Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) participates in a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee mark up, on Capitol Hill on May 03, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

A majority of senators, including 16 Democrats, voted on Wednesday night in favor of a nonbinding Senate measure that opposes an Iran deal addressing only the regime’s nuclear program as well as the removal of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ terrorism designation, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. The final vote on the measure was 62 to 33.

Details: Wednesday’s vote came on a motion introduced by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), as part of the Senate’s consideration of the United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) aimed at countering China. The motion instructs the senators negotiating the final bill with the House to “insist” that the legislation include language requiring any nuclear weapons agreement with Iran to include provisions “addressing the full range of Iran’s destabilizing activities,” including missiles, terrorism and sanctions evasion; does not lift any sanctions on the IRGC; and does not revoke the IRGC’s terror designation.

Breaking ranks: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Chris Coons (D-DE), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Angus King (I-ME), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Gary Peters (D-MI), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), Jon Tester (D-MT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) voted for the measure.

Explaining himself: Shortly after the vote, Coons — a close administration ally who has been referred to as President Joe Biden’s “shadow secretary of state” — said in a statement that his vote “does not undermine my continuing support for the administration’s efforts to negotiate an agreement” and that he “maintains an open mind towards any potential outcomes.” He explained that he voted for the motion “in order to encourage the Biden administration’s negotiations to push for the strongest possible deal that addresses Iran’s nuclear weapons program and many other malign activities.”

On the docket: Lankford’s motion was the second measure on Iran to come up for a vote on Wednesday. Earlier in the day, 86 senators voted in favor of a motion, introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), stating that terrorism-related sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran and the IRGC “are necessary to limit… cooperation” between Iran and China. The Cruz motion instructs the Senate’s negotiators on the competition bill to “insist” that the final bill include language requiring the administration to report to Congress on cooperation between China and Iran.

On the list: Twelve senators — Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Tom Carper (D-DE), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Ed Markey (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Rand Paul (R-KY), Jack Reed (D-RI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — voted against the motion.

Read more here.

Gideon Friedmann

Gideon Friedmann, the acting chief scientist at Israel’s Ministry of Energy, detailed on Wednesday how the country plans to transition to renewable energy and urged private investors to fund research in the field, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports from the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles. Government support is important, said Friedmann, but investors will need to more forcefully enter the market if countries hope to work toward net-zero emissions.

Slow and steady: “The private sector is not doing very well, because everyone here wants to get their return, and [a] high return. And it’s not easy to get a high return on infrastructure,” or a quick return, Friedmann told attendees at a Milken panel. According to Friedmann, it takes up to 15 years to build a power line, for instance, so any kind of fast returns would be impossible.

New technologies: At several sustainability-focused panels at Milken, environmental experts and financial professionals urged investors to consider putting more money into the research and development of technologies such as carbon capturing and bringing deep geothermal heat out of the ground. Developing new technologies may yield smaller returns in the short-term, Friedmann argued, but it will pay dividends as more countries move away from fossil fuels.

Energy bridge: Israel discovered natural gas reserves off its coast more than a decade ago, and natural gas is now used “as a bridge” in the transition to sustainable energy “because it’s much less polluting” than oil, explained Friedmann. “So natural gas is a solution, but we want also to convert the natural gas to something cleaner. We want to invest in R&D to do that.”

Global cooperation: “We also work on international collaboration,” Friedmann said. Israel is now collaborating with the United Arab Emirates, with which it normalized ties in late 2020, on a number of climate-related projects. “There’s a lot of activity going on between the UAE and Israel,” Friedmann said. “It’s not in my area particularly. There’s a lot of discussion as well on R&D but nothing particularly yet. But I think in the near future there will be.”

Read the full story here.

When Josef Zissels talks about how he’s fared during the war in Ukraine, he doesn’t begin with the Russian bombardment that started in late February. Instead, he starts by talking about 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and began funding separatists in Ukraine’s east. That’s when Zissels began sounding the alarm about an invasion and, he says, not enough people listened. Nor does Zissels, who has served for three decades as ​​chairman of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine, anticipate that the war will be over soon. Rather, in a conversation lasting more than an hour with eJewishPhilanthropy’s Ben Sales, the former Soviet dissident and political prisoner described an unvarnished vision of the future in which he hopes Ukraine and its Jewish community can both support themselves, even while under constant attack by Russian forces.

