Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Darin LaHood (R-IL) visited Lebanon this week under the auspices of the House Intelligence Committee for discussions with the Lebanese government on countering Hezbollah and negotiations with Israel.

Gottheimer has previously pressured the Lebanese government to follow through on disarming Hezbollah, accusing it of having failed to take serious steps to meet its obligations agreed to in ceasefire agreements with Israel. LaHood has Lebanese ancestry.

Nithya Raman, a democratic socialist mounting a formidable bid to unseat Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass next month, faced a particularly hostile crowd on Tuesday night at a Jewish community candidate forum, where the city councilwoman fielded several tough questions about Israel.

Her answers drew audible groans from the audience members at the Skirball Center as she reiterated her view that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and defended her decision to sit for an interview with the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who regularly espouses antisemitic rhetoric.

Elisha Wiesel urged the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday to speak up against what he called the false accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, arguing that the institution his father helped create has a “unique responsibility” to address the issue.

Wiesel, the son of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, made the appeal while delivering special remarks at “Honoring the Life, Lessons and Legacy of Elie Wiesel.” The event, held on what would have been his father’s 98th birthday, marked a decade since the elder Wiesel’s death. It was organized with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, the Embassy of Romania and Moment magazine.

A group of more than 40 House Democrats introduced the Stop the Settlements Act on Wednesday, which would place sanctions on anyone involved in further settlement expansion in the West Bank or Gaza and ban imports from Israeli settlements.

The bill is another signal of a significant appetite among congressional Democrats to take a hard line toward Israeli settlements and Israeli policy in the West Bank, which would likely be a focus of Democrats’ Israel policy if they retake the majority in either chamber in November.

The Senate Judiciary Committee canceled a planned Thursday meeting where the committee was set to discuss and vote on the Right to Worship Act, a bipartisan and bicameral bill that would create buffer zones outside of religious institutions during worship services.

The committee announced earlier this week that the bill was on the committee’s agenda for a meeting this week — a significant sign of progress for the still relatively new legislation, which supporters hope to pass before the end of the year. But the meeting was canceled after the Senate finished its work for the week on Wednesday and left Washington until after the midterm elections.

In a year when the Jewish community was rocked by a terror attack at a Detroit-area synagogue alongside other antisemitic threats, the Nonprofit Security Grant Program fulfilled less than 23% of applications submitted for funding in 2026, according to new data obtained by Jewish Insider. 

The chronically underfunded and overstretched program provides security funding to synagogues and other nonprofits that survivors of antisemitic attacks say has directly helped save lives. 

Still wearing a bloodstained shirt, Yaniv Hayoun described to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday how he rushed into the cockpit of a FlyDubai flight, helped overpower a co-pilot accused of stabbing the captain and briefly grabbed the aircraft’s controls as the plane was in rapid descent.

Hayoun — who, along with the other passengers on board, had just touched down in Israel after making an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia and was immediately invited to meet with the prime minister — said he entered the cockpit after hearing screams and found the wounded captain as well as the co-pilot attempting to destroy the controls. He pulled the suspected attacker away and called on other passengers to help restrain him before returning to the cockpit.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani defended his administration’s strategy to battle spiking antisemitic offenses by spending heavily on nonprofit-based “hate crime prevention” and lower outlays for security — all while keeping up his fierce criticism of Israel on official government channels.

On Tuesday, the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism released its weeks-delayed “strategy to combat antisemitism,” which touted $1 million in security grants for houses of worship and “other sensitive locations” and $26 million in already announced funding for the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes.