{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Kassy Akiva on Conversion after October 7","description":"Every year on Shavuot, many Jews have the custom of reading the book of Ruth. The holiday commemorates the giving of the Torah at Sinai\u2014the moment when the Jewish people gathered at the foot of the mountain and declared, \u201cwe will do and we will listen.\u201d The rabbis paired Sinai with Ruth for a reason. Sinai is the national conversion story, in which the whole people, swept up in thunder and fire, accept the covenant. Ruth is a more intimate counterpart: a tale of one woman, at the lowest possible moment, with every worldly reason to return to the clan of her birth, who decides instead to join the same covenant. \u201cYour people shall be my people,\u201d she says to Naomi, \u201cand your God shall be my God.\u201d Ruth was not drawn toward the Jewish people at their moment of triumph but in her and her chosen family\u2019s hour of despair. That tension, between being drawn to Judaism and being pushed toward it, between choosing a people and being chosen, is at the heart of today\u2019s conversation with the Daily Wire reporter and video journalist Kassy Akiva, who converted to Judaism in April 2023. In an essay in the October 2024 issue of Commentary\u2014written while she was a Tikvah Krauthammer fellow\u2014Akiva reflected on the long road that brought her to Judaism: the hate mail, the death threats, the stalker who went to federal prison, the years of traveling to Israel before she was Jewish, the beit din, the seminary in Jerusalem, the mikveh. The essay, titled \u201cAnti-Semitism Helped Make Me a Jew,\u201d was composed in the immediate aftermath of October 7, not long after a visit to the Gaza border. The intensity of that moment was bound up with her conversion. We are now a few years further on. The vicious anti-Israel activism that followed in the wake of Hamas\u2019s attack on southern Israel has not dissappeared, but it has, for many, settled into something less acute. In that context, Mosaic\u2019s editor Jonathan Siliver has invited Akiva to return to that essay and its argument, and to discuss whether anti-Semitism was the engine of her Jewish life or merely the road sign that pointed her toward it, what ordinary Jewish life looks like now that the adrenaline of that first year has either deepened or faded, and what she makes of the convert\u2019s particular vantage point\u2014as someone who, only a few months into being a Jew, was asked by people who had been Jewish their whole lives how to handle the anti-Semitism she had already been forced to learn how to carry.  This week's episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin and family. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org\/circle to learn more and join. ","author_name":"The Tikvah Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/tikvah.libsyn.com\/webpage","html":"