Good Tuesday morning!

Today marks the second anniversary of the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh that left 11 Jews dead. 

In a New York Times op-ed commemorating the tragedy, Bret Stephens posited “that when it comes to anti-Semitism, neither left nor right nor Black nor white has any kind of monopoly.” 

The Trump administration issued fresh sanctions yesterday on key figures in Iran’s oil sector.

President Donald Trump said during a campaign rally in Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, that, if he is reelected, Iranian leaders would be the first to call him to accept a new nuclear deal.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz is reportedly seeking to delay a decision on initiating early elections — as the already-delayed deadline to pass a 2021 budget nears — until there is a clear winner in the U.S. presidential election. 

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) told “Axios on HBO” that if Biden wins, she expects that she and other progressive lawmakers will have “a future in his administration.”

Last night, the Senate confirmed the nomination to the Supreme Court of Judge Amy Coney Barrett by a vote of 52-48.

Correction: In yesterday’s Daily Kickoff item on the article titled “Justice Dems boosted this candidate until she disagreed with them on Israel,” it was stated that DMFI’s Mark Mellman “also works as a pollster for [Georgette] Gomez.” Mellman told JI that he himself does not work as a pollster for Gomez but that other employees of his firm, The Mellman Group, do. The article has been updated.

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EXCLUSIVE

Gottheimer, Mast drafting bill to provide Israel with bunker busters

 upstate upstart

A congressman’s daughter looks to build on his political legacy in upstate New York

When Michelle Hinchey, 32, announced her bid for a New York State Senate seat last year, many recognized a familiar name. Her father, the late Democratic congressman Maurice Hinchey, was an institution in upstate New York, establishing himself as an early progressive and a staunch advocate for environmental reforms. Now, Michelle Hinchey, who is emerging as a rising star in the state’s Democratic circles, is hoping she can further her father’s legacy. “If I can now try to pick up that mantle and work to help even more people and pick up where those things left off in a moment where we really need that kind of leadership, I feel the onus is on me to do that,” she told Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel in a recent interview in Kingston’s historic Stockade District.

Record on Israel: Given that ambition, it is only natural that those in the Jewish community would want to know where Hinchey stands on issues involving the Jewish state, an area where her father was often one of the lone dissenting votes in Congress on pro-Israel legislation. As a member of Congress, Maurice Hinchey cast a number of votes that have been regarded as negative toward Israel. In 2009, he was among just 36 House members to vote against a resolution condemning the United Nations’s Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of war crimes. He also voted against the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act and opposed a bill imposing sanctions on Iran that was approved by all but 12 in the House.

Hemming and hawing: But on this issue, the younger Hinchey appears hesitant to make her own views clear. When asked about her thoughts on three bills passed in the State Senate in recent years countering the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Hinchey demurred. “I’d have to look at the exact bills,” she said. “I mean, I’m not for BDS. But I don’t know what their exact language was.” Hinchey, who is Jewish on her mother’s side, was equally reluctant to speak about her father’s views on Israel. “No, it wasn’t something that we talked about,” she said. “I’m here to talk with you more about our race and running for upstate and being a young person doing that.”

Conflicting views: Jewish community members in Ulster County, where Maurice Hinchey lived, voiced conflicting views on the congressman’s relationship to the Jewish state. Michelle Tuchman, who worked on Hinchey’s second congressional campaign and later lobbied him on behalf of AIPAC, described Hinchey as a man who did the bare minimum when it came to Israel, but added: “I do believe in his heart he was a supporter of the State of Israel.” Rabbi Jonathan Kligler of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation, where Hinchey attended services with his family, said the congressman was “definitely not anti-Israel,” noting that he was most aligned with the dovish advocacy group Peace Now. “Even if I disagreed with Maurice on some of those votes,” Kligler told JI, “I knew that I was dealing with a thoughtful and well-informed congressman.” 

Upstate issues: The political aspirant makes clear that she is focused on local concerns, including building out the district’s broadband infrastructure and expanding green jobs. Hinchey is confident that she can prevail on November 3, despite her observation that the district is gerrymandered to favor Republicans. If she wins, Hinchey would hold a position similar to one her father, who represented a district that leaned conservative, previously occupied. “People, I think, want change,” she said. “They’re ready for someone who shows up and someone who they can listen to and who is accountable and who’s transparent.” 

Read the full feature here.

Fast Friends

Malcolm Hoenlein on his burgeoning friendship with Nick Cannon

Three months after coming under public scrutiny — and his highly publicized firing from ViacomCBS — for making antisemitic comments on his podcast, actor Nick Cannon has worked to make amends with the Jewish community: He has devoured Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Anti-Semitism, hosted rabbis on his podcast and toured a Holocaust museum. Cannon has also fostered a growing friendship with Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Hoenlein spoke with Jewish Insider’s Jacob Kornbluh about his relationship with Cannon in an interview yesterday. 

Reaching out: The pair first began talking, Hoenlein said, shortly after controversy erupted over Cannon’s podcast with rapper Richard Griffin, who was kicked out of Public Enemy in 1989 for making antisemitic comments. Cannon and Griffin engaged in back-and-forth commentary that included clear antisemitic tropes. “Somebody close to him connected us, and then he reached out to talk to me and to begin a dialogue that has continued steady throughout this kind of for months now,” Hoenlein told JI. “It’s led to many hours of discussion.” 

