
Daily Kickoff: What Mike Bloomberg will tell UJA tonight + Steven Olikara’s Senate bid
👋 Good Monday morning!
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to call out antisemitism on the political right and left during remarks he is set to deliver tonight at UJA-Federation of New York’s annual Wall Street Dinner in Times Square.
“Too many on the right seem only concerned about antisemitism when it occurs on the left – and vice versa,” Bloomberg will say, according to a draft of his remarks obtained by Jewish Insider.
Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Steve Daines (R-MT) are set to announce a follow-on bill today to the 2018 Taylor Force Act, which cut off U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority as long as it continues its “martyr payments” to the families of terrorists.
Stuart Force, the father of Taylor Force, the U.S. Army veteran who was killed in a 2016 terrorist attack in Israel, described the new legislation to Jewish Insider as “a more nuts-and-bolts approach to the actual mechanics of funding terrorism.” Force is set to speak at the announcement today alongside the senators.
He added that he and his wife, Robbi, “will do whatever we can do to help [Cotton] attack the problem” and promote the bill. The Taylor Force Act “became our mission and it was our therapy. We didn’t go to grief counseling, we focused on doing this,” he continued.
Bob Dole, a former senator from Kansas, longtime Senate majority leader and 1996 presidential candidate, died on Sunday at 98.
badger ballot
Steven Olikara’s next act: A Senate bid

Steven Olikara
Steven Olikara, a 31-year-old political activist from Milwaukee, is likely the only Democratic candidate in Wisconsin’s crowded Senate primary field who once played guitar in a Klezmer band — a personal tidbit that, on first glance, may seem largely irrelevant to his current campaign. But on a recent afternoon in downtown Madison, he suggested that his experience communing with Jewish folk music in high school was by no means trivial. “When I was growing up playing music, I was connecting with all of these different cultures,” he told Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel, “and in many ways, I’m trying to bring that spirit of togetherness in music into our political sphere.”
Bridging divides: Olikara, who hasn’t held public office before, is the founder of a nonpartisan youth advocacy group, the Millennial Action Project, that aims to bridge political divides through involvement on such issues as voting rights, climate change and criminal justice reform. He says he is bringing a similar ethos to his Senate campaign, which he announced in September following a statewide listening tour. He is among a dozen Democrats competing to replace Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who has yet to announce if he will seek reelection in the midterms next year.
Music to politics: Olikara, whose parents settled in Milwaukee from Kerala, in southern India, in the early 1980s, had long anticipated a different path for himself. “Like a good son of Indian immigrants, I figured I would become an engineer for most of my life,” he said. “Every male in my family did go into engineering.” Yet primarily through music, “I became interested in people,” he said. “That led to an interest in public service, particularly how you can bring people together across lines of division.”
‘Exhausted majority’: While the limited publicly available polling suggests that Olikara lags behind such apparent frontrunners as Mandela Barnes and Alex Lasry, the nonprofit leader argues that he is gaining momentum. “Really where I think our campaign differentiates itself is we are activating what some researchers have called ‘the exhausted majority,’” he told JI. “People who feel disillusioned by politics right now, and who feel left out, and feel like politics is not responsive to their daily challenges.”
Beyond Klezmer: Olikara has been gaining support from Jewish community leaders as well as pro-Israel advocates at the state and national levels. Among those who have contributed to his campaign are Moses Libitzky, a donor to Jewish causes in San Francisco, and Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. “My interest in supporting pro-Israel issues and supporting the Jewish community here starts with the people who I love most — my close circle of friends,” said Olikara, whose engagement with Jewish issues extends beyond Klezmer. “Hearing their passion for Israel has truly moved me on a deep level.”