Trayon White, a member of the Washington, D.C. Council with a history of promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, was expelled from the Council last year as he faced federal bribery charges before being voted back in months later. 

Now, weeks before a heavily contested mayoral election in Washington, White is hitting the campaign trail with Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, a leading Democratic mayoral candidate who voted with the rest of her colleagues on the Council to expel White.

President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he was calling off a planned U.S. attack on Iran, which he said was scheduled for Tuesday, at the request of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to allow peace talks to continue. 

The commander-in-chief wrote on his Truth Social platform that the leaders of the three Gulf nations had asked him to hold off because “serious negotiations are now taking place” and they believed that “a deal will be made, which will be very acceptable to the United States of America, as well as all countries in the Middle East, and beyond.”

Two of New York City’s leading mainstream Jewish organizations will skip a pre-Shavuot gathering at Gracie Mansion on Monday evening — with one directly pointing to a controversial video Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted to his official social media channels on Friday as the reason for refusing to participate.

The UJA-Federation of New York and Jewish Community Relations Council-New York, two of the largest groups serving the city’s nearly 1 million Jewish residents, will not participate in the Jewish Heritage Month event the mayor is hosting, a development first reported by the New York Post. 

Northwestern University’s Jewish community is celebrating the appointment of Mung Chiang as the school’s new president, optimistic that the supportive environment he fostered for Jewish students during his tenure as president of Purdue University will help combat the antisemitism seen at Northwestern in recent years. 

“Purdue and Chiang have strong reputations for defending freedom of expression while not tolerating antisemitism,” Rich Goldberg, a senior advisor at Foundation for Defense of Democracies who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Northwestern, told Jewish Insider. 

The three leading Democratic candidates in the race for executive of Montgomery County, Md., pledged to address the rise of antisemitism within the local school system, while some noted their disappointment that the school board has yet to adopt a Jewish group’s recommendations for doing so.

As the June 23 primary approaches, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington hosted a forum on Monday in which the group’s CEO, Ron Halber, asked Councilmembers Andrew Friedson, Evan Glass and Will Jawando how each would address rising antisemitism in Montgomery County’s K-12 schools if elected as executive. 

Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and prospective presidential candidate, is slated to discuss the future of U.S.-Israel relations at Tel Aviv University on July 8, according to an announcement on Monday from the school.

Emanuel, who has long held a close connection to the Jewish state, has recently drawn headlines over his calls to immediately end U.S. military aid to Israel, which he had played a key role in securing as a chief of staff to former President Barack Obama from 2009-2010. 

For the last two weeks, a resumption of hostilities with Iran seemed unlikely, with the U.S. uninterested in sparking renewed fighting against the Islamic Republic in advance of President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping — whose country is a key trade partner of Iran. 

But with the president back in Washington, the administration appears to be reopening military options — even as Iran continues to drag out tensions by offering what U.S. officials have said were unacceptable proposals to end the war. That extends to Congress, where Democrats on both sides of Capitol Hill are expected to introduce new war powers resolutions this week in an attempt to constrain the administration’s actions in the Middle East.

Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, lauded Israeli innovation as “No. 1 in the world,” in a live, virtual appearance at the Samson International Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv on Monday.

“I’m a huge admirer of the innovation coming out of Israel. I think it is objectively true that Israel punches high above its weight for population,” Musk said, when asked if he had a message for Israeli innovators.