Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Wednesday morning!
The Senate will vote today to pass the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, after approving a procedural vote yesterday by a vote of 86 to 13.
The 13 senators who voted against the measure were Sens. Mike Braun (R-IN), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Mike Lee (R-UT), Ed Markey (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Rand Paul (R-KY), Rob Portman (R-OH), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Pat Toomey (R-PA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR).
The House approved a bill, along party lines, that would create a special envoy to monitor and combat Islamophobia.
Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Nachman Shai said Wednesday that he doesn’t accept any stalling on advancing a deal for a state-recognized egalitarian prayer section at the Western Wall, following a report that Israel has frozen its implementation — news that has troubled some religious leaders in the U.S. “I don’t accept it and I will do my best to advance the cabinet resolution about the Kotel — I see no reason to wait,” Shai told Jewish Insider’s Tamara Zieve.
A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told JI that “no decision was made of the sort described in that report.” When pressed on whether the deal is still going ahead as planned, the spokesperson said that “it’s being discussed.”
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan told JI he was “disappointed” but not surprised by the report, particularly coming just days after positive discussions he and others had with Shai on the subject in New York.
barnstorming badger
Milwaukee’s son makes a Senate run

Mandela Barnes
JI’s Matthew Kassel sat down with Barnes, the Wisconsin lieutenant governor and Senate hopeful, twice and interviewed nearly 30 of his acquaintances, strategists, pundits and state officials in recent weeks to find out how Barnes would approach the Senate… if he makes it there. Read the start of the full story below:
On a brisk evening in late November, Mandela Barnes, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Wisconsin who is now emerging as a high-profile Senate candidate in one of the most consequential races of the upcoming midterm elections, was celebrating his birthday at a post-industrial community center on the east side of Madison.
Despite the festive occasion, the fundraising event was, at points, relatively subdued, perhaps in part because the gathering had been scheduled on the Monday after Thanksgiving, two days before Barnes would officially turn 35. But it was also hard not to feel as if the tumultuous events of the past week or so had contributed to a lingering sense of unease in this liberal redoubt of south-central Wisconsin.
As the governor’s gregarious sidekick, Barnes is something of a ubiquitous presence at public events throughout the Badger State, and so it was hardly unusual that he had been planning to attend the holiday parade in Waukesha at which a driver had careened his maroon SUV into the crowd and killed six bystanders. Instead, Barnes was in Kenosha that day, an hour’s drive south, where protesters were objecting to the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who, armed with a semiautomatic rifle, had killed two people and injured a third amid widespread demonstrations following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in the summer of 2020.
The last-minute schedule change had clearly shaken Barnes, who described “a bitter irony that encapsulates all the stress and pain of this past week” in social media comments the day after the car attack in suburban Milwaukee. “The only reason I wasn’t at the parade in Waukesha yesterday is because I needed to be in Kenosha.”
Read the full profile here, including Barnes’s views on the Middle East and how Jewish leaders in Wisconsin feel about his campaign.