Good Tuesday morning!

After the Israeli government unanimously approved the Abraham Accords deal with the United Arab Emirates, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan spoke and agreed to meet soon. 

Historic talks between Lebanon and Israel over the countries’ maritime border are slated to begin tomorrow.  

Israel’s Intelligence Minister Eli CohentoldReuters that Israel would oppose any U.S. sale of F-35 jets to Qatar.

Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) are urging the FBI to increase the federal response to the far-right Proud Boys group as it increases its activity across New Jersey.

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Transition

Former Sanders aide Joel Rubin to head American Jewish Congress

Democratic strategist Joel Rubin, who served as director of Jewish outreach for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign, has been tapped as executive director of the American Jewish Congress, the group announced on Tuesday. American Jewish Congress President Jack Rosen told Jewish Insider’s Jacob Kornbluh that Rubin’s hiring reflects the ideological shift within the American Jewish community in recent years and the challenges ahead. 

New path: “I think that’s going to require new approaches to new leadership and we have to be ready for this new future,” Rosen explained. “Our mission is to connect with influential people and influence policy at the highest level. And when you look at all of that, I think Joel has the experience in Washington and the qualities that can help the American Jewish Congress fulfill its purpose and help the Jewish community.”

Background: Rubin, 49, currently the vice mayor of Chevy Chase, Md., previously served as the U.S. State Department’s chief liaison to the House of Representatives — where he worked in 2015 to build congressional support for the Iranian nuclear deal — and as a career officer in the State Dept.’s Bureau of Political-Military affairs and Near-Eastern Affairs during the George W. Bush administration. He was also the founding political and governmental affairs director at J Street. In addition to working as a congressional staffer for Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Rubin mounted an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2016. 

Focus on Congress: In an interview, Rubin said that his Washington experience has primed him to lead the group, which will take on a new focus in the years ahead. The American Jewish Congress, Rubin explained, “has always been at the forefront of helping bring American Jews into the mainstream American political dialogue and have an impact. And it’s a role that after the election is going to only increase with the policy community and in the public dialogue — within and outside the Jewish community.”

Bridging gaps: Rosen, a longtime donor to Democratic candidates and an early supporter of former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, told JI the board tapped Rubin for the role after a “pretty thorough” conversation. “His heart, his DNA was with Israel,” Rosen said. Pointing to the pressing issues — such as rising antisemitism both in the U.S. and around the world, the delegitimization of Israel and the need to advance racial justice — Rubin said the prime goal of the American Jewish Congress is “being a voice for tomorrow, being a voice for the American Jewish community and building bridges to other communities.” 

Read more here. 

book launch

Tracing the transformation of American Jewish philanthropy

Jewish history professor Lila Corwin Berman was surprised to discover that in the early 20th century, American Jewish charitable organizations largely worked to ensure they were never holding on to too much money. “I was really interested when I discovered that the New York Federation had in its bylaws a rule against building endowments,” Berman told Jewish Insider’s Amy Spiro in a recent phone interview about her new book. “That was so contrary to everything that I just had assumed was part of the story, that of course it was always the goal to build up these big funds.” 

Transformation: The dramatic evolution of Jewish communal organizations is the focus of Berman’s latest book, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex. In the meticulously researched work, Berman — a professor of American Jewish history at Temple University — traces the history and the transformation of the extensive network of Jewish charitable organizations, and how that evolution was inextricably interconnected to both changing U.S. tax law and growing capitalistic sentiments. Berman charts this major turnaround over a period of many decades, from a model that “worked to make the process of collection and allocation as efficient as possible, as if moving funds through a revolving door,” to the current structure that supports building extensive endowments designed to ensure indefinite funding. 

Vignettes: Throughout the book, Berman details prominent figures, organizations and movements that had a significant impact on the development of American Jewish philanthropy. The events and incidents she documents include the formation of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in the 1950s, the establishment of the Republican Jewish Coalition in the 1980s, the Bernie Madoff scandal that shook up global Jewish philanthropy in 2008 and the creation and financing of Birthright, one of the most ambitious and well-funded Jewish communal programs. 

Disclaimer: Berman, who spent several years digging through private archives and personal records and interviewing relevant figures, begins the book with a unique disclaimer: the concern that she could be “treading the same ground that has provided fodder for antisemitic theories of Jewish power or domination.” She told JI that she doesn’t feel “like I tried to back away from something or made decisions that I couldn’t talk about things because I was scared — I never felt constrained. But it was very important to choose my words wisely, to make sure that anything I was saying I could very responsibly back up with the historical evidence that I had found. That’s always what a good historian is supposed to do.” 

