Bahraini Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Sheikh Abdulla Al Khalifa

Bahraini Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Sheikh Abdulla Al Khalifa met with Jewish leaders in New York on Monday and Tuesday as part of the Gulf nation’s efforts to facilitate people-to-people engagement with the Jewish community following last year’s Abraham Accords, Jewish Insider‘s Melissa Weiss reports.

‘Warm peace’ strategy: The series of meetings, which included sit-downs with New York-area rabbis, the leadership of UJA-Federation of New York, Yeshiva University students and faculty and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, saw Al Khalifa share his government’s hope for what Bahraini and Emirati leaders have described as a “warm peace,” both with Israel and the global Jewish community. “I think…that engaging with American Jewry, with world Jewry, is part of the ‘warm peace’ strategy,” Al Khalifa, who holds Bahrain’s Israel portfolio and became the highest ranking Bahraini to visit the Jewish state last August, told JI in an interview in a midtown Manhattan hotel on Tuesday morning in between meetings. “It’s not ‘the undersecretary is here in passing.’”

Grassroots effort: The meetings left an impression on attendees, many of whom had not previously had deep engagement with Bahrain but were optimistic about future people-to-people efforts. “I think it showed an interest in a very low-level, grassroots manner, which you typically don’t see. I think typically countries make peace and everyone moves on,” Rabbi Daniel Sherman of the West Side Institutional Synagogue, an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side, told JI. “I think there was a real effort for a grassroots relationship for Jews and the Bahraini community and obviously Israel in a much more authentic way.”

Positive step: UJA-Federation CEO Eric Goldstein said the “warm peace” concept “requires not simply country-to-country sorts of activities but very much people-to-people initiatives from an economic perspective, from an interfaith religious dialogue perspective, from student-to-student perspective, that it requires the communities to learn each other. And I think he sees not only Israelis, but American Jews, as critical to that process.”

Ongoing work: Al Khalifa told JI the Bahraini government was “very grateful for the Trump administration for their support” in facilitating the Abraham Accords, and “also very much appreciative to the Biden administration, who will continue to support Bahrain and developing the ties with Israel.” He was hopeful that the success of the Abraham Accords would encourage other Arab countries to enter into similar agreements. “The entire world is looking today and asking… ‘What are the fruits that have been built by countries and people of the region?’” Al Khalifa said. “I think, through the processes that we have undertaken through the past 12 months with our counterparts in Israel, [it] is very much encouraging and [is] setting the foundation for cooperation on many different fronts.”

Read the full story here.

James Traub

The Jewish Lives biographies published in an ongoing series by Yale University Press have typically functioned as succinct celebrations of Jewish achievement, covering figures including Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein and Barbra Streisand. But the latest book, out this week, grapples with a knottier subject: Judah Benjamin, the Southern lawyer and Louisiana senator who served as secretary of state of the Confederacy. “Ambition makes men do terrible things, and he was an ambitious man,” James Traub, the author of Judah Benjamin: Counselor to the Confederacy, told Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel. “He had to come to terms with slavery in order to achieve what he wanted to achieve.”

‘Deplorable’ cause: “Judah Benjamin was the most politically powerful, and arguably the most important, American Jew of the nineteenth century,” Traub, whose previous books include a biography of John Quincy Adams, writes. “He was also the most widely hated one, not only in the North but in portions of the South. Benjamin does not deserve our admiration; but like some other figures who have yoked their lives to deplorable causes, he nevertheless deserves our attention.”

Thin paper trail: Traub, a senior fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, knew little of Benjamin when he first began the book — and found that was likely his subject’s preference. Benjamin left behind scant documentation of his controversial life, forgoing a diary and discarding written correspondence, perhaps aware that future historians would view him unfavorably. Still, Traub had enough material to work with.

Jewish identity: Born in the West Indies, Benjamin grew up in Charleston and later moved to New Orleans, establishing himself as “the most prominent Jewish member of the bar,” Traub writes, and “by far the largest slave-owning Jew in America.” Rather than embracing his Judaism, however, Benjamin largely eschewed his faith. He married a Catholic woman, ate pork and did not observe the Sabbath. “I think that Judah Benjamin wanted to efface his Jewishness as much as he could,” Traub told JI. “For him, success meant success in a slave culture.”

