That is to say, the language, literature, music and spirit of the culture of the East European Jews. The key to the post-Holocaust  survival of that culture was and remains the Yiddish language. Our guest in this podcast, Jonathan Brent, is the Executive Director of YIVO, the Yiddish Research Institute which was founded in Poland in 1925 and fled the Holocaust by moving to New York in 1940. Before he came to YIVO about three years ago Jonathan was Editorial Director of Yale University Press and helped to open the Stalin Archives in Moscow. He then commissioned more than 20 books revealing the barbarism and evil of that epoch.

Was the Arab Spring really the surge of democracy that many in the media and government made it out to be? Not according to Andrew McCarthy, author of Spring Fever. He argues that for many who practice Islam, freedom simply doesn’t have a place, and the values of the West are at odds with this worldview.

Author N.T. Wright provides a provocative new picture of how to understand who Jesus was, and how we should relate to him today.

Paul Rahe discusses the tension between the federal government and the Catholic Church; and Juliana Taimoorazy and Kamal Ibrahim speak about persecution in Egypt and the Middle East.

Biblical scholar Douglas Knight joins us to analyze the Old Testament as history, as theology and as literary masterpiece.