Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg attend the 2020 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony at NASA Ames Research Center on November 03, 2019, in Mountain View, California.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are donating $1.3 million to 11 Jewish organizations in a sign of their deepening connection with the Jewish community, Helen Chernikoff reports for eJewishPhilanthropy and Jewish Insider.

Learning and giving: The couple has also been meeting with rabbis, historians and scholars to learn more about Judaism and the Jewish community, a spokesperson for the Chan-Zuckerberg family office told eJP. “Mark and Priscilla have made some personal commitments in the past, but these new grants reinforce their interest in learning and deepening their connections with the community,” the spokesperson said. Eleven organizations, most of which serve families and young people in the couple’s San Francisco Bay area community, received the funding, which comes not from the couple’s foundation — the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) — but through their family office.

Act local: They include three schools: Contra Costa Jewish Day School in Lafayette, Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto and the Jewish Community High School of the Bay, as well as three California summer camps: URJ Camp Newman, Camp Ramah in California and Camp Tawonga. The local Jewish Family and Children’s Services and Jewish Community Relations Council, in addition to the Oshman Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto, received support, as did two national organizations — OneTable, which helps young Jews host Shabbat dinners, and PJ Library, which provides free Jewish books to families.

Fighting antisemitism: “Mark and Priscilla are proud to support the important work each of these organizations does in building communities, education, celebrating traditions and faith, and giving people a voice — especially in fighting antisemitism,” the spokesperson said. The couple’s public philanthropic vehicle is CZI, founded in 2015 with $95 million in proceeds from a sale of Zuckerberg’s Facebook shares. CZI underwent a major overhaul in January when Zuckerberg and Chan launched a new, $350 million group focused on criminal justice reform. When the couple launched CZI, they also pledged 99% of their Facebook fortune to philanthropic causes, estimated to amount to $45 billion over the span of their lifetimes.

Read the full story here.

Incoming Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Herzog

In his first interview since being approved earlier this month as Israel’s next ambassador to the U.S., Michael Herzog acknowledged the fraying ties between Israel and some segments of American Jewry and offered an outstretched hand. “I would like Jews in America to feel that when we talk about Israel as a nation-state of the Jewish people that they are, in one way or another, stakeholders,” he told Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash. “I think what needs to be done is to foster a dialogue with as many Jewish groups as possible — the tent is a big one and we have to talk to everyone inside the tent. I want to bring a message of dialogue and building bridges.”

Family ties: Herzog, the grandson of Israel’s former Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Halevy Herzog, the son of Israel’s sixth President Chaim Herzog and older brother of Israel’s current President Isaac Herzog, will need every bit of his pedigree as he takes up Israel’s most important diplomatic posting at a perilous time in the relationship between Israel and the U.S., and Israelis and American Jews. “My background is relevant in more ways than one,” Herzog told JI. “I grew up in a family where my grandfather was chief rabbi, my father president — elements of Jewish destiny and solidarity were a fundamental part of my education.”

Hitting the ground running: “It is a great honor to do this job, I do not take it lightly. I am preparing for this job very seriously and since there are some open and very pressing issues, I will have to hit the ground running,” he said. “We are at a junction where there will or won’t be a [nuclear] deal [with Iran] and there will be a dialogue and specific strategies, so that will be a main issue for me to deal with vis-a-vis the administration.”

Rebuilding bipartisan support: Herzog, 69, a former chief of staff to four former defense ministers and a longtime peace negotiator, also said he would also focus on “the need for broad bipartisan support for Israel in the U.S.,” as well as countering the “international campaign to delegitimize Israel, which is also prevalent in the U.S.” He told JI, “My message is going to be really showing Israel’s diversity. We are a very diverse, open society and certainly far away from the stereotypes [associated with Israel], and we need to make that very clear.”

Read the full interview here.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

On Feb. 3, a few weeks after he proposed a sweeping $1.9 trillion pandemic aid plan, President Joe Biden met with a group of leading Senate Democrats in the Oval Office. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who was present, got to business. “If we cannot deliver, authoritarianism may be on the march,” he told Biden, according to an account of the meeting detailed by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their forthcoming book, Peril, an advance copy of which was obtained by Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel. The book is published by Simon & Schuster and comes out on Tuesday.

