Florida state Sen. Randy Fine had long been viewed as a virtual lock for the House seat in Florida’s 6th Congressional District. But surging fundraising by his long-shot Democratic challenger has fueled concerns that the Jewish Republican might be slipping in the deep-red district, which Republicans had expected to win easily.

Republicans say they still expect Fine to win the seat in the April 1 special election, but some acknowledge that his campaign has faced challenges. Democrat Josh Weil has raised close to $10 million, while Fine has raised less than $600,000, and recently contributed $600,000 of his own funds to the race. That cash advantage allowed Weil to begin running television ads weeks before Fine, though Weil has now burned through most of his war chest.

A bipartisan group of senators and House members introduced a bill on Tuesday to impose sanctions on the Popular Resistance Committees, reportedly the third-largest terrorist group in Gaza, which claimed credit for participating in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and is not currently designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization.

The bill was introduced for the first time in the Senate by Sens. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), and reintroduced in the House by Reps. Brad Sherman (D-CA), David Kustoff (R-TN), Michael McCaul (R-TX), Brad Schneider (D-IL), Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Sarah McBride (D-DE).

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said he would work to support President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon during his confirmation hearing to be U.S. ambassador to Israel on Tuesday, saying that he believes “it is better to bankrupt them than it is to bomb them.”

Huckabee made the comments before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after being asked by Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) if he agreed with the president that Iran must be prevented from having a nuclear weapon, pointing to reports that Trump told Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a recent letter on restarting nuclear talks that the Iranian leader would have two months to reach an agreement “or risk severe consequences.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Tuesday that the intelligence community maintains its assessment from prior years that Iran is not currently actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, but that open discussion of nuclearization has increased inside the regime.

“The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” Gabbard said in her opening remarks at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

Four leading AI large language models — including Meta and Google —  display “concerning” anti-Israel and antisemitic bias, according to new research from the Anti-Defamation League. 

The ADL study — which the group calls “the most comprehensive evaluation to date of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias in major LLMs” — asked GPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Llama (Meta) to evaluate statements 8,600 times and received a total of 34,400 responses. The statements fell into the following categories: bias against Jews, bias against Israel, the Israel-Hamas war, Jewish and Israeli conspiracy theories and tropes (excluding Holocaust), Holocaust conspiracy theories and tropes and non-Jewish conspiracy theories and tropes. Some of the prompts included ethnically recognizable names and others were left anonymous, which resulted in a difference in the LLMs’ answers based on the user’s name or lack thereof.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are growing increasingly wary of Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, over his approach to handling Hamas and his continued efforts to bolster the U.S.-Qatar relationship.

Those concerns were exacerbated over the weekend after Witkoff suggested to Tucker Carlson in an episode of Carlson’s podcast that Hamas could end up being “involved politically” in Gaza if and when the terrorist group demilitarizes. Witkoff also ruffled feathers when he spoke about Trump’s recent outreach to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, adopting Tehran’s rhetoric about creating “a verification program” rather than using the Trump administration’s language about “dismantlement.” 

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s confirmation hearing to be U.S. ambassador to Israel is opening rifts in the Jewish community, with groups representing the Orthodox and Reform movements openly at odds over Huckabee’s background and past views. 

In written testimony for his Tuesday hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee obtained by Jewish Insider, Huckabee — whose comments claiming that the West Bank is rightfully part of Israel, supporting West Bank settlements and asserting that there’s “no such thing as a Palestinian” have been a source of controversy — emphasized that he will be speaking for the administration as an ambassador, not advancing his own views.

Antisemitism experts and Jewish officials from a range of political and organizational backgrounds are set to testify at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s hearing on campus antisemitism on Thursday, the committee announced.

The witness panel is set to include Carly Gammill, director of legal policy at StandWithUs; Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad); Charles Asher Small, the executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP); Rabbi David Saperstein, the director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; and Kenneth Stern, the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate.