On September 17, 2025, Israel announced that the world’s first laser defense system was ready for deployment, and was being integrated into its multitiered missile-defense shield. Iron Beam may be the most significant advance in missile defense since Israel pioneered the concept of intercepting missiles with missiles back in the 1980s. That’s because Iron Beam promises to solve one of modern warfare’s most vexing problems: the economic asymmetry of defense. When a crude, unguided rocket costing a few thousand dollars must be stopped with an interceptor costing between $50,000 and $100,000, the math quickly becomes unsustainable. The scale of rocket, drone, and missile fire into Israel over the last two years, coupled with the yet-unlaunched arsenals that Iran and her proxies have in reserve, would, if each one needed to be defended by traditional interceptors, cripple Israel’s economy. But Iron Beam changes that calculus entirely. Rather than the $40,000–$50,000 interceptor, each laser interception costs roughly two dollars—the price of the electricity that powers it. The system has what military officials call an “endless magazine,” capable of firing continuously as long as it has power. It’s already battle-tested, shooting down over 40 drones from Lebanon during recent conflicts. But this breakthrough also raises profound questions. Israel’s intelligence failures on October 7, 2025 partly stemmed from an overreliance on technological solutions—the belief that smart fences and surveillance systems could replace human judgment and offensive action. As Israel celebrates this remarkable achievement of military innovation, how do we ensure Iron Beam enhances rather than replaces sound strategic thinking? To discuss these questions, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Yaakov Katz, former editor of the Jerusalem Post and author of the new book While Israel Slept. Together, they explore what Iron Beam means for Israel’s defense, for military cooperation between Israel and America, and the future of warfare.
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Andrew Roberts and Meir Soloveichik on Winston Churchill and His Detractors
What mattered most for survivors of the Holocaust, indeed, what made their survival possible, was not only that the Allies had better ideas about democracy and civilization, though of course Britain, America, and the other Western Allies did. It was that they actually won the war. They defeated the Germans on the field of battle—on sea, land, and air, in the hills and in the streets. It’s not enough for us to rest contentedly on the superiority of our ideas. We also have to fight. But at this moment, the fundamental political fact of the last 80 years—that it was an indispensable and untarnishable achievement for the Allies to have destroyed the Third Reich—is itself under revisionist assault. The Internet talk-show host Tucker Carlson last year promoted the podcaster Darryl Cooper, calling him “America's most honest historian,” and airing his claim that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II who “escalated” what Hitler supposedly intended to be a limited conflict. As one of this episode’s guests reports in the Wall Street Journal, when the Holocaust-denying podcaster Jake Shields polled his social-media followers about who they thought was “the biggest villain of World War II,” 40.3 percent chose Churchill over Hitler (25.3 percent) or Stalin (25.9 percent). Darryl Cooper or Jake Shields are teaching a new generation of Americans a grotesquely distorted view of our own history. To understand why that is, what can be done about it, and what’s at stake for Jews and America, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver sat down Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Andrew Roberts. Roberts is a distinguish historian and the author of more than twenty books. His 2018 biography of Churchill, Walking with Destiny, was the rare work that deserved all of the glowing praise it received, and there is perhaps no person living who knows more about the 20th century’s greatest man than Roberts. On November 1, 2022, he was elevated to a peerage as Baron Roberts of Belgravia. Rabbi Soloveichik is the religious leader of Congregation Shearith Israel, the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought and Yeshiva University, and vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. This conversation took place at a private event held for members of the Tikvah Society. You can learn more about its activities and how to join here.
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Daniel Samet on the U.S.-Israel Relationship and the American National Interest
The relationship between the United States and Israel has long been the subject of intense scrutiny, very often distorted by polemic and conspiracy. One of the most influential articulations of these distortions came in 2007, when the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued that American foreign policy had been hijacked by a powerful Israel lobby—an argument that, despite its weaknesses, has shaped how many Americans view relations between these two nations. My guest today, the historian and policy scholar Daniel Samet, has written a new book that aims to set the record straight. Drawing on archival research and much evidence, Samet demonstrates that U.S. policy toward Israel during the cold war was not the product of special pleading and manipulation, but of America’s own strategic interests. By examining presidencies from Harry Truman through George H.W. Bush, he shows how American leaders, whatever their personal sympathies, consistently acted to advance U.S. national priorities—and how Israel sometimes fit into that strategy, and sometimes did not. In this episode of the Tikvah Podcast, Samet joins the host and editor of Mosaic Jonathan Silver to discuss how Israel was perceived in Washington during America’s long struggle with the Soviet Union, what lessons that history holds for America’s rivalry with China today, and why misconceptions about the “Israel lobby” persist in our political discourse. Daniel Samet is a Jean Kirkpatrick Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. His book, U.S. Defense Policy Toward Israel, was published earlier this year.
