
Daily Kickoff: World leaders pay respects in Abu Dhabi + PA-12 parallels OH-11
👋 Good Monday morning!
World leaders descended on Abu Dhabi this weekend to pay condolences following the death of UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Sheikh Khalifa, who became president in 2004 and presided over a period of massive economic growth, died Friday at 73. Sheikh Khalifa’s brother, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, was appointed to take over as president.
Vice President Kamala Harris is leading a delegation of more than a dozen senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and CIA Director William Burns. The visit offers an opportunity to mend ties that had been strained in recent months over a number of issues, including Washington’s lessening presence in the region. Read more here.
“This delegation both honors [Sheikh Khalifa’s] legacy and points confidently to the future of relations between the U.S. and UAE,” a senior Biden administration official told Jewish Insider on Sunday. Harris “will congratulate Sheikh Mohammed on his election as president of the UAE and underscore the importance the Biden-Harris administration places on the U.S.-UAE partnership,” the official said.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog met on Sunday with Sheikh Mohammed. “I came here on behalf of the people of Israel to express my condolences to you, to your family and to the Emirati people,” Herzog told bin Zayed during their meeting, according to a statement from his office. Sheikh Khalifa’s “brave leadership contributed tremendously to advancing his country and his people and to the partnership that materialized in recent years between our countries,” Herzog said, referring to the 2020 Abraham Accords. Read more here.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahianwill also travel to the UAE today.
Ten people were killed in a shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., on Saturday. The assailant, an 18-year-old man who drove 3.5 hours to commit the attack that investigators say was racially motivated, carried out the attack in a predominantly Black neighborhood in the Western New York City. Most of the victims were Black.
A manifesto believed to be written by the shooter contained antisemitic and racist sentiments, and cited the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that Jews are orchestrating the “replacement” of white Christians with minority communities.
Two days before the attack, newly appointed Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt discussed the “great replacement” theory in her first public remarks since being sworn in, held at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. “Accusations by the Charlottesville [‘Unite the Right’ march] organizers that Jews were behind an attempt to destroy white America have been adopted and adapted by racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” Lipstadt said on Thursday.
On Sunday morning, Lipstadt tweeted, “Yesterday’s horrific attack was one and the same. Hate must have no safe harbor. Anywhere.”
drawing parallels
Echoes of OH-11 in heated Pittsburgh House race

Steve Irwin, a Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District, speaks to supporters at a campaign event, Saturday, May 14, 2022, in Pittsburgh.
In a matter of weeks, the race for an open House seat in Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs has burst onto the front lines of a high-profile Democratic civil war that has figured prominently in several recent primary battles around the country, particularly where opposing approaches to Israel have fueled tensions between the party’s mainstream and activist wings, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.
In this corner: The progressive frontrunner, state Rep. Summer Lee, has consolidated support from the activist left. Justice Democrats, the combative political group, is backing her campaign, as are the range of Squad members whose ranks she is likely to join in Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Her chief rival, Steve Irwin, an attorney and Democratic activist in Pittsburgh, stands on the opposing end of the party spectrum and casts himself as eager to build on the policy objectives of the Biden administration. Irwin, 62, has drawn overwhelming support from the Democratic establishment in Allegheny County, which makes up most of the district. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), the outgoing dean of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation, has blessed his bid.
Money matters: The United Democracy Project, a new super PAC affiliated with AIPAC, the bipartisan pro-Israel lobbying group, has invested heavily in the race. For nearly the past month, UDP has unleashed a barrage of attack ads targeting Lee. The spots, which have drawn sharp rebukes from her supporters, have upended what had otherwise been a relatively staid primary, despite some simmering tensions — not least around Middle East foreign policy matters — that had already sown division at the local level. But while UDP has recently dominated the race, the three-week period during which Irwin was on TV alone, beginning in early April, seems to have been a crucial turning point in his campaign. And it is one among many dynamics that are similar to last year’s closely watched House primary in Cleveland, where Rep. Shontel Brown (D-OH) overcame a 35-point polling deficit in her come-from-behind victory over Nina Turner in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District.
Political parallels: The Pittsburgh area shares a number of characteristics with Ohio’s 11th District, which takes in Cleveland and the suburbs of Cuyahoga County. Like Cleveland, for instance, Pittsburgh is a heavily Democratic Rust Belt enclave with a large Black population and a sizable minority of politically active Jewish voters. Those parallels have not gone unnoticed by Jewish voters in the district, many of whom watched the Cleveland race with interest and now view Irwin’s candidacy as akin to Brown’s campaign. “I call him the Jewish Shontel Brown,” Lou Weiss, a pro-Israel activist in Pittsburgh who is supporting Irwin’s campaign, quipped in a recent interview with JI. “Why? He’s a relative unknown who’s pro-Israel, coming from behind against someone who’s a future Squad member.”