Working-class pitch: Sanders argued that passing a major rescue bill would demonstrate to working-class voters — who he believed former President Donald Trump had largely lured away from the Democratic Party — that the federal government was capable of improving their lives for the better, according to the book. “The future of democracy depends on which party is the party of the working class,” the authors paraphrase Sanders as saying in the Oval.

Democracy at stake: Following the deadly Capitol riot less than a month earlier, Sanders had reason to believe that American democracy was in serious jeopardy. But as the Brooklyn-born son of a Jewish immigrant father from Poland whose family members perished in the Holocaust, Sanders was also concerned that the insurrectionists Trump had incited to breach the halls of Congress — one of whom was photographed wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt — were merely a prelude to future acts of violence.

Invoking the Holocaust: “As a kid, I read a lot about the Holocaust and Germany in the 1930s,” Sanders “told others” after the meeting, according to Woodward and Costa. “Germany was one of the most cultured countries in Europe. One of the most advanced countries. So how could a country of Beethoven, of so many great poets and writers, and Einstein, progress to barbarianism?” Sanders, who turned 80 earlier this month, went on: “How does that happen? We have to tackle that question. And it’s not easy.”

‘More horror’: According to statistics released last month by the FBI, Jews are the target of more than half of all religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States. But by the time he walked into the Oval, Sanders — who rarely seems to have invoked the Holocaust throughout his long career in politics — was likely more apprehensive about the future of the republic than his own personal safety. “He told Biden and his colleagues they could not take anything for granted after January 6,” Woodward and Costa write. “Who says more horror could not happen here?”

Read more here.

Annamie Paul poses for a photo with Green Party supporters in downtown Toronto during the 2019 federal election. (Courtesy)

Last month, when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a snap election for Sept. 20, the Liberal leader presented Jewish candidates with an inconvenient timetable. The final weeks of the election have coincided with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The election itself takes place on Monday. Sukkot begins at sundown on Monday evening. The Canadian Green Party leader Annamie Paul — the only Jewish federal party leader in Canada — has found herself thwarted by the ill-planned election. “This is what happens when we don’t have enough diversity in politics,” Paul, 48, lamented in an interview with Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel. “We miss things.”

‘Laser-focused’: Such grievances are perhaps the least of Paul’s problems following months of party infighting in which Green members have conspired to remove her as leader, revoke her party membership and deprive her of campaign funds in the lead-up to what may represent the most consequential election in recent Green Party history. Now, Paul is wagering her future with the party as she vies for a seat in the House of Commons. “Because it is such a short and intense election cycle, because we did start the election cycle at a disadvantage,” Paul said, “I’ve had to try to be as laser-focused as I can.”

Conflict over Israel: No issue has been more troublesome for Paul than than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As violence escalated between Israel and Hamas in May, Paul weighed in on the party’s behalf, urging “restraint” in comments that were received with hostility by party members who took a more critical view of Israel. It was the opening salvo in a bitter feud that has seriously hobbled Paul’s standing as a Green — and just the latest flashpoint in a contentious battle that has long been festering within the party.

Fighting back: Paul acknowledges the stakes but deflects blame for the breakdown that has occurred on her watch, characterizing efforts to remove her from the party as racist and sexist. “It’s been very difficult,” she told JI. “It was an individual situation with an institution. I underline that because we say, generally, in Canada, that we recognize that there are things like systemic discrimination and so forth, and then we never seem to apply that to actual situations.”

Staying positive: Paul isn’t conceding defeat just yet. But she is largely clinging to the belief that her persistence may clear a path for aspiring candidates who feel discouraged by a lack of diversity in Canadian politics. “I really wanted to show that, as a Black Jewish woman, despite all of those challenges, that I did make it to the debate phase,” she told JI, “that I could make it through.”

Read more here.