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Richard Goldberg on How American Energy Dominance Is Reshaping the Middle East
In the span of just twelve days, the strategic balance of the Middle East was fundamentally altered. Israel systematically dismantled Iran’s drones, missiles, and air defenses, while American strikes turned its most important nuclear facilities into dust. But for all of that, another aspect of the war may not yet have gotten enough attention, and that is the demonstration of what American energy dominance can make possible. What does it mean that oil did not rise over $100 per barrel, as some predicted it might, and how did American policymakers ensure that it didn’t? The answer to that question lies in part in the creation in February 2025 of the National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC). Our guest today is Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who recently served as senior counselor to the NEDC. In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, Goldberg examines what he calls “a National Security Council for energy,” its role in crafting a whole-of-government approach to coordinating American energy policy, and what it tells us about President Trump’s vision for American power. We are currently living through a three-way strategic competition among the United States, China, and Iran for influence in the Middle East—and energy is the battleground. China is pouring billions into its Belt and Road infrastructure projects across the region while buying Iranian oil in defiance of sanctions. Iran is using energy revenues to fund proxy networks from Iraq to Yemen, threatening the very shipping lanes that global commerce depends on. The Trump administration’s answer is to turn American energy abundance into a strategic weapon. To this end, it has signed an energy- and AI-cooperation agreement with Israel—designed to combine Israeli innovation with American infrastructure to dominate the technologies of the future. The administration is also working to cut off Iran’s energy lifelines, ending waivers that allowed Iraq to buy Iranian oil and gas. It’s also pushing massive infrastructure projects like the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor that would run through Israel and bypass both Iranian threats and Chinese influence. Coordinating and advancing these policies is the work of the NEDC, and Goldberg was in the room during the twelve-day war and the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, as well as for the signing of that unprecedented U.S.-Israel energy-cooperation agreement during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s July visit to Washington. Now that he no longer holds public office, he can talk about the experience.
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Ido Hevroni on Teaching Homer in Wartime
This week, as students in North America are returning to campus and settling into the rhythms of the fall semester, some of them are going to open their copies of Homer’s epic poems of the Trojan War, the Iliad and Odyssey. They will read of the Trojan commander Hector’s poignant farewell to his wife Andromache, of the Greek warrior Achilles’ terrible rage, of Odysseus’ long journey home, and of his wife in Ithaca, Penelope, who has endured his absence for some twenty years. For many students, these will be powerful stories—windows into an ancient world of honor and virtue and hubris—but for all that, distant stories. When read from the air-conditioned dorm room or plush campus library, the dust and blood and bronze of the Trojan War are abstract. But what happens when these same texts are read by young men and women who do know the weight of putting on armor, who have themselves kissed loved ones goodbye before departing for battle? Who must walk away from their own infant children in order to defend the country? What happens when the students who stand before Homer’s text are not just dispassionately analyzing the soul of the warrior but are warriors themselves? Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver speaks in this episode with Ido Hevroni, a professor of literature at Shalem College in Jerusalem. For over a decade, Hevroni has guided Shalem students through Homer’s epics, watching them grapple with these eternal questions of personal pride and public duty, private love and public defense, glory and sacrifice. But now, after October 7, his students find themselves in active combat, and he finds that it is Homer who is helping to explain their own experience back to themselves. And it is their experience in the tanks and tunnels of Gaza that is teaching them to read Homer with new eyes. Hevroni recently wrote about teaching the Odyssey in the pages of Mosaic, and that essay was published in honor of Ido’s own teacher, Amy Apfel Kass, z”l, whose yortsayt on the fifth of Elul falls on the day that this conversation was originally broadcast. This discussion, too, is dedicated to her memory.
The Tikvah Fund is a philanthropic foundation and ideas institution committed to supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish State. Tikvah runs and invests in a wide range of initiatives in Israel, the United States, and around the world, including educational programs, publications, and fellowships. Our animating mission and guiding spirit is to advance Jewish excellence and Jewish flourishing in the modern age. Tikvah is politically Zionist, economically free-market oriented, culturally traditional, and theologically open-minded. Yet in all issues and subjects, we welcome vigorous debate and big arguments. Our institutes, programs, and publications all reflect this spirit of bringing forward the serious alternatives for what the Jewish future should look like, and bringing Jewish thinking and leaders into conversation with Western political, moral, and economic thought.
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