Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Monday morning!
Today is a big day at Jewish Insider. Below, Gabby Deutch has just published a must-read 5,000-word in-depth profile of Gen. Miguel Correa, the two-star retired U.S. Army general who helped broker the Abraham Accords and even came up with the name for it. This is the general’s first on-the-record set of interviews. And the story is not just available here but also at a new publication we’re launching today called The Circuit.
The Circuit is a new digital publication covering the Middle East through a business and cultural lens. The Circuit, accessible at Circuit.News, is geared for doers and deal-makers — in the region and afar — who are “on the circuit.” This includes those in the U.S., the Gulf and Israel who are now getting to know one another — so expect good overlap of content with our other publications at JI and eJewishPhilanthropy. We have big plans for JI and eJP this year, and are excited to welcome The Circuit into our family of publications.
Stay tuned for the launch of The Daily Circuit, a new curated newsletter from The Circuit, coming soon. Sign up here to be notified when it goes live.
behind the name
The general who coined the Abraham Accords

Gen. Miguel Correa
Note: This story is worth reading in full. Below are a few tidbits from the article but we recommend clicking the link to read more here.
Beneath the holiest place in Judaism, a group of visitors gathered in December 2020 to celebrate Hanukkah. Guests of honor inside the dimly lit stone archway of the Western Wall Tunnels in Jerusalem included a who’s who of Jewish officials from the Trump administration. Together, the group lit candles, recited blessings and sang Hanukkah songs. Afterward, the rabbi of the Western Wall and Israel’s Holy Places, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, noticed a familiar face out of the corner of his eye. Rabinowitz proceeded with purpose, blowing past Trump advisors Jared Kushner and Avi Berkowitz, as well as U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, to reach two-star U.S. Army Gen. Miguel Correa. The rabbi from Jerusalem and the general, a Catholic Puerto Rico native, embraced in a brotherly hug.
What’s in a name: The unlikely pair had met earlier in the year when Correa, who played a pivotal role in negotiating and bringing about the Abraham Accords, was in Jerusalem. Now the general was back to celebrate a Jewish holiday for the first time, just months after he had coined the name “Abraham Accords,” knitting together the three Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
An American experiment: “My dad really drove all these cultures into our minds, and I think it helped me get where I’m at,” the press-shy general explained to The Circuit / Jewish Insider‘s Gabby Deutch at his home in Pompano Beach, Fla., in his first in-depth interview on his professional experiences and personal journey. Correa’s parents were the formative force in every career choice he made: “My parents had beat that into our heads, ‘Hey, what is going to be your contribution to this American experiment?’”
Behind the scenes: The name for the normalization agreements that are having a major economic and cultural impact in the Middle East came to Correa with hardly a moment to spare. “This is on August 13 at roughly 10 a.m., with the announcement, with the phone call [between Trump, then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Emirati leader Mohamed bin Zayed] being at I think 10:30 a.m., so there wasn’t much time — it was a last-minute decision,” Berkowitz recalled in an interview. “I thought it was excellent, that’s fabulous, that’s great,” Kushner told JI.
Read the full profile of Correa — with stops in Florida, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Alaskan wilderness and the UAE — on The Circuit for the inside story of how the gregarious Puerto Rican earned the trust of the Emiratis and went on to help broker the Abraham Accords — and name it, too.