Brian Hook, former U.S. special representative for Iran and senior advisor to the U.S. secretary of state, speaks onstage during the 2021 Concordia Annual Summit at Sheraton New York on September 21, 2021, in New York City.

Brian Hook, who served as the Trump administration’s Iran envoy, suggested that any deal with Iran must bar the regime from nuclear enrichment of any kind, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

‘Original sin’: “The original sin of the [2015] Iran nuclear deal is that it allowed Iran to enrich,” Hook said at an event on Thursday organized by the National Union for Democracy in Iran, an Iranian-American diaspora organization. “Iran claims it wants peaceful nuclear power. This is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. So when such a country is talking about peaceful nuclear power… they can put to bed any concerns people have by [stopping] enrichment.”

Setbacks: Hook said he had not seen anything to indicate that a no-enrichment standard is part of the current talks with Iran. “We should not be defeatist or fatalist about the need to do this,” Hook said. “We shouldn’t negotiate with ourselves and talk ourselves out of it. We should not be resigned to Iran as a nuclear threshold state. It will change the balance of power in the Middle East profoundly.” He added, “The regime needs to understand that this is a non-negotiable issue.”

Knock-on effects: Hook argued that reentering the Iran deal would have “a lot of consequences” for U.S. partners in the region, emboldening Iran to further expand its non-nuclear provocations, such as the Houthi proxy attacks on U.S. allies in the Gulf. The former Trump official said that the Iran deal, from which former President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018, also complicated efforts to convince other Arab nations to agree not to enrich nuclear material themselves.

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Former Rep. Max Rose (D-NY)

Former Rep. Max Rose (D-NY), who is running to reclaim his redrawn Staten Island congressional seat, criticized both the Biden administration and Congress on Friday for failing to take the actions he sees as necessary to counteract white supremacist domestic terrorism, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Designate: Rose, speaking at a virtual event organized by the American Jewish Congress, said that the administration should be more aggressive in pursuing white supremacist groups in the same fashion that the U.S. pursued jihadist terrorist organizations. Specifically, he said, domestic groups with international connections and membership should be labeled as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. “This administration needs to do more in this space,” Rose, who spent six months as the Defense Department’s COVID advisor last year, said. “Our safety — the safety of Jewish communities — relies on it, and we do not want to act after a horrific incident. We want to act before it.”

Falling behind: “[Administrations] will say — ironically — ‘Well, there are too many members of these organizations in the United States of America… so it’s not going to work,’” he said. “It’s patently absurd. The only reason why they’re not doing this is because they’re afraid… All this requires is the will of this administration.” Rose argued that the Trump administration did more than the Biden administration had in this regard, having designated the Russian Imperial Movement, a global white supremacist group, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

On the Hill: Rose also believes that Congress should also work to create a separate domestic terrorism statute, such as exists for foreign terrorism, although he acknowledged that there is “not the political will to do that.” And he noted a differentiation between “domestic violence” and “domestic terrorism.” “In the absence of that [political will], I don’t care how much funding or condemning congressional resolutions you pass in regards to enforcing or protecting us against domestic terrorism, what you’re ultimately doing is — and this is a valiant cause — you’re protecting us against domestic violence,” Rose explained. “But what we are concerned about is terrorism. And that is totally different because the goals of terrorism are completely different.”

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Members of the Jewish Council of the Emirates celebrate Chanukah, 2021. (Credit: AGJC)

When Rafael Schwartz moved to Kuwait three years ago for work, he was hoping he’d be able to make quick trips to the fledgling Jewish community in the nearby United Arab Emirates every few weeks if he needed Jewish company or kosher food, but when COVID-19 struck two years ago, he found himself unable to travel. Then, in February 2021, something like a miracle happened. Spurred by the fall 2020 signing of the Abraham Accords, a set of normalization agreements between Israel and four Muslim-majority countries, the Association of Gulf Jewish Communities (AGJC) was born, connecting Jews in six Persian Gulf countries and providing a Jewish lifeline for people like Schwartz, an engineer. Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash reports on the changes the Accords have had on the region’s Jewish communities.

Backbone of Jewish life: In that short time, the AGJC has become the backbone of Jewish life in the Gulf, primarily in the UAE and Bahrain — two of the signatories to the Abraham Accords — and has connected the sprinkling of Jews living and working in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The association estimates there are roughly 1,200 Jews residing in the Gulf, not including a further 1,000 serving there as part of the U.S. military. Among its activities, the organization has played a hand in the growing number of Jewish life-cycle events, helping to organize the region’s first bar mitzvah in 16 years and its first Jewish wedding in 52 years. It has also launched a Jewish dating website, a Beth Din of Arabia (Jewish religious court), and is currently in the process of creating an Arabian Kosher Certification Agency, which will set standards for kashrut throughout all six Gulf countries. The AGJC also offers weekly in-person and virtual programming, including a Friday pre-Shabbat Zoom and events around the holidays.

