Podcast: Yuval Levin on How America's Constitution Might Help Solve Israel's Judicial Crisis

The editor and political analyst stops by to discuss American constitutional structures and how relevant they are to Israel.


U.S and Israeli flags are projected onto the historical walls near Hebron Gate in Jerusalem during U.S President Joe Biden’s visit on July 14, 2022. Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.
U.S and Israeli flags are projected onto the historical walls near Hebron Gate in Jerusalem during U.S President Joe Biden’s visit on July 14, 2022. Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.
Observation
April 10 2023
About the authors

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

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.

Podcast: Yuval Levin
 
Earlier this month, Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “The Solution to Israel’s Crisis Might Be in America’s Constitution.” That essay forms the point of departure for this week’s discussion with Levin himself.

Levin does not, of course, think that Israel should simply adopt the American constitution, or any of its particular features. Israel is a sovereign nation with its own history and its own destiny, and no foreign document would suit its particular needs and character. Yet the American constitution contains within it elemental concepts of democracy, equality, and representation—understandings that the women and men now called upon to establish judicious political structures in Israel might be able to learn from as they structure their own political order.

So here, in conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, Levin expands on his essay and looks at the American constitution in search of those foundational ideas—and in particular of the ones that might be useful for Israelis at their current moment of political instability.

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, Israel & Zionism, Israeli Judicial Reform