Podcast: Rick Richman on History and Devotion

The author of And None Shall Make Them Afraid stops by to talk about his new book and how history has a role to play in forming devotion to the Jewish people.

From Visual History of Israel by Arthur Szyk, 1948. Wikimedia.

From Visual History of Israel by Arthur Szyk, 1948. Wikimedia.

Observation
April 21 2023
About the authors

A weekly podcast, produced in partnership with the Tikvah Fund, offering up the best thinking on Jewish thought and culture.

Jonathan Silver is the editor of Mosaic and the senior director of Tikvah Ideas, where he is also the Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization.

Rick Richman is the author of Racing Against History: The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler and And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Biography.

 

Podcast: Rick Richman
 
Patriotism—or one form of it at least—is an acknowledgment of the obligations that flow from recognizing all that one owes to previous generations and what they undertook and passed down.

And if one wanted to inculcate that form of patriotism, how would one do it? Rick Richman has a simple and powerful answer to that question. A regular Mosaic author, Richman recently published And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel, a book that tries to foster connection to Israel and the Jewish people by telling stories from the past.

Richman’s answer: teach history. History, as he sees it, has an irreplaceable role to play in the formation of devotion to the Jewish people. It helps Jews see all that they owe by relaying the stories of all that their predecessors accomplished, and by implication, what Jews now have an opportunity and obligation to pass on to their own descendants.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

More about: History & Ideas, Patriotism