President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he was replacing Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller as his White House chief of staff.

Miller, one of the president’s longest-serving advisors and the principal architect of Trump’s hardline immigration agenda, reportedly said in his pitch for the job that the president “needed to wind down the Iran war, a conflict that the president’s core supporters viewed as a betrayal,” according to The New York Times. 

CUFI Action Fund, the political arm of Christians United for Israel, the powerhouse Christian Zionist group, went after Vice President JD Vance on Friday for his assertions that the war in Iran and the U.S.-Israel relationship were two major drivers of the historic GOP midterm losses on Tuesday, accusing him of effectively blaming Jews for the election results.

“After the blue wave crashed across the country on Tuesday, the Vice President seized the opportunity to blame…. Jews. Not once, mind you, but in a list of the top four reasons the Republicans lost, the Jews were effectively blamed twice if you can hear that pitch of dog whistle,” the group asserted.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), who is running to lead the House Education and Workforce Committee in the next Congress, is pushing to repeal a federal education tax credit that could benefit Jewish day schools and other religious institutions, arguing that the program improperly directs taxpayer-subsidized funding to private schools rather than public education.

The proposal is part of Bonamici’s Transforming Education for the Future Act, a package of 22 Democratic education bills that would repeal the Education Freedom Tax Credit, created under Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 

There’s little doubt that the underlying trends in American politics — the turn against Israel within the Democratic Party and elements of the far right, the rise of extremists within both parties and the underlying polarization in our social media-driven culture — make it challenging for advocates of a healthy U.S.-Israel relationship to reverse the gloomy political trajectory.

The election of a number of virulently anti-Israel lawmakers — capped by Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan, along with a number of DSA-affiliated candidates in the House — certainly captured the early wave of headlines in the Jewish community coming out of the results. 

The Trump administration’s campaign against campus antisemitism may be entering a new phase, Jewish advocates and a former administration official told Jewish Insider — one complicated by a Democratic takeover of the House, the departure of a key Justice Department official and growing questions about the White House’s commitment to enforcement.

One key enforcer of the Justice Department’s efforts to crack down on campus antisemitism, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, resigned from the agency on Thursday, just as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is set to return as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the committee with jurisdiction over universities. 

Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan recorded another strong showing in the race for United Nations secretary-general on Thursday, increasing her support in the eighth Security Council straw poll, while Turkey’s newly nominated candidate struggled in his debut and the established front-runners maintained their positions.

Thursday’s straw poll again used undifferentiated ballots, concealing whether votes came from the five permanent, veto-wielding members — the U.S., United Kingdom, France, Russia and China — or the council’s 10 elected members. The selection process has also been shaped by informal regional rotation norms and calls for the U.N. to select its first female leader. The latest result shows that the newcomers took nothing from the front-runners, while Grynspan appears to be consolidating support.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY), a leading moderate Democrat in the House and co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, argued after the decisive Democratic sweep in Tuesday’s midterm elections that the administration needs to bring Congress and U.S. allies in on issues related to the Iran war.

Suozzi emphasized, in an interview with Jewish Insider on Wednesday, that a clear message from the election is that voters are concerned about the impact of the war on prices, and many analysts — as well as prominent Republican leaders — have interpreted the election results as a clear repudiation of the Iran war.

Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, resigned from the Justice Department on Thursday, leaving her role that included spearheading the Trump administration’s efforts to combat antisemitism on college campuses.

Her departure had been largely expected after she indicated to Bloomberg in August that she intended to return to her California-based law firm, Dhillon Law Group, following her government service.