I ’m just back from the fourth Tikvah Fund seminar for bnei Torah. The Tikvah Fund seeks to advance a Jewish conservative agenda: defense of freedom of religion and private education support for the traditional family a preference for free markets and concern over strategic threats to Israel’s security.
Tikvah programs consistently draw on some of the finest conservative thinkers to guide participants in working through primary texts in the areas under consideration whether it be Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses of the US Constitution or classics of modern political thought from John Locke to Edmund Burke to America’s Founding Fathers.
In addition leading talmidei chachamin give shiurim on the topics connected to the seminars — for example Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz on the Seven Noachide Laws and their implications and Rabbi Ahron Lopiansky on Torah economic models and the structure of the Jewish family. For the last three years a dialogue between Rabbi Aaron Kotler president of Beth Medrash Govoha and Professor Robert P. George of Princeton one of the few conservative thinkers to carve out a niche in the Ivy League on the role of Orthodox Jews in the public square has been one of the highlights of the seminar.
THE FEATURED TEACHER this year was Yuval Levin America’s premier young conservative intellectual. Levin is editor of the public policy quarterly National Affairs. Besides being a policy wonk he is a political theorist. His book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the intellectual arguments underlying much of contemporary political debate.
