Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Tuesday morning!
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will meet today for hearings on Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s nomination to be ambassador to India, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann’s nomination to be ambassador to Germany and Donald Blome’s nomination to be ambassador to Pakistan.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) spoke at Rutgers University Hillel last night about antisemitism. During the speech, Gottheimer alleged that members of the Working Families Party disrupted a recent event about the bipartisan infrastructure bill by “screaming ‘Jew’ at me.”
Gottheimer expressed concerns about a statement this summer from part-time Rutgers professors attacking the Israeli government after the May conflict with Hamas.
In his speech, Gottheimer called the faculty statement “disgraceful,” adding, “It was even more sickening that the university felt that it had trouble defending the pro-Israel students on campus and stand up to such blatant antisemitism. They had to back down from the initial comments of support.”
Sue Altman, the New Jersey Working Families Party state director, denied Gottheimer’s claim and said that “spurious and false allegations of antisemitism are extremely dangerous; they cheapen real ones.”
The House will vote today on establishing a special envoy to monitor and combat Islamophobia.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wrapped up a historic visit to the United Arab Emirates last night, having become the first Israeli premier to make an official visit to the country. At the conclusion of the visit, it was announced that Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, with whom Bennett met for more than four hours, had accepted an invitation to visit Israel.
Following the meeting, the two issued a joint statement saying that “both sides confirmed a shared desire to advance a range of significant areas of cooperation to further strengthen trade and economic relations, by establishing a joint research and development fund.”
Bennett entered isolation shortly after returning to Israel, after someone who had been on his flight tested positive for COVID-19, his spokesman said in a statement.
child care considerations
Senate modifies child care provisions in Build Back Better Act

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) walks away from reporters after speaking with them outside the Senate Chambers of the Capitol on December 07, 2021, in Washington, D.C.
The Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee released an updated draft of the Build Back Better Act over the weekend that includes several changes to child care and pre-K provisions pushed by religious groups, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. The Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel of America had, in coalition with other religious organizations, lobbied for changes to provisions they said would bar religious providers from receiving funding under these programs unless they drastically changed and secularized their programs.
Ch-ch-changes: In the latest draft of the bill, the Senate removed provisions subjecting child care and pre-K funding to a series of additional anti-discrimination requirements under the 2007 Head Start Act. Those provisions, activists said, could exclude single-sex programs and bar providers from giving preference to families of their own faith. The Senate also removed a provision designating child care aid as federal financial assistance to child care providers, which activists said could make religious groups ineligible.
Two out of three: The groups’ third major request — reworking the universal pre-K program from direct aid to providers into a certificate program providing funding to parents — was not included in the new Senate draft. “Unfortunately, as the bill is currently written, [universal pre-K] funding will only be provided in the form of direct aid, allowing faith-based participation but only to programs that have been secularized — not a realistic option for religious providers or the parents they serve,” Abba Cohen, Agudath Israel’s vice president for government affairs, told Jewish Insider.
Leeway: Nathan Diament, executive director of the OU’s Action Center, said that there may be ways for religious pre-K providers to still receive some funding depending on how states implement the program. He offered the example of New York City’s pre-K program, which pays for half days of non-religious instruction at religious pre-K schools, leaving a half day of privately financed religious education.
On the horizon: The Supreme Court’s decision in Carson v. Makin, a pending case involving government funding for religious schooling, could also shake up the pre-K funding provisions. Observers on both sides of the issue expect the Court, which heard oral arguments in the Maine case last week, to rule in favor of parents seeking to use public funding to pay for religious schooling, but it’s unclear how far the Court will go in changing precedents on public funding of religious schools.