Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Friday morning!
Yesterday brought the second blow of the week for investment giant Morningstar, as a group of Republican financial officers from 17 states sent a letter to the company claiming its environmental, sustainable and governance scores system is “deeply infused with anti-Israel bias” in “apparent alignment with the Boycott, Divestment [and] Sanctions (BDS) movement.”
Morningstar has come under scrutiny in recent months for the ESG products provided by its subsidiary, Sustainalytics. The company has pledged to implement reforms, while denying that it supports the BDS movement.
“Many of our states have investments in Israel, and we view Sustainalytics’ practices [as] a direct attack on those investments,” the letter, obtained by Jewish Insider, reads. “As Americans who strongly support Israel – a close democratic ally of the United States – we are also deeply disturbed by a corporate culture at Morningstar that would allow researchers to rely on sources aligned with the anti-Semitic BDS movement.”
The letter alleges that state contractors “rely upon Morningstar and other firms for unbiased financial research” and that “as state financial officers, we have a fiduciary duty to ensure that the financial research our respective states rely upon is based on sound financial principles rather than BDS movement tactics.”
The letter follows our scoop earlier this week that Arizona’s state treasurer — one of the signatories to the most recent letter — notified Morningstar last week that she intends to blacklist Morningstar under anti-BDS legislation, the first state to do so. Some of the signatories to the Thursday letter are responsible for maintaining their states’ respective anti-BDS registries.
The BDS-related criticisms of ESG investing come amid a recent broader push by Republicans against ESG and other manifestations of “woke capitalism” — what Bloomberg describes as an effort to “to wipe ESG off the financial map.”
The group that organized the letter, the State Financial Officers Foundation, a group of Republican state officials, has been critical of ESG investing more broadly, as have some of the individual signatories.
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Auburn hoops coach Bruce Pearl: ‘Even in the midst of 1,000 rockets, we felt safe’

Head coach Bruce Pearl of the Auburn Tigers celebrates by cutting down the nets after their 77-71 win over the Kentucky Wildcats in the 2019 NCAA Basketball Tournament Midwest Regional at Sprint Center on March 31, 2019 in Kansas City, Missouri.
In March, Auburn University men’s head basketball coach Bruce Pearl was asked during a press conference if he and his team would be joining the pledge started by Stanford University women’s head basketball coach Tara VanDerveer to donate $10 to Ukraine for every three-pointer sunk during March Madness. His answer, which was ultimately a “yes,” was given by way of a semi-long-winded explanation of the Purim story. In a nutshell: Queen Esther saved her people despite being safe herself in the castle, so he too would give help to Ukraine, despite not facing the same threats at home.
The connection between Purim, Ukraine and sports may not have seemed abundantly clear at first, but for Pearl, Judaism and basketball have long gone hand-in-hand. A strong supporter of Israel, the Boston native has visited the country on several occasions — often as part of Jewish-Christian interfaith missions, but most recently with his team from Auburn, where they both toured the country earlier this month and faced off against Israel’s national teams, Pearl recalled during an interview with Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast.”
Bringing the Bible to life: “It very much brought their Bible alive. And if it wasn’t their Bible, it was their mom’s Bible or their grandmother’s Bible, somebody in their family is a churchgoer, and they got to see and feel [that] themselves,” Pearl said, referring to how the trip touched his players. “And then the next day, it was the Western Wall, and it was the City of David, and it was Yad Vashem. And we focused on some of these Jewish, historical, religious sites, and they got that.”
A passion for Israel: Seeing his players in Israel was important to Pearl not only as their coach, but also as someone with deep love for the country. Pearl told podcast co-host Rich Goldberg that one of his passions is gaining allies for the Jewish people and for Israel.
Teaching positivity: “I’m not trying to change the hearts and souls and minds of the people that hate us, because they hate us. They’ve been taught to hate us and it’s really hard to change those minds. But there are a lot of people that don’t know, that haven’t been affected yet, that may be on the fence or that someday are going to face and see some real antisemitism, or experience some Israel hate. And now these kids are going to be in a position to handle it a little differently,” he said.
‘Let them experience it’: “Honestly, you don’t need to do much persuading. Just let the kids, let people see it, let them experience [it]. Let them see how much the people there love the land, love their history, love their country,” he added.