J. D. Vance speaking with attendees at the 2021 Southwest Regional Conference hosted by Turning Point USA at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Arizona.

J.D. Vance, the venture capitalist and Hillbilly Elegy author, got off to a bumpy start when he declared his candidacy in Ohio’s open-seat Senate race two months ago. But despite some initial obstacles, including a CNN investigation uncovering a number of since-deleted tweets in which he expressed criticism of former President Donald Trump, Vance, a Republican, suggested in a recent interview with Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel that he has found his footing. “I feel like we’ve got a lot of momentum,” he said. “Certainly a lot of folks seem excited. We’re raising a lot of money. We’re getting a lot of volunteers. We’re getting a lot of media, and I think the polling is moving in our direction.”

Endorsement game: Still, it remains to be seen whether his tweets, including one describing the former president as “reprehensible,” will be a liability in the crowded Republican primary to succeed outgoing Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH). Trump, who maintains widespread support throughout the Buckeye State, has yet to make an endorsement. “I certainly think I have a chance if he ends up doing an endorsement,” said Vance, who now casts himself as a staunch Trump supporter. “But everything I’ve heard from both the president directly, but also his close advisers, is that he is taking a wait-and-see approach on this race.”

Working-class whisperer: Vance established himself as a leading voice of the white working class when he published his 2016 memoir about his turbulent Rust Belt upbringing. But his candidacy will test whether voters in his home state of Ohio feel as if he speaks for them. The Senate hopeful, who grew up in Middletown, emphasized that he will need to appeal to a wide cross-section of voters if he has any hope of prevailing in next year’s primary. “My view here is that, to win a state like Ohio, I have to be a candidate not just winning any one geography or any one group,” he told JI, “but I have to try to appeal to everybody.”

The Jewish vote: For Vance, Jewish voters in particular represent an opportunity to expand his support base. “I think the Jewish community is an important part of our coalition on the right,” he said, noting that he has engaged in conversations with local and national Jewish organizations since he launched his campaign. “I hope it becomes a more important part of our coalition because I think that, frankly, the left has gone pretty crazy on a lot of issues that Jews care about.”

Eye on Israel: “In my experience, Jews, whatever their political affiliation, are pretty patriotic,” Vance elaborated. “They care a lot about living in a country that’s prosperous and free, and they don’t see Western civilization, which obviously has deep roots in the State of Israel and in the Jewish tradition, as something that’s evil and needs to be rejected but as something that needs to be built upon.” Vance has never been to Israel but said that his connection with the Jewish state has deepened in recent years thanks in part to his conversion to Catholicism. “Culturally, morally, politically, it is a real ally in the sense that we’re not just sort of sharing interests,” he argued, “we’re actually sharing common values.”

Read the full interview here.

In this March 12, 2020, file photo, George Washington High School stands in San Francisco. California’s State Board of Education votes Thursday, March 18, 2021, on a long-anticipated model ethnic studies curriculum for high schools across the state.

The California State Legislature voted to advance the bill known as A.B. 101, which mandates the teaching of ethnic studies for high school graduates, following the state board of education’s approval of a suggested curriculum earlier this year, reports Jewish Insider’s Melissa Weiss. The legislation now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.

What to expect: The bill requires students graduating from California high schools in 2030 and after to have completed a one-semester ethnic studies class, and mandates that high schools, including charter schools, offer the class as of the 2025-2026 academic year. The legislation does not specify a curriculum educators should use in the classroom, though the model curriculum approved earlier this year by the state board of education has already been made available to educators across the state.

Background: A first draft of the ethnic studies curriculum came under fire from Jewish educators and activists across the state for its promotion of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and its omission of lesson plans about antisemitism. The curriculum approved by the education department earlier this year does not include references to the BDS movement, and includes two lesson plans on antisemitism.

Making amendments: Some of the authors of the curriculum’s first draft requested that their names be removed from the final version, alleging that they “were not fully consulted throughout the process of the curriculum development and significant parts of the curricular text do not fully reflect the work of past or present Ethnic Studies teachers/educators.” The legislation approved on Wednesday includes amendments backed by the California Jewish Legislative Caucus that prevent the teaching of the original draft and mandates that the curriculum be “appropriate for use with pupils of all races, religions, nationalities, genders, sexual orientations, and diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, pupils with disabilities, and English learners.”

