As we approach America’s 250th anniversary, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik examines key moments in the nation’s history—from the revolutionary era to World War II—through a set of iconic images that have shaped the American imagination. Through paintings and symbols both familiar and forgotten, Rabbi Soloveichik explores how Americans have understood themselves, and how visual culture has transmitted that understanding across generations.

In moments of triumph, tension, and transformation, “Images of America” reveals how art both reflects real life and articulates high ideals. Focusing on paintings like John Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence” and Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms,” Rabbi Soloveichik illuminates how theology, ethics, and political reflection converge in these snapshots of history. Ultimately, this course invites you to see not only what America has been, but what it might yet become.

The great writers of the modern Jewish literary canon captured the struggles, questions, and aspirations of a people entering a new world. Confronted by the promises and perils of religion, Communism, liberty, assimilation, and capitalism, Jews turned to literature to understand—and to confront—the challenges of modern life. What emerged was a rich body of writing, a treasure to which Jews and all thoughtful readers can turn for insight, experience, and moral understanding.

In this nine-part series, Professor Ruth R. Wisse—one of the world’s foremost interpreters of Jewish fiction—guides you through the masterpieces of modern Jewish literature. Through stories by the greatest Jewish writers of the age, you'll see how they wrestled with God and man, tradition and change, suffering and joy—and how their words continue to illuminate both the Jewish and human conditions.

This course, and all of Ruth Wisse's work at Tikvah, is supported by the generosity of Robert L. Friedman.

Where can modern Jews, both young and old and across the spectrum of observance, turn for guidance on timely and timeless questions, on the most urgent and most perennial issues?

For nearly two millennia, Jews from all around the world have dedicated the six Sabbaths between Passover and Shavuot to the regular study of Pirkei Avot, the Ethics (or Chapters) of the Fathers. Pirkei Avot—or Avot, for short—is a section of the Mishna, the first formal codification of the Jewish Oral Law, which portrays the moral-ethical universe of Judaism in all its fullness. These teachings, culled from the sayings of almost sixty sages, stretching over some five centuries, are the building blocks of a Jewish life well-lived. In short, Avot is the foundational text for any authentic transmission of Jewish values and virtues.