Eluding the past: After the war, Benjamin escaped to England, enduring a shipwreck on the way, and built a new life as a successful British barrister. “In a universe ordered by our moral imagination, Judah Benjamin’s life would have ended with a terrible reckoning,” Traub writes. “But the universe is not a movie. Benjamin died in 1884 wreathed with honors and probably quite content with the path he had hewn through life.”

Read the full interview here.

Last Friday night, after Democrats failed to pass two major spending bills, a small but exclusive group of young Republicans gathered to mingle with others of their kind. A mile and a half away from Capitol Hill, at a trendy music venue at the Wharf, fried chicken was abundant and the drinks were free. The guests’ preferred political party controlled none of the levers of power in Washington, but everyone was having a good time, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports. The 150 or so people filling out Pearl Street Warehouse were members of Maverick PAC, a national network of conservative young professionals that makes donations to Republican politicians.

Moving on: More than just a social gathering, the two-day conference served as a test case for the Republican Party in a post-Donald Trump era. Some prominent speakers, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, served in the Trump administration, while others, like Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), are known as moderates.

The whole spectrum: The former president, widely seen as the current standard-bearer of the Republican Party, was referenced infrequently; Trump supporters were in the room, but so were others who backed Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) when she blamed the Jan. 6 insurrection on the former president. One woman recalled hardly leaving her apartment last winter until she got the COVID-19 vaccine, while a young Ohio politician known to be an anti-masker described himself “as conservative as they come.”

Rooted in reality: While MavPAC members didn’t hesitate to share a few laughs at the expense of the Biden administration, they also tried to present a policy-focused, public service-driven approach to conservative politics separate from the world of election fraud and COVID-19 conspiracy theories that has animated segments of the Republican Party for the past year.

Not trying to fit in: “We just don’t get into the weeds of having that fight,” said Ben Proler, a Houston-based employee at Shell who sits on MavPAC’s national board. “Just because we’re not in line with maybe what [the] mainstream GOP is talking about doesn’t mean we’re wrong. In fact, I think we’re right. And we’re talking about the issues that matter to our members, who are young and diverse.”

Read the full story here.

Yonatan Winetraub

Two years ago Yonatan Winetraub watched with anticipation as the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet, launched by the Israeli organization SpaceIL, which he co-founded, crash-landed on the Moon. A second mission is in the works, but today the ambitious 34-year-old Israeli engineer told Jewish Insider’s Tamara Zieve that he has his sights set on a new — and entirely different — challenge, having just been named a winner of the $1.25 million U.S. National Institutes of Health Director’s Early Independence Award.

Fast track: The award offers an on-ramp for talented junior investigators to be able to carry out independent research by allowing them to bypass the traditional post-doctoral training program and helping them start their own labs.

Bypassing biopsies: Winetraub, who recently received his Ph.D. in biophysics from the Stanford University School of Medicine, will put the $250,000 per year that he has been awarded for the next five years toward developing technology that will enable doctors to “read” skin tumors without the need for physical biopsies, but rather with a virtual one.

Less invasive: Winetraub explained that today, a biopsy is needed to ascertain whether a person has skin cancer. “It’s invasive and you can’t do it everywhere — especially in elderly patients where sometimes they get a lot of spots that are suspicious,” he told JI on Tuesday. His research focuses on utilizing Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and machine learning to create virtual histology tools to non-invasively image cancer at a single-cell resolution.

Looking ahead: He hopes that the same device can eventually also be used for brain tumors. “It’s the same issue there. You don’t want to take everything out, you just want to take the tumor out — so doing this virtual biopsy to get those images that the doctors need in order to determine if there is cancer or not is really important.”

Read more here.

Bonus: The SpaceIL team is working on ideas for its second mission to the Moon, which is scheduled for 2024. Winetraub’s personal favorite is the vision of trying to grow a plant on the Moon. “Chickpeas might be part of the mission,” he told JI. But that “remains to be seen.”