Victoria Virasingh

As she mounts her first bid for public office, Victoria Virasingh, a progressive House challenger in Northern Virginia, is borrowing from the grassroots playbook that has proven successful in recent Democratic primary upsets from the Bronx to St. Louis. The 29-year-old Arlington native, who is challenging Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, and she has renounced contributions from corporate political action committees. But Virasingh emphasizes that her campaign is informed, more than anything else, by her own background, as she explained in a recent interview with Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel.

Background: Virasingh, who identifies as Indian and Latina, is the daughter of working-class immigrants from Ecuador and Thailand. She attended Stanford University on a full scholarship and was previously employed in the tech sector at Palantir, the Silicon Valley data firm, where her work on public-private partnerships took her to Germany and Israel, among other places. Virasingh launched her campaign this summer after returning home amid the pandemic.

Outside the box: “When I was sitting down and deciding our policies and what I believed in, it came from a lived experience and also a professional experience and responding to the needs of the constituents of my district,” Virasingh said last month in the finished basement of her parents’ Arlington townhouse, which doubles as her campaign headquarters. “Sometimes that’s going to neatly fit in a box, and sometimes it’s not.”

Navigating the Middle East: Her stance on Israel sets her apart from some of her progressive allies in the House. Virasingh supports continued U.S. security assistance to Israel. “Our relationship and our allyship with Israel is extremely vital,” she said. “I believe in strengthening that relationship.” Still, her hesitation with regard to supplemental funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system suggests that she may still be working her way through the issue. “I don’t want to be presumptive about how I would vote on the Iron Dome funding,” she said, “but I would hope to be more proactive on the policy prior to the vote itself.”

Ally: “She is a pragmatic progressive who does not fit neatly into an ideological box, and she rejects outright the antisemitic notion that Zionist Jews should be pushed out of the progressive movement,” Zioness’s Amanda Berman said of Virasingh. “Given her family’s own refugee story and her experiences growing up, she sees herself as an ally to Jews and other minorities who have had to fight for the American dream.”

Reason for running: “When I looked at the priorities of the voters and the priorities of the district and the leadership, I didn’t see those priorities being translated,” Virasingh told JI. “I didn’t see those issues being advocated for in the way that they needed to be. It started to trigger something in me. We can’t just wait. We can’t just say, ‘Oh, well, he’s nice, so therefore, we should just keep him,’ when, I think, we need to advocate for leaders who understand what it’s like and are willing to do something about it.”

Read the full interview here.

Bonus — Texas Hold’em: J Street is endorsing progressive immigration lawyer Jessica Cisneros in her second challenge to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) in Texas’s 28th Congressional District. Cuellar was endorsed by Pro-Israel America in July.

Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon

Former Israeli Defense Minister and IDF Chief of General Staff Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon called for the Biden administration to reconstitute a pressure campaign against Iran, including bringing together a coalition of countries to enforce sanctions. Speaking to Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast,” Ya’alon said the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran was a mistake, but not one that can’t be reversed.

Coalition rebuilding: “I call to rehabilitate the coalition. I call [on] the Biden administration: Let’s try to build again such a coalition by bringing all the elements, to include Russia and China,” Ya’alon said, while admitting the challenges in realigning with increasingly contentious adversaries. “I don’t ignore it. China has signed a strategic economic agreement with Iran for 25 years, but it is not the [lost cause].” Ya’alon described how he and then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — at then-President Barack Obama’s request — convinced Moscow and Beijing to join the sanctions coalition. “After the U.N. Security Council Resolution [1929 passed in June, 2010], having a coalition led by the United States, not just on the United Nations [overall], [the sanctions] had become successful in 2012. The feeling in Tehran was that they [had] to make a decision whether to go on with their activities, or to survive as a regime. The choice was clear for me, survivability.” 

Missed opportunity: Despite the pressure on the Iranians, Ya’alon said, the United States committed a “historic missed opportunity” by not pressuring the regime further, noting that the Obama administration could have pressed for Iran to dismantle its centrifuges, forfeit more uranium and end its missile-development program. “The problem in the engagement between the P-5+1 [world powers negotiating the 2015 agreement] and the Iranian regime, approaching 2016, to my mind, was an American political clock,” he said on the podcast. “The Obama administration at the time, after almost three years of political engagement… seemed to be in a hurry because of the elections,” Ya’alon added of the administration’s attempts to seal the deal before the end of Obama’s second term.

Closer than ever: Still, Ya’alon considered the withdrawal a mistake. “Because of the withdrawal from the JCPOA, now the Iranians are close to the ability, first of all, to have enriched uranium in a capacity to produce a bomb,” he argued. “Because of the withdrawal, the U.S. administration destroyed a coalition, the P5+1; they are not on board.”

Read more here and listen to the full podcast here.

Sunflower Bakery

Inside Cafe Sunflower, the lobby-level bakery and coffee shop in the Rockville, Md., office of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, a young employee named Michael excitedly greeted a customer. He rattled off the list of beverages he could make. In front of him was a glass case filled with kosher cookies, cakes and other baked goods. Everything in the shop had been made by the students at Sunflower Bakery’s training kitchen a couple of miles away, where young adults with learning disabilities are taught the basics of baking and independent living: showing up to work on time, maintaining professionalism, communicating with employers and colleagues, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports. Michael is one of those students. 

What they can do: “So many people who have been in special ed or received additional services all the way through school have been told always what they don’t do well, what they don’t know, the things that they can’t do,” said Sara Portman Milner, a social worker who co-founded Sunflower Bakery in 2008 with Laurie Wexler. “When they leave school, and they’re supposed to get a job, their anxiety level is through the roof, because they’ve only really been told what they can’t do. They haven’t really been told, ‘You’re a wonderful human being, you’re capable of learning to be able to do something,’ and continually supported.” 

Fresh idea: Wexner and Milner say this type of skills-based training program is largely nonexistent, both in the D.C. area and beyond. Training people with intellectual disabilities to then go into the community and get jobs at other institutions alongside neurotypical individuals is rare. (Not to mention that the Rockville area, home to a large Jewish population, lacked a kosher bakery.) 

Meeting the need: Research shows an acute need for training services and support for that community. Twenty-eight percent of adults with intellectual disabilities have never held jobs, according to data from the Special Olympics. Only one-third of adults with intellectual disabilities between the ages of 21 and 64 are employed. Decades of research from social scientists shows a high correlation between having an intellectual disability and living in poverty. “Those are staggering statistics,” said Jody Tick, who took over for Wexler as the bakery’s executive director last summer.  

Thinking twice: Much of Sunflower’s training involves instruction that an average neurotypical baker wouldn’t think twice about. But if Liz Hutter, the bakery’s culinary director, told the students to arrange cookies in alternating rows of seven and six on a tray, they couldn’t do it. “You tell that to someone with a disability, sometimes they’ll put seven cookies in a row, six cookies in a row, and they’ll put them all up in the corner,” Hutter explained. So she put together a curriculum, creating new methods to help her students learn skills that might seem like common knowledge to others.

Independent living: John Katz, Sunflower’s program director, works with students to get jobs in the community. But jobs are not the only success metric he cares about. “In this last year, I’ve had six students gaining the confidence to move out and live independently. I have two that work part-time jobs while going back to college. I have three that have gotten driver’s licenses,” Katz noted. 

Read the full story here.