👋 Good Wednesday morning!

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks (D-NY) is reportedly organizing a congressional delegation trip to Israel for July — Meeks’s first CODEL as chairman — but, in light of recent changes to Israel’s travel restrictions, details are currently unclear, a source familiar with the planning told Jewish Insider.

But Reps. Ann Wagner (R-MO) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who were reported on Tuesday to be joining the trip, will not be going, spokespeople told JI. Wagner’s spokesperson cited a “scheduling issue.”

Polls closed across New York City at 9 p.m. last night. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams took an early lead in the mayoral race to succeed Bill de Blasio, taking in nearly 32% of the vote. Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, both alums of the de Blasio administration, received 22.3 and 19.5, respectively. Andrew Yang, who pulled in just under 12% of the vote, was the first candidate to concede the race. JI’s Matthew Kassel was at Garcia’s watch party last night and reported on the scene. More below.

ideological divide

Is it Miller time in Ohio’s 16th Congressional District?

President Donald Trump talks with Deputy Campaign Manager for Presidential Operations Max Miller, left, and director of the Presidential Personnel Office John McEntee, right, before his speech to the Republican National Convention on the South Lawn of the White House, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Former President Donald Trump looms large over the Republican Party, but he may loom even larger in Max Miller’s challenge to Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH) in Northeast Ohio. Over the past few months, Miller — who worked as an aide in the Trump administration and was rewarded with an endorsement from the former president immediately after he announced his candidacy — has focused considerable attention on courting donors at Mar-a-Lago while sitting for interviews with national right-wing outlets like OANN, Newsmax and Fox News, reports Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel.

Local Flavor: Miller is the scion of a wealthy Shaker Heights family with deep roots in the city’s political and philanthropic milieu. His grandfather, Sam Miller, a co-chair of Cleveland’s Forest City Enterprises, was a powerbroker whose influence extended well beyond real estate development before his death in 2019. The son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, the elder Miller is credited with launching the career of Michael White, Cleveland’s second-longest-serving mayor, while using his considerable wealth and political clout to support a number of causes that were personally important to him, including advocating for Israel. “If you take what we mean when we say ‘Trump country’ and we apply it to this district, I think you’d be pretty close to being on mark,” said David Giffels, the author of Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America. “There are a lot of pick-up trucks in the 16th District.”

Singing Trump’s praises: “Under the Trump administration, what he was able to accomplish for the State of Israel, he did more in four years than any other president could have ever done in the history of this country, bar none,” Miller said enthusiastically, using the kind of breathless rhetoric he often relies on while discussing the former president. “People said if you move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, you’re going to have another intifada. Nothing happened. The Abraham Accords are historic,” he said, referring to the pact that normalized relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. “I mean, you cannot devalue that,” Miller added, “and I think anyone who says different truly doesn’t understand what President Trump and this administration [were] able to accomplish.” Miller emphasized his vehement opposition to the Iran nuclear deal on the grounds that it is against Israel’s interests. “You could go over to Israel right now and you could take the most left-leaning Israeli and that individual would not support the Iran nuclear deal,” he said.

On the other hand: Still, a number of Jewish community members and pro-Israel advocates in Cleveland and the surrounding area are standing by Gonzalez, one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach the former president after the violent Capitol riot on Jan. 6. “He showcases to us that he takes our community very seriously,” said Howie Beigelman, executive director of Ohio Jewish Communities. “On the record side,” Beigelman added, “because he has a record to run on at this point, he’s been there on the things we’ve asked him for.” Gonzalez visited Israel in 2019 on a trip sponsored by the AIPAC-affiliated American Israel Education Foundation and has made clear to Jewish leaders in the Cleveland area that he is strongly devoted to safeguarding the U.S.-Israel relationship, according to Beigelman, who characterized the congressman’s commitment to the Jewish state as “from the heart.”

Read the full story here.

teamwork

Why Israel’s move to CENTCOM matters

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, participates in a press briefing at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

When Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi traveled to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., yesterday, the visit marked the beginning of a new phase in a military relationship between the U.S. and Israel that is already strong and extensive, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.

Strategic shift: The U.S. military has 11 combatant commands, each of which has a specific geographic or functional mission. Kochavi’s visit marked the first time the top IDF official had visited CENTCOM’s Tampa headquarters since former President Donald Trump announced in January, days before leaving office, that Israel would soon fall under CENTCOM’s area of responsibility, a shift from its current status as part of European Command (EUCOM), which works closely with NATO on security issues in Europe. The announcement marked the culmination of years of unofficial cooperation between Israel and CENTCOM, whose mission is to “build cooperation among nations throughout the Middle East.”    

New relationships: The main reason for the longstanding arrangement was the icy relationship that historically existed between Israel and its Arab neighbors. But as Israel has begun cooperating with Persian Gulf nations — including recent diplomatic agreements with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates as part of the Abraham Accords, and reported behind-the-scenes coordination with Saudi Arabia — the U.S. made a change to its Unified Command Plan. “The easing of tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors subsequent to the Abraham Accords has provided a strategic opportunity for the United States to align key partners against shared threats in the Middle East,” the Pentagon said when it announced the change in January. Michael Makovsky, president and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) — which had advocated for the change — said the move could lay the groundwork for an expansion of the Abraham Accords. “It could facilitate cooperation even with those countries [that the Israelis] don’t have diplomatic ties to,” like Saudi Arabia.

