Gov. Gavin Newsom at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the launch of the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education on Wednesday in Los Angeles, citing “xenophobia, the antisemitism on the rise, the hate [and] the bigotry” as the impetus for its “long overdue” creation. “The purpose of this council on the Holocaust and genocide [is] more broadly around education, more sustainable investments, more peer-to-peer, more professional development, more of a systemic investment that will transcend jurisdictions and boundaries — that is where we need to do more,” Newsom told Jewish Insider’s Melissa Weissshortly after the announcement.

What it is: The council will include state legislators, civic leaders and representatives from minority communities, Anita Friedman, a Jewish community leader and longtime friend of the governor, told JI. Rabbi Meyer May, the executive director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said the council would be a “major game-changer” for the state. “I don’t see this as one of those cases where it becomes polarized. It shouldn’t become polarized,” he said, “If you’re in Poland, that becomes polarized, because Poland has trouble with its Holocaust memory, as do some of the Eastern European countries. But here, we don’t have that. We’re all rowing in the same direction.”

‘This is ominous’: As part of the state’s $196 billion 2021 budget, more than $13 million was allocated to Holocaust education institutions around the state, including $10 million to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, which will fund a new exhibition on antisemitism. Newsom announced the council’s launch at an event hosted by the museum on Wednesday morning. “The fundamental fear of the Holocaust is pretty pronounced when you look at the number of young people that don’t know, never heard of Auschwitz, don’t know what the Holocaust is, don’t sometimes believe it,” Newsom told JI. “I mean, they’re getting their history from Instagram. This is ominous. And so we have to make up for that.”

Campus beat: The governor’s announcement comes amid rising concerns in the state over the inclusion of anti-Israel lessons in educational materials, as well as efforts by local teachers’ unions to adopt anti-Israel measures. Last month, a union representing San Diego community college educators passed a resolution condemning Israel. Weeks later, an effort by United Teachers Los Angeles to pass a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel was tabled indefinitely after an uproar from the local Jewish community. Newsom recalled his time on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, when he encountered anti-Israel sentiment on campus. “I remember at [San Francisco] State [University] being at a number of rallies, and [there being] just sort of a rank anti-Israel sentiment that was coming out, the antisemitism that was bleeding over, only to be formalized [into] the BDS movement,” he recalled.

Read the full story here.

Reps. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass.

Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) called for any nuclear deal with Iran to be submitted to the Senate as a treaty, during an interview on Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast” with co-host Rich Goldberg. “I may be old-fashioned, but I would expect the White House to get the approval of the Senate for a treaty, which is what it says in the Constitution,” the freshman representative from Massachusetts said. On the podcast, Auchincloss, who represents the state’s 4th Congressional District, covered a range of policy topics, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan, applying a “nuanced approach” to dealing with Iran.

No retrenchment: Auchincloss, 33, rejected any premise that the withdrawal from Afghanistan served as a retrenchment to a 1990s approach towards combating terrorism. “I do not think that the United States should retain the war footing that it had for the last 20 years vis-a-vis the Middle East and Central Asia. I don’t think that those regions’ strategic and economic importance on the world stage justify the amount of bandwidth, time, troops, [and] material that were invested in them over the last 20 years,” the congressman said. “The United States should be focusing its international relations on the great race with the Chinese Communist Party, and its strategic economic diplomatic dimensions. We should be focused on leadership for transnational challenges, like climate change and public health and yes, terrorism.

Investigation: While hesitant to offer any criticism of the withdrawal, the Afghanistan War veteran did call for a more open investigation. “I have been hesitant to be critical because you can’t armchair-quarterback a 20-year war without all the information. And for that reason, I added an amendment to the NDAA — to the defense authorization — that gives the Afghanistan commission subpoena power to declassify and access decision-making documents from the last 20 years — from 9/11 to today — because we’ve got to understand better over the course of four administrations why we were doing what we did,” Auchincloss said.