Looking ahead: Berman notes how the history and identity of global Jewry played a role in many organizations’ decisions, and may have fueled the desire to build endowments and plan long term. As Jews in America found success and middle-class comfort, they were “trying to reckon with the fact that a third of world Jewry had been murdered [in the Holocaust]… and that kind of creates a logic for endowment,” she told JI. “You don’t need millions of dollars in this particular minute to create identities, but you want these kinds of visions of the money existing in perpetuity so that Jews and Jewish identity will exist in perpetuity,” she added. “I think that that has a very specific historical and psychological grounding in American Jewish life.”

Read the full interview here.

unlike

Facebook will no longer allow Holocaust denial on its platforms

Facebook announced on Monday that it will ban content “that denies or distorts the Holocaust” from the social media platform, a reversal of a controversial policy that did not remove Holocaust denial-related content.

Drawing a line: In a public Facebook post, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the decision came in part due to rising global antisemitism. “I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust,” Zuckerberg wrote. “My own thinking has evolved as I’ve seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence, as have our wider policies on hate speech. Drawing the right lines between what is and isn’t acceptable speech isn’t straightforward, but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance.”

Cause and effect: ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt welcomed the announcement, noting a rise in antisemitic incidents across the country and recent polling showing that young Americans have an “alarmingly low” amount of knowledge about the Holocaust. “The sum total of that led Mark, in part, to think, ‘Should we do something here?’” Greenblatt told JI’s Melissa Weiss.

Our town: Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations CEO William Daroff has been engaged in conversations with Facebook over its controversial content for several years. On Monday evening, he spoke via Zoom with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and the company’s head of policy in Israel, Jordana Cutler. “Facebook has become very much the town square of our town — our Jewish town, our American town, our world town,” Daroff said. “And so ensuring that Facebook is there to work together to battle against the rising tide of antisemitism is important.”

Read more here.

Bonus: Zuckerberg has spent more than $10 million through his family’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative backing a California tax reform measure that is on the ballot next month, and has donated an additional $100 million to local election administrators.

Worthy Reads

🎥 Colorful Career:The New Yorker’s Rachel Syme interviews actor Mandy Patinkin about his four-decade career, his newfound social media stardom, his first-ever trip to New York with his dad for his bar mitzvah and his time undercover at a yeshiva in Monsey while researching for “Yentl.” [NewYorker]

🚫 Stand Down:In The New York Times, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik urges people to leave Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s religion out of their criticism. “A judge’s jurisprudence… are worthy matters of debate, and they are appropriate reasons to oppose or support Judge Barrett’s nomination. But her faith is not.” [NYTimes]

🕍 New Era:Author Tevi Troy reflects in Tablet magazine about the ways that COVID-19 is changing American Jewish life — perhaps permanently. “It seems safe to predict that the American Jewish community that emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic will be more fractured and fractious than the community that existed before it.” [Tablet]

Gif of the Day

Birthdays

Retired nurse, health educator and mother of Ethan Bronner, she is the youngest of 11 children and hails from the Horowitz-Margareten matzo-making clan, Leah Bronner turns 103…

Encino, Calif., resident, Sonia Bordo turns 83… Former deputy assistant secretary at the USDA, now an attorney working on organic food law, Richard D. Siegel turns 81… Musician, singer, songwriter, best known for his lead role in the Simon & Garfunkel duo, Paul Simon turns 79… Chair of the Anti-Defamation League, Esta Gordon Epstein turns 77… Former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, now a sports media consultant, Ari Fleischer turns 60… Managing director at Finsbury Glover Hering’s Glover Park Group, Jack Krumholtz turns 59… Former Associated Press bureau chief in Israel, now a journalist in the Indian state of Goa, Steven Gutkin turns 56…

Attorney on leave of absence from DLA Piper while his wife, Senator Kamala Harris, runs for VPOTUS, Douglas Emhoff turns 56… Chairwoman of Disney Television Studios and ABC Entertainment, Dana Freedman Walden turns 56… Rick Lamke turns 56… Film director, producer and screenwriter, Amy J. Berg turns 50… Award-winning actor and comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen turns 49… Israeli fashion model, Shiraz Tal turns 46… Author, novelist and blogger, Emily Gould turns 39… Associate at Seattle’s Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, he is temporarily serving as a regional voter protection director for the DNC, Josh Friedmann turns 32… Congressional reporter for NBC News, Rebecca Shabad turns 31… Executive director at Hillel at Ohio University, Sarah Livingston…