Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Tuesday morning!
Nebraska and West Virginia voters head to the polls today. More below on the races we’re watching.
Former Anti-Defamation League National Director Abe Foxman published an op-ed in the Detroit News this morning criticizing Rep. Andy Levin’s (D-MI) stance on Israel and antisemitism and endorsing his primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI).
“[Levin] uses his Jewishness [and] respected political family name as a cover for softness on both issues,” Foxman told Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod last night. “On Israel, he is a constant critic. I worry about people who envelop themselves in protecting Israel from itself. He knows better. I find that very troubling because he doesn’t bear the consequences of his recommendations or criticisms or decisions because he’s a citizen here.”
Foxman also said, on antisemitism, “nothing from the left concerns [Levin],” specifically citing the congressman’s friendship with Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN). He said that Stevens has been “very clear” where she stands on both issues.
Karine Jean-Pierre, who is set to take over for Jen Psaki as White House press secretary next week, has come under fire for an op-ed she published in Newsweek in 2019 encouraging Democrats to skip AIPAC’s annual conference. She called the pro-Israel lobby “severely racist” and wrote that “AIPAC’s values are not progressive values.” At the time, she was the national spokesperson for the advocacy group MoveOn.
Jean-Pierre, who will be the first Black White House press secretary, has not commented on the matter since her appointment was announced last week. She has been serving as principal deputy press secretary since last year. Her most recent public comments about Israel were in 2020, when she tweeted an image of Muslim and Jewish paramedics praying together in Israel at the start of the coronavirus pandemic and called it an “inspiring show of humanity.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Jewish Insider on Monday.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines will testify this morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the global threat landscape. And Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) will speak at a Jewish Federations of North America event to kick off the group’s virtual lobbying campaign.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding a confirmation hearing this afternoon for the nominee to be State Department counterterrorism coordinator, Elizabeth Richard, as well as the nominee to be Ukraine ambassador, Bridget Brink. Both are career foreign service officers.
Politico reported yesterday that Richard, as ambassador to Lebanon in 2020, turned away a supplemental security force sent to Beirut following the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani without consulting her superiors.
book shelf
A White House speechwriter chronicles major speeches never delivered

Jeffrey Nussbaum
On election night in November 2000, speechwriter Jeff Nussbaum had drafted three possible speeches for his boss, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore. Gore didn’t deliver any of them: In a surprising twist, he won the popular vote but lost the electoral count to George W. Bush. Nussbaum’s speeches, which would have ushered in an alternate ending, were lost to history. But that night marked the first stop on a scavenger hunt whose clues Nussbaum has been following for two decades. The result is his new book Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History, which comes out today, just weeks after Nussbaum stepped down from serving as a speechwriter to President Joe Biden. Nussbaum talked to Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch about how he tracked down the speeches, what they teach us about history — and shares some of his own undelivered speeches.
Track them down: “It started me thinking, there must be other instances in history — and not just elections, which are obvious — where an ultimate outcome wasn’t just envisioned, [but] the words that would accompany that outcome were drafted,” Nussbaum said. “I started to follow breadcrumbs for undelivered speeches wherever I heard them.”
Cool down: Each chapter gives readers insight into the complicated political calculus that goes into a leader’s speech. Former Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a young civil rights activist during the 1960s, intended to give a heated address criticizing the Democratic establishment at the 1963 March on Washington. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped in to get Lewis to tone down his rhetoric. There was a “fear that John Lewis’ speech was so hot that the Catholic leadership would pull out of the event, and the Kennedys desperately wanted the Catholic Church’s seal of approval on this march,” Nussbaum explained. “That sort of fraught relationship between progressive religious groups and civil rights, I think, is tremendously fascinating.”
No peace: One speech that only appears in the book as an acknowledgment of defeat was the speech that President Jimmy Carter planned to deliver if the 1978 Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt fell apart. On the verge of collapse, the parties “moved so quickly to an agreement that they basically sprinted out of Camp David to the White House,” said Nussbaum. “Everything that was on President Carter’s desk, including the failure speech — basically, imagine someone taking an arm and sweeping it across the desk into a box, and into the box it went.” The Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta confirmed to Nussbaum that the box existed, but no copy of the speech was found in it.
Rumor mill: What about Nussbaum’s own undelivered speeches? There are “dozens and dozens” of them, he said. His favorites? “I have presidential announcement speeches for people who didn’t end up running for president.” Unfortunately for political gossip hounds, those didn’t make it into the book.