Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), a strident critic of the U.S.-Israel relationship, is mulling a bid to challenge Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for the role of majority leader in the next Congress — a move that, at this point, seems unlikely to succeed.

Van Hollen told reporters on Tuesday he is “actively listening to people” about a potential majority leader bid. “We should not have a coronation,” he said. “We should not support anybody for leader without a very clear plan. As you know, there are many people who think change is required.”

Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that starting a major security operation while coalition talks are ongoing would violate the public’s trust, and sought to compel Netanyahu to brief him on national security.

Eisenkot sent Netanyahu a letter on Wednesday demanding that he “act with national responsibility at this sensitive time. Exercise restraint and caution regarding dangerous actions that can wait until a new government that has secured the confidence of the Knesset is sworn in. Do not violate the public’s trust in the institutions of the government and in the decision-making process.”

A new organization aimed at replacing some of the Republican Party’s older, more moderate lawmakers in the House with a slate of young conservative populists launched this week, with one of the faces of a right-wing controversy at the helm. 

The group, American Ascent, is being run by Ryan Neuhaus, the former chief of staff at the Heritage Foundation who wrote the script for a now-infamous video in which Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended Tucker Carlson and called those criticizing Carlson for platforming neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes a “venomous coalition.”

Rep.-elect Brad Lander’s (D-NY) new communications director is a “publicly self-identified communist,” who has denied Israel’s right to exist and equated the slogan “Am Yisrael Chai” — a Hebrew phrase meaning “the people of Israel live” — with “globalize the intifada,” and called for the abolition of all national borders.

News that Jesse Myerson would become the incoming congressman’s messaging chief was first reported on Tuesday in Politico New York’s morning newsletter. The outlet highlighted Myerson’s past work for politicians involved in the Democratic Socialists of America, though not his short stint at the failed DSA-tied advocacy group Our Time or his 18-month tenure at the far-left Jewish activist group IfNotNow.

The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed suit against the Department of Education on Wednesday in an attempt to compel the release of a long-delayed report on foreign funding to U.S. colleges and universities, as well as moved to intervene in a separate lawsuit brought by a university association attempting to block the release of that report.

The group had previously filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the release of a report produced by the department identifying individual foreign donors to U.S. institutions of higher education. The new lawsuit seeks to compel the production of that report after the department failed to respond to the FOIA request.

Vice President JD Vance is considering face-to-face talks with Mohsen Rezaei, the hard-line secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, as the Trump administration seeks to revive diplomatic efforts to end the war with Iran, U.S. and Middle East officials told The Wall Street Journal.

Vance sent Rezaei a letter in October reportedly requesting a meeting, though discussions remain preliminary and no date has been set, according to the outlet. Doha, Qatar, is among the locations being considered for a potential meeting. Trump has confirmed Vance sent the letter last month, though he said it was focused on humanitarian and medical supplies.

Gal Gadot and her husband, Jaron Varsano, are teaming up with FOX Entertainment Studios and the media arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to bring Don’t Feed the Lion, a book about antisemitism and Jewish identity for middle schoolers by journalists Bianna Golodryga and Yonit Levi, to the big screen.

The film, announced on Wednesday by Deadline, will follow the story of a fictional 13-year-old Jewish soccer player whose world is crushed when his sports hero shares an antisemitic message that goes viral, leading to antisemitic incidents at his Chicago middle school. It is based on the novel published last November by co-authors Golodryga, an Emmy Award-winning journalist who announced last month that she is leaving CNN after nine years, and Levi, the longtime anchor of Israel’s Channel 12 nightly newscast.

Josh Gruenbaum, a former Trump administration official who was involved in the federal government’s pressure campaign against universities over campus antisemitism, claimed in a new podcast interview that several prominent university presidents and trustees privately welcomed the administration’s approach as a way to push back against faculty resistance to institutional reforms.

“I could think off the top of my head four or five specific instances of big-name presidents of super prestigious universities and trustees who were around this situation,” Gruenbaum told host Dan Senor on the “Call Me Back” podcast, in an episode released to paying subscribers on Wednesday. “What they basically said to us was … ‘Yes, we see what’s going on, but we are actually being held hostage and captive by the faculty on our campuses,’ and in some instances the students, but more so the faculty, and more so the faculty in the humanities and in the social sciences, and they did not know a way out.”