U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill March 21, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

The three jurists most recently nominated to the Supreme Court had very little in common before they were tapped to sit on the highest court in the land. Brett Kavanaugh grew up near Washington, D.C., and attended Yale Law School; Amy Coney Barrett was raised in suburban New Orleans and went to Notre Dame Law School; and Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Harvard Law grad whose confirmation hearings are taking place this week, hails from Miami. But they shared one formative experience, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports: As young lawyers, each worked at a now-defunct boutique law firm in Washington called Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin.

Meritocracy: “It was a very unusual firm,” said Nathan Lewin, one of the firm’s founding partners and a crusading attorney known for his decades of work on civil liberties cases. “It was both color-blind and gender-blind. We hired people regardless of race, regardless of gender. It was just the best people, a meritocracy.”

Who’s who: Today, Washington’s most prestigious firms are multinational behemoths that employ hundreds of attorneys. But at Lewin’s old firm — which was acquired two decades ago by Baker Botts LLP, a Houston-based legal giant — the number of attorneys never surpassed three dozen. Other alumni include a who’s who of Washington power players over several administrations. Among them are David Cohn, current deputy director of the CIA; Stuart Levey, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush; and Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton.

On the Hill: The Senate Judiciary Committee’s four days of hearings for Jackson began Monday. Jackson, who currently serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, would be the first Black woman on the High Court if she is confirmed by the Senate. Committee Chair Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) kicked off the hearings by praising Jackson’s “record of excellence and integrity,” while Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said Jackson’s past advocacy as a defense attorney has “gone beyond the pale.”

KJ: Lewin does not recall working with Jackson, who spent a year at the firm from 1998 to 1999, although he found the initials “KJ” scrawled in his notes from a case he worked on that year, suggesting she may have assisted him. (The case was about a school in Kiryas Joel, so the initials could also have referred to the town in New York.)

Family matters: Today, Lewin, who is 86, operates an even smaller firm: Lewin & Lewin, a two-lawyer operation with his daughter, Alyza Lewin, who also serves as president of the ​​Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. The pair has worked on several high-profile cases together, including that of Menachem Zivotofsky, who sued former Secretary of State John Kerry in 2014 in a bid to list “Jerusalem, Israel” — rather than simply “Jerusalem” — as his place of birth on his passport. (They lost that case in the Supreme Court, 6-3.)

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Former New York City Council Member Ritchie Torres, left, speaks at a news conference in New York in 2018.

With diplomats in Vienna reportedly making progress on a new nuclear agreement with Iran, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) told Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod that he has yet to see a credible plan from proponents or opponents of the deal that would permanently prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Torres, a freshman lawmaker who represents the South Bronx, is at least the 17th House Democrat to publicly air concerns about the direction of nuclear talks.

Bad faith: Torres told JI on Monday that he’s worried that neither Iran nor Russia — one of the world powers negotiating in Vienna — are acting in good faith, pointing to Iran’s recent ballistic missile strike that landed near a U.S. consulate in Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Iran’s pledge to continue to enrich uranium above the limits laid out in the original 2015 deal.

Red flags: He said he “would have trouble supporting” any deal that includes sanctions relief for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the Quds Force. He noted concern over the sunset provisions involved in the potential deal and that the deal would allow Iran to keep its nuclear infrastructure intact.

Quotable: “Based on media reports, a future deal is unlikely to permanently prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” he said, and will give Iran a breakout time of less than a year. “So there is a concern that within the next decade, Iran will have the benefit of permanent sanctions relief without the cost of permanent denuclearization. It will have both more wealth and a nuclear weapons program within a decade.”

Holding back: He emphasized, however, that he’s “going to resist the temptation to render a final judgment on a deal whose existence is hypothetical” and which he has not yet had the opportunity to review.

What’s next: Torres said he is also concerned that “neither side has a strategy for permanently preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” He added, “The question I ask myself [is], in the absence of the JCPOA, what is the alternate strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon? And it’s a question to which I have never heard a particularly compelling answer.”

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Michael Feinstein

The renowned jazz and cabaret singer Michael Feinstein has long been dedicated to mining the seemingly endless recesses of the Great American Songbook, with an emphasis — as anyone familiar with his unique backstory is aware — on the Gershwin catalog, writes Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel. Before his career took off, so the story goes, Feinstein was just 20 years old and new to Los Angeles when he began a six-year stint as Ira Gershwin’s archivist, working closely with the master lyricist to catalog, among other things, the music he wrote with his brother George in the 1920s and ’30s.

