School and her BA in history from Barnard College. She currently serves as a faculty member at SAR High School in Riverdale, New York, where she teaches Tanakh, Jewish Identity, and chairs the Jewish Philosophy department. She has also developed and teaches a curriculum for educating Modern Orthodox high school students in comparative religion. Last year, Shuli was the Sopher Community Scholar at the Young Israel of North Riverdale where she gave shiurim and served in a pastoral role. She also lectures in synagogues throughout the country. Shuli and her husband Ari live in Washington Heights, New York.
Each of our master teachers brings a unique and passionate vision to his or her work. We hope to provide students with faculty who are more than just teachers; students get to meet with teachers in informal settings such as meals and during free-time to learn from the faculty as citizens and role models.
Alumni Spotlight
Ariel Mizrahi
UC Berkeley '24
Valley Torah High School '20
The Tikvah Scholars Program provided us with outstanding mentors that further developed my curiosity and zest for learning.
Ricky Sasson
Yeshiva of Flatbush '20
Tikvah has taught me to develop my own set of beliefs and morals, while still approaching life with an open mind.
Gabrielle Bray
University of Virginia '23
White Station High School '19
The Maimonides program was a transformative experience for me. I learned so much from the professors and moderators about the complicated matters of Judaism and how they apply to us today. Tikvah’s focus on creating a diverse environment made these conversations all the more special because there were so many different perspectives at the table.
It is incredibly hard to pick a best part of the program, but I know it will remain one of the best parts of high school for me.
Rebekah Grzebinski
Midreshet Harova '21
SAR High School '20
Tikvah was a transformative experience. The atmosphere of academic rigor inspired me to explore my education further through a Jewish lens. I made absolutely incredible lifelong friends, and great connections with the outstanding professors.
Yaakov Garfield
Yeshivat Har Etzion '20
Mechinas Ner Israel '18
The two weeks I spent in the Tikvah Scholars program were some of the best of my life. Never before had I experienced an environment so focused on meaningful conversation about important topics. I hope the friendships I made there will stay with me for the rest of my life; the answers and questions certainly will.
Billy Lockhart
Dartmouth College '24
St. Mark's School of Texas '20
I had a blast at the Maimonides Scholars Program this summer. The richness and depth of the conversations, the high quality of peers, and the nurturing social environment all helped foster a love of Judaism that had previously slept dormant in my heart. I wouldn’t rather have spent my time doing anything else.