Breaking bread: “He came even to Friday night dinner at my daughter’s house” in Teaneck, N.J., Hoenlein said, believing it was Cannon’s first Shabbat experience. “He spent hours talking with my family — my children, grandchildren.” Since then, Hoenlein has met with the actor numerous times, including a dinner at Manhattan’s UN Plaza Grill last week. Hoenlein and Cannon were also photographed holding up a poster that read “stop Jew hatred now.”

Sticking up for a friend: In the interview with JI, Hoenlein praised Cannon for his commitment to not only engaging with the Jewish community, but also learning from his missteps. “He made a mistake,” Hoenlein said, “but he has faced up to what he did and publicly spoke about doing t’shuvah. This guy is anything but an antisemite. He fasted on Tisha B’av. Because he didn’t know it started at night, he fasted until the next morning. He speaks whole Hebrew sentences, because he studies it. I have fought antisemitism for five decades. I see one and I know somebody who is not.”

Read more here.

heard last night

In Ohio, Morgan Harper’s grassroots campaign hobbled by coronavirus pandemic

High-dollar donors at the Jewish Federations of North America’s first all-virtual General Assembly tuned into a special event Monday evening featuring political scientist Robert Putnam, author of the recently released The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. Putnam, a convert to Judaism, drilled down into some of the ideas showcased in his latest book, which tracks a century’s worth of cultural and societal trends.

Learning from the past: In the book, Putnam points to the hyperpartisan, polarized environment of the late 19th century as evidence that a society can pull itself together. “If you look at the course of the last half-century, things have been going downhill. America has been in a bad place in many different ways in terms of politics, economics, social relations, culture. And if you start the story then… in 1970, say, you could be pretty pessimistic. But it turns out actually, if you begin the story 125 years ago, not just 50 years ago, you can get a quite different impression, because that enables you to look back at the last time we were in a situation like this — a very extreme polarization, extreme inequality, extreme social isolation, extreme self-centeredness. And you can see that they got out of it. And you can see sort of how the people of that generation — who are sort of like us — what lessons can we learn from their experience?”

Jewish values: “I think it’s important for us… to kind of constantly weave back and forth between things that are especially true of Jews, and things that are true of us as Americans,” Putnam said. “The values that are at the heart… our sense of community, our sense of ties to one another, and our values. And the values that are at the core of Judaism are also relevant here,” he added, citing the prophet Isaiah, who described Jews as a light unto the nations. “Being a light unto the nations means we have… a role, but maybe even an obligation, to try to be a model for non-Jews [with] the role that community plays in our lives.”

Next generation: “Empirically, a lot of the people who are the most creative — not just the people who were just rabble-rousing, but people were most creative actually — were these young people at the turn of the century,” Putnam said, citing two reasons for his assertion. “One is they were actually organized on the ground. But secondly, they were the people who were most caught up in this idea that we have to take morality more seriously than it had been taken during the Gilded Age… they, often themselves coming from very wealthy homes, said to themselves and then to everybody else, ‘look, morality is more on this is really important.’ That’s the lesson that I would take from that period.”

Pic of the Day

Jeff Goldblum appeared alongside other celebrities last night during a Get Out The Vote rally for Joe Biden organized by Young Jewish Americans for Biden and the creators of the “Saturday Night Seder.”

Birthdays

Author, actress and comedian, Fran Lebowitz turns 70…

Professor emeritus of preventive medicine at Northwestern University, Jeremiah Stamler turns 101… Pacific Palisades resident, Gordon Gerson turns 84… Producer and director of popular films including “Animal House,” “Meatballs,” “Stripes,” “Ghostbusters” and “Twins,” Ivan Reitman turns 74… Rabbi emeritus at Miami Beach’s Temple Beth Sholom, Gary Glickstein turns 73… Founding CEO of Israel Experience, Inc., Joel M. Schindler turns 70… CEO of Jewish Creativity International, Robert Goldfarb turns 69… Television writer, director and producer, best known as the co-creator of “The Nanny,” Peter Marc Jacobson turns 63… Specialist in Middle Eastern affairs at the Congressional Research Service, Dr. Kenneth Katzman turns 61… Co-owner of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers and English soccer club Manchester United, Bryan Glazer turns 56…

New York State senator and candidate for Manhattan borough president, Brad Hoylman turns 55… Creator and editor of the Drudge Report, Matt Drudge turns 54… Partner in HR&A Advisors, Andrea Batista Schlesinger turns 44… Television meteorologist, currently working for The Weather Channel, Stephanie Abrams turns 42… Deputy chair of the Open Society Foundations, founded by his father George Soros, Alexander F. G. Soros turns 35… Israeli actress best known for playing Eve in the Netflix series “Lucifer,” Inbar Lavi turns 34… Senior foreign policy advisor to U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), Elizabeth (Liz) Leibowitz turns 32… Executive producer of online content at WTSP in St. Petersburg, Florida, Theresa Collington turns 31… Senior strategist at Red Balloon Security, Andrew J. Taub turns 31… Co-founder of NYC-based Arch Labs, Ryan Eisenman turns 28…