New direction: Feinstein put that experience to use on his first record, “Pure Gershwin,” and followed up with two more similarly dutiful Gershwin tribute albums in the late ’90s. His latest album, released this month, represents something of a return to form as well as a stylistic departure for the seasoned Gershwin interpreter. On “Gershwin Country,” Feinstein, now 65, puts the Gershwin songbook through a country prism.

Interpreting lyrics: The album, recorded with a session band in Nashville, includes cameos from such heavy hitters as Dolly Parton, Brad Paisley, Roseanne Cash and Liza Minnelli, who served as executive producer and was Ira’s goddaughter. While the setting may have been somewhat unfamiliar for Feinstein, “the idea of singing with artists who still are focused primarily on interpreting lyrics, which is what country music is still about,” was appealing to him, he said in a recent interview with JI. “It may be the last place where that is so.”

Surprise turn: Not that he hasn’t gotten some quizzical stares from those who are surprised by his latest turn. “When I mention it now to anybody who is unfamiliar with the concept, they always give me a funny look or their voice is raised in a certain inflection as if, ‘Really? You really mean this?’ because it sounds like an odd concept,” he said. “But it made sense to me musically because great songs survive because of the ability to reinterpret them or adapt them to a different style, and they don’t lose the essence of what they were created to express.”

Timeless appeal: “The timeless nature of Gershwin songs is comparable to the other great songs of that time in that they’re such eloquent expressions of oft-expressed emotions,” Feinstein said. “These songwriters were always trying to find fresh ways to express romance and to express love without saying ‘I love you.’ One of the reasons that Bing Crosby loved working with the lyricist Johnny Burke is that Crosby hated to sing ‘I love you,’ and so Johnny Burke would write all these songs that referenced love but weren’t obvious. And that’s what Ira Gershwin tried to do with ‘Someone to Watch Over Me,’ which is a song that he wrote when he married his wife, Leonore, in 1926.”

Read the full interview here.

A view of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial in Babyn Yar Park on March 2,2022, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

On the day the Russian army invaded Ukraine last month, Anna Niedźwiedź, a citizen of neighboring Poland, noticed a post on Facebook requesting shelter for a family from Kyiv that was fleeing the violence. She responded immediately. “I sent a message saying that I have space in my house, and they are very welcome,” the Krakow resident told Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash. “I then called my husband to tell him.”

Lessons from the past: It was that phone call – as well as Anna’s act of pure kindness – that set into motion a series of events drawing a direct line between the chaos and inhumanity of the past few weeks in Eastern Europe and the forces of past horrors in the same area. Anna’s husband, Wojtek, has worked for years as a security guard for JRoots, an organization that runs Holocaust educational trips to Poland, as well as other places of significant Jewish heritage. Her call to him on that day sparked the interest and compassion of the nonprofit, propelling its leaders to re-channel its regular activities into helping the more than one million Ukrainian refugees who have poured across the border into Poland. The group of educators is now putting into practice lessons that they have been imparting for years to thousands of visitors from all over the world.

Helping hand: “When this kicked off, we couldn’t just sit down and do nothing,” Tzvi Sperber, founder and director of JRoots, told JI. “We had been teaching about the Righteous Among the Nations and other lessons of the Holocaust, so we had to do something.” With a broad infrastructure and manpower already in place in Poland, including contacts in the hotel industry, bus drivers and tour guides, Sperber said it was fairly easy for the organization to pivot its efforts into helping those in need and, almost immediately, the organization’s vast network of alumni responded with support, both financial and otherwise.

Essential aid: Since the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24, the group has helped to provide food, clothing, medicine and other essential items to one of the largest distributions centers in Krakow, assisted in turning the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow — which commemorates Holocaust victims and celebrates Polish Jewish culture — into a daycare center for refugee children and helped to convert the lower floor of the Chachmei Yeshiva in Lublin into a refugee center. “Most of the refugees are women and children,” Sperber described, adding that the help they are giving is not limited to Jewish refugees. “The whole situation is just so heartbreaking and catastrophic on a humanitarian level.”

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