
Daily Kickoff: Which Jew should join ‘The View’ + UAE and Israel increasingly in the same boat
👋 Good Friday morning!
For less-distracted reading over the weekend, browse this week’s edition of The Weekly Print, a curated print-friendly PDF featuring a selection of recent JI stories, including: The quarterback scion in Zion; Ritchie Torres to pick up Riverdale in latest redistricting; In Texas 35, Greg Casar outlines his approach on Israel and the Palestinians; With a target on her back, Carolyn Maloney gets lift from new map; In floor speech, Menendez blasts Biden administration’s Vienna negotiations; On a range of Washington issues, the UAE and Israel are increasingly in the same boat; and A Jew on ‘The View’? Some say it’s long overdue. Print the latest edition here.
More than a third of the House — 174 members — signed onto a letter led by Reps. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) and John Katko (R-NY) urging House Appropriations Committee leaders to increase funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program.
Republican Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno announced last night that he is suspending his campaign, after coming in at the back of the field in fourth-quarter fundraising last year and trailing in his own internal polls.
Leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, killed himself and four members of his family during a U.S. raid in Syria, U.S. President Joe Biden said yesterday.
“Last night, operating on my orders, United States military forces successfully removed a major terrorist threat to the world: the global leader of ISIS, known as Hajji Abdullah,” Biden said at a White House briefing.
“Our team is still compiling their report, but we do know that as our troops approached to capture the terrorist, in a final act of desperate cowardice, he — with no regard to the lives of his own family or others in the building, he chose to blow himself up — not just with a vest, but to blow up that third floor rather than face justice for the crimes he has committed, taking several members of his family with him just as his predecessor did,” Biden added.
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A Jew on ‘The View’? Some say it’s long overdue

“The View” co-hosts
Amid the intense fury over Whoopi Goldberg’s controversial assertion that the Holocaust was “not about race” because it had involved “two groups of white people” was a somewhat more constructive plea from Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, that has largely gone unaddressed,Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports. Appearing on the show a day after Goldberg had made her remarks, for which she has apologized, Greenblatt took the opportunity at the end of a long and emotional discussion to suggest that the panelists consider enlisting a Jewish co-host.
Is this seat taken? Greenblatt’s suggestion was hardly an idle one. While Goldberg was suspended by ABC on Tuesday for two weeks, another seat has been vacant for months since a former co-host, the conservative foil Meghan McCain, quit last August. Out of 22 co-hosts who have worked for “The View” since 1997, when the show was created, only two have been Jewish, the last of whom, the comedian Michelle Collins, departed in 2016 after just a year in the role. The broadcast journalist Barbara Walters, who helped launch the show 25 years ago, retired from her seat in 2014.
Two to tap: On Thursday, Greenblatt followed up on the conversation he had started, after JI inquired about his own preference for the seat. He had two picks, provided by way of an ADL spokesperson: the actress Debra Messing, who has put her Jewish identity front and center in speaking out against antisemitism and other injustices, and Juju Chang, the Korean-American “Nightline”anchor on ABC News who converted to Judaism in the 1990s after her marriage to the media executive Neal Shapiro.
Funny woman: “Is Sarah Silverman available?” said the novelist and essayist Dara Horn, whose most recent nonfiction book is People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present, published last September. Silverman, the actress and comedian known for her raunchy humor and provocative commentary, was among the candidates most frequently suggested. In recent months, she has placed herself at the center of a high-profile debate over representations of Jewish women in Hollywood, after criticizing what she described, on her podcast this past fall, as a “pattern in film” and TV in which non-Jewish actors are cast as Jewish characters — a topic of discussion that seems particularly well-suited for the show. “She’s a sharp, fierce, independent thinker, who has been making trenchant social commentary for decades,” actor Joshua Malina told JI. “She’s endlessly funny and has a huge, Jewish heart. She’d be perfect.”
Journalistically speaking: Another commonly cited pick was Bari Weiss, the former New York Times editor who has already appeared on “The View” as a guest host, and who publishes a popular Substack newsletter, “Common Sense.” In social media comments on Monday, Weiss reiterated that view in describing Goldberg’s remarks as a “whitewashing of the Jewish people and Jewish history.” Bethany Mandel, the conservative columnist who is outspoken on Jewish issues, said that Weiss could help bring a renewed focus to addressing antisemitism in a manner that, she believes, has been lacking since McCain left the show. But she was equally enthusiastic in recommending a somewhat lesser-known journalist who would be a “provocative” addition to the cast: Batya Ungar-Sargon, the former opinion editor of The Forward who now serves as a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.