Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Friday morning!
Ed. note: This is our last Daily Kickoff of 2022. We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday, Jan. 3. Happy new year from the team at JI!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we talk to outgoing Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Nachman Shai and profile U.K. TV host Rob Rinder. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Joe Lieberman, Rep. Elise Stefanik and David Barnea.
For less-distracted reading over the weekend, browse this week’s edition of The Weekly Print, a curated print-friendly PDF featuring a selection of recent stories from JI, eJewishPhilanthropy and The Circuit, including: The White House gelt peddler; Hanukkah comes to Audrey Gelman’s Six Bells; Brazilian database records, historian cast doubt on Santos’ claims of Jewish ancestry; ‘Fragile Beauty’ exhibition connects Jewish artists with the environment; Meet the L.A. rabbi who found a national stage for her support of the Iranian protests; How ‘GirlWithNoJob’ raised $50,000 on Instagram for Holocaust education in one day; Dead Sea rebounds from pandemic slump as tourist magnet for Jordan; and UAE offer for Israeli insurer paves way for more deals, minister says. Print the latest edition here.
Less than a day after Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu told President Isaac Herzog that he had formed a coalition, the incoming Israeli leader sat down with Jewish Insider podcast hosts Rich Goldberg and Jarrod Bernstein on Thursday afternoon to share his views on Israel’s economy, the makeup of his new government and potential normalization with Saudi Arabia. Below are previews of our podcast episode with Netanyahu, the full version of which will be posted next week. To be notified when the episode goes live, subscribe to our podcast here.
On Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to a joint session of Congress this week: “Well, I’ve only seen parts of it, but I think it was a strong speech with a strong message. And it looks like it was well-received, to say the least.”
On what he would say if invited to address Congress: “I think my message is constant. It’s peace through strength, prosperity through free markets, and the alliance of the like-minded states to assure our place and our permanence, to the extent anybody could do that, in history. That’s really something that unites us across nations, across oceans and across time.”
On taking on Iran: “I have come back to office to the genteel world of Israeli politics, I’ve come back for one reason, one main reason, and that is to do everything that I can, as I’ve done over the past 15 years of my premiership, to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons that will endanger my country Israel, will endanger your country the United States, and just about everything in between.” View a preview of this exchange.
On potential normalization with Saudi Arabia: “I want to go as big as we can, but sometimes to take a long journey it takes smaller steps, and that’s not a problem. Look, you should understand already that we have things in place. The Saudi government’s decision to open up Saudi airspace to Israel occurred before the Abraham Accords; that gives you a pretty good clue that they didn’t look askance at the Abraham Accords. This was done in 2018, the Abraham Accords were done in 2020. And yet, two years before we signed the agreement, or perhaps I’m wrong, a year and a half, Israelis began to fly over the airspace of Saudi Arabia to the Gulf states and other places. So that is a clear sign of a change. Now I hope to bring about a full, formal peace as we’ve done with the other Gulf states like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. It’s up to the Saudi leadership to decide that. I hope they will. And I intend to explore that alongside my other main goals. This is a very important goal, because if we have peace with Saudi Arabia, we are effectively going to bring an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
On providing educational and training opportunities to Israel’s Haredi community: “Well, my view is, and I’m going to advance it in this coming government, is to create it on a voluntary basis, through their networks — not force-feed them, but do it through their networks, under their standards, religious standards, whatever… the cost of information, the cost of education, the cost of branded education… is going down precipitously. So we can exploit that. You can give everyone a Harvard, MIT or Stanford [education], I mean that seriously, by giving them access to people who teach there or in our excellent universities with technology. Just don’t force-feed them, offer it. See how far you’ll get.”
Lightning round —Favorite Israeli wine? “I’m gonna be in hot, hot trouble if I answer that. There are fantastic, fantastic wines [in Israel], but I have to confess to you that I’m a very, very poor drinker. That is not because I get drunk, it’s because I don’t drink that much.” Goldberg suggested Psagot’s Pompeo wine, named after the former U.S. secretary of state, to which Netanyahu jokingly responded that Pompeo “did something inexcusable. He went a few kilometers north of Jerusalem to a winery that produces fantastic wine. Psagot wine. And how could you do that? I mean, this is like visiting the Belgian Congo. I mean, occupied territory! For God’s sake. This is the homeland of the Jewish people who’ve been there for thousands of years. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous.”
Philadelphia, Boston or Ithaca? “I very much enjoyed my years in Boston. It’s a great city. It’s a university town and I went to university there, MIT, and enjoyed both living there, but especially studying there, and then working there for two years in the Boston Consulting Group, that was actually illuminating and rewarding in every way.”
Favorite American president of all time? “I’m gonna play it safe, George Washington…that’s not a sort of a postcard-empty answer. I never appreciated Washington fully until I read several biographies about him, and I could see that he was exceptionally astute and brave and smart. And he knew how to steward a herd of cats. The most gifted cats probably in history.”
Read more here and stay tuned for the full episode next week.
exit interview
Nachman Shai’s goodbye to the Diaspora

Nachman Shai has long been a major figure in Israeli-Diaspora relations, dating back to his time as a senior vice president to United Jewish Communities, now known as the Jewish Federations of North America. But in June 2021, as a member of then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s coalition government, he was tapped for Israel’s top role working with the diaspora — and immediately faced an unprecedented crisis. Days after the collapse of a residential building complex in Surfside, Fla., home to a sizable Jewish community, Shai arrived in South Florida with a team from Israel’s Homefront Command’s Search and Rescue unit, who assisted in rescue-and-recovery efforts. “It was my second or third week in the job, and I believe that it changed the course of the [Israeli-diaspora] dialogue,” Shai told Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash. “The Jewish community suffered tremendous casualties, scores of people were killed and the fact that an official spokesperson from the State of Israel came, stayed with them, spoke to them and addressed them in their synagogue sent a message that we hadn’t thought so important before.”
All in the family: In the year and a half since Shai parachuted in to support a grieving Jewish community, his work — from providing support to Jews fleeing the war in Ukraine to pushing Israelis to pay attention to the rise in global antisemitism to launching initiatives bridging the gaps between Israeli and Diaspora Jews — has focused on changing the way the Jewish state views the global Jewish community. Shai described to JI his steadfast belief that it is time for Israelis to start asking Diaspora Jews “what they need from us,” adding, “there are eight million Jews in the Diaspora and whether they are under pressure from antisemitism, or living full and happy lives, they should be on our radar screen, and we should look at them, work with them, help them and see them as, as members of our own family.”
Future fears: “I was hoping that [the Bennett-Lapid] government will survive for three years,” lamented Shai in the interview, adding that visiting Jews in the Diaspora over the past 18 months made him realize that having such a diverse coalition consisting of right- and left-wing politicians, Jews and Arabs, including nine female ministers, “was so important” for Jews in those communities. “So, I’m really going to miss it, not only as a politician, but also on a personal level, as I wonder where is my state is going and what it will mean for my children and eight grandchildren in the future.”