Josh Kraushaar

With Congress set for a shakeup in next week’s midterm elections, experts are predicting a “red wave” that could see Republicans winning office across the board, including in historically blue states. Axios senior political correspondent Josh Kraushaar, joins Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast” this week to analyze the many uncertainties on the ballot. 

Toss-up territory: “The Senate is a toss-up with, I think it’s no worse than 50/50 for Republicans, but the trend lines and the wind and the momentum is certainly at the Republican Party’s back right now. Now, the problem for Republicans in the Senate is that they nominated some pretty extreme out-of-the-mainstream characters, whether you’re talking about Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia. So those are tests of whether the environment matters more, whether people just want to check, they don’t care about the candidates, they’re voting like this is a parliamentary system and they want Republicans to be in charge of the Senate, or whether these not-ready-for-primetime candidates will truly cost the Republicans either the Senate or at the very least some valuable seats in expanding their majority.”

On the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race: “Extremism does not sell politically in a general election. And whether you’re a far-right Republican like [Doug] Mastriano, or you’re a far-left candidate like Tina Kotek in Oregon or Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, you are paying a big political price — you’re not winning swing voters, you’re not winning people in the middle. So yeah, I mean, look, Mastriano has got the Republican right-wing base really excited, but he’s not spending much money, he’s not getting help from outside Republican groups. He’s said a whole bunch of antisemitic [things], or has been at least tied to a lot of antisemitic organizations, or Gab and other groups that are very extreme, and that is unacceptable for a lot of swing voters of the Philly suburbs [and] across the state of Pennsylvania… I expect a whole lot of people who vote for [Josh] Shapiro for governor and vote for Dr. [Mehmet] Oz for the [Pennsylvania] Senate race.”

Zeldin’s odds: “Look, I think [Lee] Zeldin is the underdog [in the New York governor’s race]. I’d be surprised if he wins. Yes, he’s a Trump Republican, but he doesn’t necessarily come across that way to your average New Yorker. He is one of the few Jewish Republicans in Congress, lives in the Long Island suburbs — he certainly was a leading advocate for Trump during, I guess it was the first impeachment, where he was front and center defending the president — but he doesn’t come across like [Ohio Rep.] Jim Jordan, he doesn’t come across like [Georgia Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene, and that’s part of his political appeal, that he’s not alienating the base, but he’s running on the issues that a lot of New Yorkers care about. And one of the interesting things about this campaign, guys, is that he is spending more time in New York City than any other Republican maybe since [former New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani.”

Read more and listen to the full podcast episode here.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is seen on the House steps of the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, June 16, 2022.

The House Congressional Progressive Caucus’s retracted letter last week urging direct talks with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine rapidly turned into a public embarrassment, with Democrats across the spectrum — including some of the letter’s most prominent signatories — distancing themselves from the letter or disavowing it entirely. But the impact of the incident could prove more far-reaching for House progressives, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. The fallout could, at least in the short term, prove to both dissuade some progressives from advocacy on foreign policy issues, as well as make others in the party less eager to engage with progressives on foreign policy, some analysts and former Democratic staffers told JI.

Step back: Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state who led Jewish outreach for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign, noted that “progressives have not historically made foreign policy their highest priority,” and said they now run the risk of rolling that involvement back further. “I think it’s going to make them very hesitant to speak up, even though we really do need that voice in the mix,” Rubin continued.

Across the board: One former Democratic congressional staffer, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about members of Congress, predicted that the incident could have broader ripple effects on foreign policy well beyond the Progressive Caucus, emphasizing that they expect Democratic lawmakers and staff to apply a “stricter level of scrutiny” across the board on foreign policy issues especially. “Every member of staff is going to be wary the next time a letter like this comes along, you’re going to look at it much more closely. Your instinct right now is going to be — you’re almost going to have to prove that it’s worth doing,” they said.

Opposing view: But a second former Democratic congressional staffer was more skeptical that these events would have much impact on the signatories’ thinking. “The progressives who’ve signed that letter come from very safe districts and are pretty consistent on the foreign policy issues on which they engage,” they said. “I don’t believe they will be disabused from further engagement because of this mishap… It’s a small and marginalized group that is not particularly sensitive to the broader caucus or foreign policy implications of Democrats looking weak on foreign policy.”

Giving pause: The second staffer did, however, anticipate that it might make others outside of the 30 who signed the letter more hesitant to join with members of that group. “It will make people think twice about signing these kinds of letters, or at least make them think about the downside of something that looks pretty anodyne… after names 1-30, it will make names 30 to 100 think twice,” they explained.