Welcome change: For indigenous Gulf Jews, such as Ebrahim Daoud Nonoo, AGJC’s president and the chairman of the board of trustees of the House of Ten Commandments, the Jewish community in Bahrain, the growing Jewish life is a welcome change. “We are a tiny community and the good thing we are seeing now is that we have a workable way to make Jewish life flourish in the country,” he continued. “The AGJC is a fantastic support for all the communities in the Gulf, allowing us to enjoy Jewish life not just from the point of view of kosher food or religious books, but we also have the input of a rabbi and we have used him for bar mitzvahs and weddings.”

Jews welcomed: “When I arrived here a year ago, Jewish life in the Gulf was almost unknown,” Rabbi Dr. Elie Abadie, the AGJC’s rabbi, said in an interview with JI. “It was barren land, but I could see that we could create an orchard and connect Jewish communities and individuals in all of the countries. It feels really good watching this and, in a way, it makes you feel vindicated that finally Arab countries have come to realize that either persecuting or expelling their Jews was a historical mistake and now they want to correct that and welcome the Jews back,” he continued. “I hope and pray that we will see even more events for the Jewish community in these countries and that more Jews will either go to settle there or come out of the closet, so to speak.”

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Sharonna Karni Cohen isn’t afraid to dream big — so big that her vision will soon travel to space. Nearly a decade ago, the social impact entrepreneur founded a collective of artists and “dreamers” that transforms visions and aspirations into works of art. Karni Cohen founded Dreame in 2014 with the aim of empowering people to be creators. The initiative provides a platform for people to submit their ideas, visions and dreams to an artist of their choice who then transforms them into digital art. Karni Cohen’s latest project — projecting video art inspired by thousands of submitted visions for the future onto famous landmarks around the world — will culminate when a mosaic of 500 digital pieces of art will be carried into space in April on a mission that will also launch the second Israeli astronaut ever to venture into the cosmos, Jewish Insider’s Tamara Zieve reports.

Positive thinking: “The Big Dream” was born three years after Dreame’s founding, when Karni Cohen asked her friends how they imagined Israel in 30 years. Discouraged by the pessimism of her friends’ responses, she reframed the question, asking them instead to imagine the utopian version of the Jewish state. When she extended the question to a group of 1,000 people, she identified several recurring themes: peace, coexistence, culture, environment and freedom. The “First Big Dream” — which took the form of 1,500 yoga mats puzzled together in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square — was built out of images spawned by those 1,000 visions of the future, a giant collective dream made into an artwork by Israeli illustrator Amit Trainin.

Start-up mentality: Karni Cohen credits the Israeli mindset for the success of her projects. “None of this would have happened anywhere else in the world,” she asserted. “Even the puzzling [together] of the yoga mats. I don’t think 50 friends of mine in London would have come to help me at 6 in the morning. It’s a very Israeli attitude and I’m forever grateful to Israel and ‘Start-up Nation’ for empowering my creativity and my drive and all the fellow entrepreneurs that I work with, so I think in many ways it’s thanks to Israel that this project was born.”

Into space: For its upcoming project, Karni Cohen’s team is thinking bigger than ever, aiming to collect a total of 50,000 dreams for the planet’s future from all over the world by March 31. Fifty artists will choose 10 dreams each and will collate them into one mosaic and video animation. The final piece will be unveiled in a range of locations including the Old Royal Naval College in London; Fed Square in Melbourne; Łódź, Poland; Shibuya crossing in Tokyo; and Hamar, Norway. The final location will be the International Space Station (ISS), as part of the Rakia (“sky” in Hebrew) mission, with Israeli astronaut Eytan Stibbe projecting the final piece and a heat map connecting all the dreams with the world.

United by dreams: Embassies from around the world, with the help of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, have been involved in the effort. Various foundations and organizations have also helped collect dreams for the project; members of the Mars Society, for instance, submitted visions of human life on the Red Planet. Mental health, the environment, family welfare and peace are among recurring themes of submitted dreams. Children and adults alike have participated in the project; a number of children from around the world dreamed of opening an ice cream store to make people happy. During the space mission, the artwork will travel for eight days and be projected as a hologram that people will be able to see online and know above which part of the world it is at that moment. “The idea is to create correlations between the dreams and remind people around the world that we have quite similar dreams to each other,” said Karni Cohen.

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