President Donald Trump said in remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Friday that the U.S. is continuing to negotiate with Tehran even amid U.S. strikes on Iran, but added that he didn’t think that Iranian leaders were ready to make a deal.

“They are talking to us right now. They’d love to make a deal. I don’t think they’re ready to. I don’t think it’s time yet, but I’m willing to listen,” Trump said at the dinner, held at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria after being rescheduled following a shootout at the annual April dinner between a lone gunman and Secret Service agents at the Washington Hilton.

With less than two weeks until Michigan’s contentious Democratic Senate primary, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) on Friday, offering a burst of momentum to the moderate Democrat’s campaign against progressive, anti-Israel firebrand Abdul El-Sayed. 

“Haley will do whatever it takes to get things done for people in Michigan, and we need her now more than ever,” Whitmer said in a video announcing the endorsement. 

Shockwaves from the Tisha B’Av stabbings on the Upper West Side reverberated through New York’s Jewish and Democratic party elected leadership on Friday, as some blamed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s invective against Israel, while others called more broadly to turn down the temperature on the rhetoric in the city.

Thursday afternoon, a man allegedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” stabbed first an Asian American and then a Jewish man near Central Park, a short walk from the second victim’s synagogue. Police quickly captured a suspect, and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch reported that her department was investigating the attack as a potential hate crime, though she noted that “mental health may have been a factor.” Both victims are in stable condition.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fly to Washington on Monday, where he will meet with President Donald Trump and attend the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), his office announced on Friday. 

Slated for Tuesday, the Oval Office meeting — Trump and Netanyahu’s first in-person sitdown since the start of the Iran war in late February — comes amid escalating U.S.-Iran hostilities and heightened Israeli readiness for potential strikes from Tehran. 

Morris Katz, a close advisor to Graham Platner who stood by the embattled Maine Democrat until the final days of his Senate race, is now adopting a more contrite tone as he looks back on what went wrong in the campaign, one of the most closely watched in the country this year. 

“The tattoo should have been enough,” Katz said in an interview on “The Ezra Klein Show” from The New York Times. He was referring to Platner’s tattoo of a Totenkopf, a symbol associated with the Nazi regime’s elite — and brutal — SS unit. Platner denied knowing what the tattoo, a version of a skull and crossbones, represented, though an ex-girlfriend has maintained that he told her and others that he knew what it was. Katz said her account should’ve been taken more seriously when she shared it. 

President Donald Trump’s capture of the Republican Party did not happen at once, and was memorably met with resistance from some lawmakers who would later become his allies. 

Many Republicans, during the rise of Trump, cast mostly party-line votes alongside the president and rarely spoke out publicly when they disagreed. But there were notable times when prominent party leaders used their political capital to stand up for their principles on key issues, such as then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) outspoken advocacy for Ukraine funding or Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-ME) decisive vote against repealing Obamacare. 

The Trump administration withdrew its controversial subpoena requesting that the University of Pennsylvania provide lists of Jewish university affiliates and their personal contact information, according to a Thursday court filing. 

“With the support of many members of the community who have stood with Penn throughout, the University has been able to protect its employees’ rights and none of the subpoenaed personal contact information was disclosed,” a university spokesperson told Jewish Insider. 

Of the 103 House Democrats who voted to cut off the $3.3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel last week, few came as more of a surprise than Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), a Jewish Democrat who has generally been a reliable pro-Israel vote in the House.

Auchincloss, in an interview with Jewish Insider this week, said that he approached the vote as a protest of the war with Iran, and argued that the vote wasn’t anti-Israel.