Community response: “We applaud the efforts of…the Jewish caucus to include amendments intended to prevent the teaching of the odious first draft of the model curriculum, which included antisemitism,” Tyler Gregory, the executive director of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, told JI. “We expect challenges to come at the district level, but the amended version of this bill, which now prevents discrimination by nationality, will present our detractors with a more difficult climb.”

Read the full story here.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog (c) meets with (from left) Sens. Jon Ossoff, (D-GA) Chris Murphy (D-CT), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)

During their visit to Israel late last week, four Democratic senators pressured Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, to allow the United States to reopen the Jerusalem consulate that traditionally served the Palestinians prior to 2019, Jewish Insider‘s Marc Rod reports. Such a move is highly contentious in Israel, with some members of the government believing that reopening the consulate, which operated in Jerusalem for decades before it was closed by then-President Donald Trump, would infringe on Israeli sovereignty claims over Jerusalem.   

Details: “In our meetings today in Israel w[ith] Prime Minister Bennett and other officials we stressed the importance we place on reopening our consulate in Jerusalem to better serve Palestinians,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) wrote on Twitter last week. “This consulate was open for over 100 years before being cruelly shuttered by President Trump.” Murphy was accompanied on the trip by Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA). As well as meeting with Bennett, the four Democrats also met with Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, Knesset Speaker Micky Levy and President Isaac Herzog. The delegation also traveled to Ramallah to meet Palestinian officials and, prior to their arrival in Israel, visited Lebanon. Murphy and Ossoff also traveled to Tunisia and Greece.

‘Cosmic oy vey’: Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, took a different view, telling Jewish Insider on Wednesday evening that the statements did not seem especially unusual. “This is what I call the ‘cosmic oy vey,’” Miller explained. “It’s the notion that any bump in the road or any obvious sort of disagreement between Israel and America is basically blown up into some major issue. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here… This was perfectly understandable.”

Admin weighs in? Miller noted that Van Hollen’s invocation of Biden’s name and “commitment” may indicate that high-level administration officials such as Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan may have consulted with the senators on the consulate issue before they met with Israeli officials. “Senators are capable of weighing in on their own and independently, but it’s a curious framing of the issue that this is a commitment the president made, it’s important that he follow through on that commitment. I mean it sounds like a secretary of state speaking, not a U.S. senator,” Miller said.

Read more here.

Zebulon Simantov reads his old tatered hebrew prayer book as he celebrates the Jewish New Year feast of Rosh Hashanah September 18, 2009 in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Zebulon Simentov, widely considered “Afghanistan’s last Jew,” has been rescued from Kabul and taken to an unnamed neighboring country following the Taliban’s takeover of the country last month, an American-Israeli businessman who spearheaded the evacuation confirmed to Jewish Insider’sTamara Zieve on Wednesday.

Sukkot in New York: Simentov arrived in the unnamed country on Monday, along with 30 other people, mostly women and children. “He wanted to save his neighbors too, which I respect,” Moti Kahana said in a phone conversation with JI. Kahana is hopeful that Simentov will make the journey to New York in the coming days, where he will be able to celebrate Sukkot with relatives.

Resistance to rescue: Efforts to evacuate Simentov began a month ago but he was initially resistant. On August 17, not long after the Taliban took control of the capital city of Kabul, JI spoke to Simentov — who only speaks Persian — by phone, through an Iranian interpreter. He confirmed that he was safe and did not feel he was in danger. He said he wasn’t willing to leave the country until he resolved some financial issues.

Turning point: According to Kahana, Simentov was not afraid of the Taliban, under whose rule he had already lived when the group was in control of Afghanistan from 1996-2001. The turning point seemed to be when fighting between the Taliban and ISIS-K intensified. “I told him, ‘ISIS will either kidnap you and try to sell you or they will chop your head off,’” Kahana said. He felt Simentov’s sense of urgency to flee the country increased last Wednesday when he started receiving numerous messages from him. “He was texting me saying ‘please get me out,’” Kahana said.

Get to be granted: Simentov may eventually move to Israel, Kahana added, where his children and estranged wife — to whom he has finally agreed to give a get, or divorce under Jewish law — live.

Read the full story here.