Team in Tampa: So what does the change mean for U.S.-Israel military cooperation? “Military officers are often quick to acknowledge that there is very close and ongoing coordination between Israel and CENTCOM on issues of common concern, but right now, of course, there is no full-time Israeli presence at CENTCOM,” said Michael Eisenstadt, director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Military and Security Studies Program. When Israel is integrated into CENTCOM, the Israeli military will have staff stationed in Tampa. “Having a full-time military representative, or a team of representatives there, first of all, would enable Israel to see where they can contribute to CENTCOM’s mission on a day-to-day basis, rather than coming over for visits and having a set agenda,” like Kochavi did this week, Eisenstadt explained.

Read the full story here.

still counting

Kathryn Garcia sounds note of cautious optimism at Williamsburg watch party

Kathryn Garcia, candidate for mayor of New York City, delivers remarks to supporters on June 22, 2021 in the Bushwick neighborhood in New York City.

On Tuesday night, Kathryn Garcia, whose late-stage surge in the final months of New York City’s contentious mayoral race represents the most remarkable turnaround of any candidate in the crowded Democratic primary, gathered with supporters at her sister’s event space in Brooklyn after polls closed and early vote counts trickled in. Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel was on the scene at the nondescript venue on a dead-end street in post-industrial East Williamsburg, which was in some ways a fitting location for the end of a grueling campaign that until not too long ago was widely dismissed as unviable.

Still in it: Eric Adams, the frontrunner and Brooklyn borough president, had already taken an early lead by the time Garcia took the stage at around 11 p.m. in a white jacket and gray T-shirt with “Feminist” written in gold lettering. Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate who failed to sustain an initially promising campaign, was admitting defeat across the river at a watch party in his home neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. But Garcia made clear she had no intention of conceding, despite being in third place while trailing Adams by about 10 points with 20% of the vote and the majority of precincts reporting in the first round of counting. “This campaign has been about overcoming expectations,” Garcia, 51, told the modestly populated room, sounding a note of cautious optimism. “When I got into it, people said, ‘Well, I know you would be the best mayor, but I’m just not sure you can win.’ Or, ‘Women haven’t ever won the race for mayor.’”

Ranked-choice boost: Following a New York Times endorsement in early May, polls began to shift, indicating that Garcia was gaining momentum in the final stretch of the race. Speaking to supporters last night, Garcia suggested that she was depending on that dynamic as the city implements its first ranked-choice election system. The new system would seem to benefit a candidate like Garcia, whom voters might be more inclined to pick as their second or third choice rather than their first. “This is going to be about not only the ones, but also about the twos and threes,” Garcia said on Tuesday evening. “To be quite honest with you, we’re not going to know a whole lot more tonight than we know now, and it is going to come down to opening up those ballots and making sure that every single New Yorker’s voice is heard.”

Setting the scene: At the event, an intimate, low-key affair, campaign volunteers wore green shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Garcia Gets it Done” as attendees munched on fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, tater tots and gourmet sandwiches from Court Street Grocers. The soundtrack included thematically appropriate numbers such as Curtis Mayfield’s “Move on Up,” Starship’s “We Built This City” and Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” whose lyrics Garcia wrote on the walls of her childhood bedroom in Park Slope. David Freedlander and Ross Barkan, local political reporters who had both been denied entry to Adams’s event nearby at a Williamsburg dance club, could be seen lingering on the sidelines at Garcia’s shindig — their apparent number-two choice for watch parties.

Read more detailed coverage here.

Worthy Reads

💻 Rewarding Aggregators: In Popular Information, Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria dissect how Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes information shared on newsfeeds, ranking high-engagement news aggregators like Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire over hard news reporting by outlets from the Chicago Tribune to The New York Times. “For this minimal effort, The Daily Wire is rewarded with massive engagement on Facebook while the source of the journalism, quite often a local media outlet, gets a tiny fraction of engagement. Beyond distorting the content of the news, this dynamic has real financial consequences. The Daily Wire gets showered with traffic and the attendant advertising revenue while local outlets, who have to pay for the costs of the reporting, get practically nothing.” [PopularInfo]

🐎 Wandering Jews: In Tablet, Alan Grabinsky talks to nomads — including a sizable contingent of Israelis who have finished their army service — who have eschewed creature comforts to explore South America on horseback. “Many of these Israelis hear about the caravan through word of mouth, but some join it after attending an event called a Rainbow Gathering while traveling through Central America. These annual gatherings, celebrated worldwide, are spin-offs of a one-month hippie festival camp in Colorado in the early 1970s that sought to inaugurate a new human consciousness rooted in the ecological and pacifist values of the time.” [Tablet]

📱 Over It: The Financial Times’ Elaine Moore argues that Instagram might be manufacturing its own decline by creating feelings of inadequacy, overloading its once minimalist appearance with ads and ceding social relevance to TikTok and YouTube. “In retrospect, 2018 may have been the app’s high point. That same year, Instagram’s founders left Facebook, unable to agree about its future. Facebook took the opportunity to clutter the app up with more video and shopping links, all with an eye to monetisation. Instagram’s minimalist design has been replaced by a grab-bag that looks more like Facebook’s own app. It has not provided an update on user numbers in three years, suggesting growth has been slowing.” [FT]

Pic of the Day

(Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Director of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Uwe Neumärker at a ceremony, yesterday, marking the 80th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Germany during World War II.

Birthdays

Yityish “Titi” Aynaw attends the De Grisogono party during the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2015 in Cap d’Antibes, France.