January 28, 2021
Podcast: Emmanuel Navon on Jewish Diplomacy from Abraham to Abba Eban
By Emmanuel Navon, Tikvah Podcast at MosaicThe author of a new book about Israel's diplomatic history joins us to discuss the enduring lessons he's learned from surveying 3,000 years of Jewish history.
This Week’s Guest: Emmanuel Navon
For much of its history, the Jewish people hasn’t had a state. The Israel described in the Hebrew Bible had emissaries and military power, and the modern state of Israel has a foreign ministry and an advanced military, yet there are nearly 2,000 years of stateless history in between. Throughout that time, however, Jewish diplomacy has been constant. Even without a state, the Jewish people has integrated, separated, argued, and made amends with the other nations of the world. And, as a new book shows, there is much to be learned from that long experience today, in the state of Israel and out.
On this week’s podcast, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver speaks with Emmanuel Navon, the author of The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel. Navon puts Israel’s diplomatic history in the context of the entire history of the Jews, beginning with the Hebrew Bible. In doing so, he and Silver try to dig up some eternal truths about the nature of the Jewish people.