Top of mind: “We’ve had classified discussions with the White House on their approach to Iran. I’m confident they are being thoughtful, deliberative [and] substantive in their approach to Iran. Obviously, I can’t share all the details of those conversations, but I know that the president and his closest advisors have Israel’s security top of mind when they’re thinking about this issue.

Local government: Auchincloss, who toured Newton (Mass.) Housing Authority’s Norumbega Gardens with Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) on Wednesday, spoke about how their shared local government background gave them a different perspective of how government works. “Both of us come from city council backgrounds, where, at the local level, and for all the friction of local governance, it’s solutions-oriented. At the end of the day, you got to take the trash out, you got to pave the roads, you got to build the schools, you got to make sure the dog parks are getting the investments that they need. And we want to bring that solutions-oriented approach to Washington as well,” Auchincloss said.

Campus watch: “Support for Israel right now is a bipartisan issue. I think the Iron Dome vote underscores that more than 450 representatives and the vast majorities of the respective parties voted in favor of Iron Dome support. I do think that’s shifting. I think that on college campuses across the country, and in high schools across the country, being anti-Zionist is increasingly being conflated with being progressive. And those of us who care deeply about Israel’s security and the U.S.-Israel relationship need to be watchful and need to be responsive to this current [situation] because I think we can appreciate that what’s being discussed in the college debating rooms of 2021 is going to be discussed in the halls of Congress in 2035.”

Read more here and listen to the full podcast here.

Bonus: Favorite Yiddish word? “Chutzpah.” Favorite Jewish food? “My grandmother’s matzo ball soup. I mean, my grandmother used to make it all the time.” Recent book recommendation? A Short History of Europe by Simon Jenkins. Dunkin’ Donuts or Sam Adams? “Dunks for sure.”

Last Thursday, just before lunchtime, it was time for karaoke. A woman belted out Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” trying in vain to get her embarrassed daughter, maybe 10 years old, to join in. Instead, she got Ann B. Friedman, 67, who sidled up beside her and started singing: Jolene, Jolene, Jolene Joleeeene. The two women do not know each other, though this was not the raucous brand of karaoke that follows too many sake bombs or mixed drinks. They were in an exhibit at Planet Word, an interactive museum devoted to words, language and literacy that opened in Washington, D.C., last year. Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch recently went on a tour of the museum with Friedman, its founder and CEO.

Use your words: This room is meant to teach visitors about songwriting, one of several exhibits that are “devoted to what we do with words,” said Friedman. People can choose from a couple of dozen songs that the museum has acquired the rights to, with Disney hits “Let It Go” and “Moana,” among the most popular. The lyrics are projected on a wall, while certain elements of songwriting — like metaphors, alliteration and repetition — are highlighted and explained next to the text.

Celebrating language: Spread over the five stories of the historic Franklin School, a century-and-a-half-old red-brick building across from Franklin Square in downtown Washington, the museum is the embodiment of Friedman’s love of language and reading. “One of the big questions I got a lot of time from people when I told them about the museum was, ‘Oh, are you going to have an exhibit on diagramming sentences?’ I was like, ‘No. This is not a right or wrong museum. This is where we celebrate language like we use it,’” Friedman recalled.

Stops and starts: After a late-October opening last year — delayed from a planned May 2020 opening — the museum operated for just five weeks before a pandemic-mandated shutdown that lasted until April of this year. Now, only 100 people are allowed in the museum at a time.

Hebrew lesson: One exhibit allows visitors to “practice” their foreign language skills with speakers of 28 different languages. Friedman walks up to a tablet and begins the brief Hebrew lesson, which include an explanation of how Eliezer Ben-Yehuda modernized Hebrew in the late-19th century, along with some of the words he created — like tapuz, orange, created from a mishmash of the words for “apple” and “gold.”

Ulpan interrupted: Friedman, who described her Jewish upbringing as “very Reform,” spent several years in Israel in the 1980s when her husband, The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, served as the paper’s Jerusalem bureau chief. “I went to ulpan, and then I kept getting pregnant,” Friedman recalled, laughing. “I had enough [fluency] to do grocery shopping and things like that. But never an advanced level with Hebrew.”

Read the full story here.