Read the full story here.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk provides an update on the development of the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket at the company’s launch facility in south Texas.

In an hour-long Zoom meeting with the leaders of several prominent anti-hate groups, Elon Musk on Tuesday expressed a commitment to combating hate and incitement on Twitter, the social network he acquired last week. “What I heard was very encouraging, and I’m cautiously optimistic,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, a vocal critic of social media’s handling of hate speech and misinformation, told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch on Wednesday. But, he added, “actions speak louder than words.”

Coalition collaboration: A mutual acquaintance connected Greenblatt and Musk — the two had not met before — and Greenblatt arranged the meeting with leaders from Color of Change, the Asian American Foundation, the NAACP, Free Press, the George W. Bush Presidential Center and the League of United Latin American Citizens. 

Under the microscope: Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said for months that he wants Twitter to be more open to controversial ideas and to take more of a hands-off approach to content moderation. One of his first moves after taking over the company was to fire Twitter’s CEO and the company’s safety and security chief, who handled content moderation. Days later, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in their San Francisco home over the weekend, Musk tweeted conspiracy theories about the attack.

Raising concerns: “We wanted to talk to Elon Musk because there have been a series of reports from all directions about what his plans are, and we felt it was critical to have him understand our concerns as a coalition of organizations,” explained Greenblatt, who pointed out that antisemitism and hate speech had flourished on the platform prior to Musk’s acquisition of the company.

Path forward: “We had, I think, legitimate concerns in light of the current operating environment, in light of what we’ve seen, to date, on Twitter, and in light of this difficult moment we’re in, I think, as a society,” added Greenblatt. Jessica González, co-CEO of the advocacy group Free Press, told New York magazine that Musk’s tone on the call was “sincere,” and said he appeared open to hearing the group’s concerns. “I think he believes in freedom of speech for all. The trick is how to get there. And I don’t know that he totally knows how to do that,” she said.

Read the full story here.

On the other hand: Some of the popular conservative accounts that cheered Musk’s takeover of Twitter criticized his call with the civil rights groups, The Washington Post reported. Hours after Musk’s meeting, Kanye West’s Twitter account was reinstated, and the artist shared a photo of basketball player Kyrie Irving, days after the Brooklyn Nets point guard tweeted antisemitic content.

A Lebanese navy patrol boat is stationed next to a buoy marking the maritime border between Lebanon and Israel in the Mediterranean sea waters off Lebanon’s southern Naqoura near Rosh HaNikra in northern Israel on Oct. 27, 2022. (Ayal Margolin/JINI via Xinhua)

When Israel and Lebanon reached a historic agreement regarding their maritime border last week to open up drilling in two natural gas fields in the Mediterranean that were previously in disputed territory, the deal had unexpected supporters: two Israeli environmental groups, Melanie Lidman reports for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Opportunity knocks: In most places around the world, environmental activists are usually quick to condemn any new maritime gas announcements. But Israeli environmental groups that prioritize two of the agreements’ areas of focus, maritime issues and regional cooperation, applauded the deal, focusing on the opportunities that the agreement could inspire in other long-running conflicts in the region. “We want our electricity to come from renewable sources, but right now we’re in a time of transition,” explained Youval Arbel, the deputy director of Zalul, a nonprofit environmental group focused on seas and streams. “When you see what’s going on [economically] in Lebanon, you can understand the importance of what it would mean for them if they discover gas.”

Regional effort: For EcoPeace Middle East, an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian environmental group that works on cross-border initiatives, the deal is “a paradigm shift of diplomacy” that could usher in a new strategy for peace agreements in the region, Gidon Bromberg, the group’s Israeli co-director, told eJP, even though he said, “We understand that we need to stop burning fossil fuel, full stop.” Previously, he said, there was an expectation that negotiations would solve all the problems all at once, achieving full recognition and peace, which was the format of Israel’s peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt in the 20th century, and is the principle that guided the Abraham Accords, the recent Israeli normalization deals with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.  “However, it’s not the only model, and what the Lebanon-Israel agreement on the maritime border shows us is that two countries that don’t have a peace treaty, that haven’t been able to agree on all the issues that divide them, were still willing to agree on one particular issue of mutual concern they recognized was so important to both of them,” Bromberg said.

Read the full story here and sign up for eJewishPhilanthropy’s “Your Daily Phil” here.