A bipartisan group of senators gathered in the Kennedy Caucus Room on Wednesday to call for a crackdown on Iranian aggression and demand a free and democratic Iran at a luncheon hosted by the Organization of Iranian American Communities.

Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) all spoke at the gathering about their respective commitments to opposing the mullahs in Tehran and fighting for a return to a democratic Iran. The luncheon featured a keynote address from Maryam Rajavi, the Iranian dissident politician and leader of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, about the people-led movement to overthrow the Iranian regime. 

Mark Isakowitz, Google’s top lobbyist who Sen.-elect Dave McCormick (R-PA) tapped this week as his chief of staff, says his future boss’s “commitment to Israel and defending the Jewish people at a perilous time” was part of what moved him to accept the new role. 

McCormick announced on Tuesday that Isakowitz, who previously served as former Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-OH) chief of staff, will return to Capitol Hill to run his new office. The incoming senator praised Isakowitz in a statement as “an expert at bringing people together to deliver results for the American people,” touting his work with Portman on President-elect Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. 

Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said Wednesday that the Democratic Party needs to abandon “identity politics” to succeed in the future, and discussed her strategy to appeal to both Jewish and Muslim voters in Michigan on a webinar with the Jewish Democratic Council of America. 

“I feel very strongly that identity politics — we need to have it go the way of the dodo,” Slotkin said on the webinar. “The idea that you can say ‘this group, because of their race or religion or ethnicity, is going to do this predictable voting behavior’ is not right. Coalitions are changing. Voters are changing.”

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin warned that the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine “pose[s] a clear and present threat to Jewish students and the Jewish community in Virginia,” in a statement to Jewish Insider on Tuesday.

The comment from Youngkin, a Republican, follows a police search into the family home of George Mason University SJP leaders, where officers found firearms, scores of ammunition and pro-terror materials, including Hamas and Hezbollah flags and signs that read “death to America” and “death to Jews.”

Journalist Yardena Schwartz had nearly finished the manuscript for her first book, focused on the 1929 Hebron pogrom in which dozens of Jews were killed and a community was destroyed, on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023.

As reports emerged in the following days of the atrocities that took place across southern Israeli communities and the Nova music festival, “it I felt as if I was living the pages of testimony that I had spent years reading and researching for this book,” Schwartz told Jewish Insider in a recent interview about her book, Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict. “It felt like they were coming to life. I felt like it was exactly what happened in Hebron occurring today. And it was so chilling.”

Linda McMahon, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Education, began making the rounds on Capitol Hill this week for meetings with senators as part of her confirmation process. 

McMahon, the billionaire World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder, oversaw the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term before leaving to co-chair America First Action, a Trump-aligned super PAC, and the America First Policy Institute. She went on to serve alongside Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary, as co-chairs of the president-elect’s second transition team, overseeing policy. 

When Chabad of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., invited Judith Raanan, a dual Israeli American citizen who, with her daughter, became the first hostages freed by Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks, to be the guest of honor at their annual golf fundraiser, the organization’s leaders did so with the hope that she would get to meet President-elect Donald Trump, on whose golf course the fundraiser would take place. 

It would be Trump’s first meeting with a freed hostage or a hostage family member after the election, and since he met Ronen and Orna Neutra at the Republican National Convention in July. But when the fundraiser was organized, it was not a sure thing that Trump would make an appearance. 

Federal officials from the Department of Interior told lawmakers that they have limited powers to block applications for permits on protests on public land — even if the people applying for such permits, such as pro-Hamas protest groups, have histories of violent activity.

The testimony came at a hearing on the pro-Hamas protest that defaced Washington, D.C.’s Union Station during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. The revelations about the National Park Service’s procedures are particularly notable given that the ANSWER Coalition — the same group that organized that demonstration, which created tens of thousands of dollars in damage to public property, included assaults on police and has resulted in four arrests — is also organizing a protest of the presidential inauguration in January.