Background: Born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1946, Zissels became active in the Soviet refusenik movement in the 1970s and spent three years in a penal colony as punishment for his dissident activities. Since 1991, he has been at the head of Ukraine’s Jewish community and is also a vice president of the World Jewish Congress. He spoke out against Russian aggression in 2014 and has remained in Kyiv during the past few months and kept working amid the bombing and fighting. The rest of his immediate family has scattered, with some going to Moldova and others to Israel. He is not surprised that more than 10,000 Jews have left Ukraine; Jews, he said, “have this acute sense of history and danger and immigration issues that they faced for thousands of years… It’s our priority to see that the members of the Jewish community are safe.”

Self-sufficiency: Ukraine’s Jewish community is no stranger to such dispersion: By his count, 17,000 of the 20,000 people with Jewish ancestry who once lived in the Donbas — the area attacked by Russian-backed separatists and then Russia — have since left that region. His priority for the Jews who remain in Ukraine, he said, is the same as his goal for the country: self-sufficiency. He understands the need for support from global Jewish organizations, but he’s hoping for a future where it’s unnecessary, and said the community “must rely on our own resources,” adding that “even after the war, there will be a major Jewish community here, and I hope that we’ll eventually come to the stage when we’ll be 100% independent financially and when we’ll be able to provide financial help to Israel and to other communities.”

Back in the USSR: He’s still in touch with friends in Russia, who he says do not support the war. But he’s worried about where that country is headed internally, and what it wants from its neighbors beyond Ukraine. “For me, Russia currently looks like the Soviet Union,” he said. “Russia is moving from [being] an authoritarian power to a completely totalitarian state, with violence as a common practice. I want to be wrong about this, but I think that it’s not only Ukraine that Russia is interested in. Russia is interested in the whole world.” In the face of that threat, Zissels said, he draws on his experience as a dissident, which he called “a very significant part of my personal identity.” While protesting the Soviet Union, he said, he learned that he needed to support himself, by himself. Now, he hopes Ukraine and its Jews can learn the same lesson.

Read the full interview here.

One of the most famous stories in the Bible — thanks, in part, to the musical about its main character — is that of Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers before becoming a trusted advisor to the Egyptian pharaoh. The tale begins when Joseph’s brothers throw him down an empty well before selling him as a slave to passing merchants.But what if Joseph stayed in the well, and that well had been full of water, and the pharaoh was a merman who reigned over the depths of the ocean? This is the world Liana Finck conjures up for Joseph in her new book, Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation, an illustrated retelling of the book of Genesis: an underwater kingdom where Joseph settles in with an oxygen helmet, first in a deep-sea jail and then next to the king’s deep-sea throne as his advisor. The cartoonist and author talked to Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch about sexism, the process of translating the Torah and why New York City is her promised land.

Bona fide: The book takes the narrative of Genesis and gives it a modern twist, culled from Finck’s own life and her relationship to gender, sexism, art, God and New York City. With nearly 600,000 Instagram followers and a gig as a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Finck’s bona fides as an artist are unimpeachable. So, too, is her Jewish background; she is not an amateur in the art of Torah study. As she conceptualized the book, her parents were her hevrutas, or study partners. “I didn’t read all the Rashi or commentators. I knew I would never catch up,” said Finck, who understood that whatever spin she put on the sacred text would probably not placate the most traditional adherents of Judaism or Christianity. “But I got into it. And I felt like I was pretty genuine.”

New meaning: As a 36-year-old living in Brooklyn, Judaism now means something different to Finck than it did during her childhood. Writing the book helped her come to terms with that. “I wonder why I’m not as easily observant as my parents are and why this community doesn’t seem to work for me, even though I don’t … I’m not one of those people who’s like, ‘Oh, I hate religion. I hate God. I hate the Torah.’ I love those things,” said Finck, who noted that she does not attend synagogue services as an adult.

Gender dynamics: Throughout Finck’s book, the oft-inexplicable gender dynamics of the Torah are mined for absurdity. She begins with the story of Creation, with God depicted as a woman who craves validation from the humans she created. In this version, Adam assumes God to be a man, and she goes along with it rather than let the first man succumb to an identity crisis. A woman hides who she really is in order to please a man — Finck’s point makes itself.

Read the full interview here.