Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Monday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we feature Tevi Troy on JI’s podcast and visit Audrey Gelman’s Cobble Hill housewares shop. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Marina Rosenberg, Alice Tapper and Robert Oppenheimer.
With the beginning of Hanukkah last night, official celebrations are in full swing around Washington. Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff hosted approximately 300 guests at the Naval Observatory on Sunday evening for what’s believed to be the first official Hanukkah gathering at the VPR. The vice president introduced her husband, who spoke about his own Hanukkah traditions and helped light the menorah.
“Flash forward to when I met this beautiful woman over here,” Emhoff said, gesturing to Harris. “She bought me a menorah for our first Hanukkah together, when we were first setting up our home in Los Angeles, because it was important for her to know that we had a menorah to illuminate this home that we were building together.” He also pointed from the tent where the party was taking place across the lawn to the window of the Naval Observatory, where a lit menorah stood in the window.
Emhoff also discussed the recent rise in antisemitism and White House efforts to combat it, including a meeting he hosted earlier this month with Jewish community leaders. “Anyone who is not speaking up and speaking out, and not taking action, needs to be called out,” said Emhoff.
Harris and Emhoff, who took photos with attendees in an official receiving line, used a menorah on loan from the Jewish Museum in New York that was made in Eastern Europe in the late 19th or early 20th century, with a Hebrew inscription dedicating it to a mutual aid society, a White House official told Jewish Insider. The society provided aid to Jews in Eastern Europe and to others who immigrated to the U.S.
After the speeches, guests enjoyed a hearty kosher spread and several flavors of jelly doughnuts that rivaled Israeli sufganiyot. A three-piece klezmer band played throughout the night. Attendees left with a party favor: a blue velvet bag with the vice presidential seal that held a dreidel that read “Happy Hanukkah 2022.”
Ten minutes down Massachusetts Avenue, the National Menorah Lighting ceremony took place earlier in the evening at the Ellipse, just south of the White House. Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke about his family history at the event, saying he pursued a career in the Justice Department because “I wanted to repay the debt my family owes to this country for our very lives. Before World War I, America gave my family a refuge from persecution that allowed them to survive the Holocaust when World War II arrived.”
The attorney general added, “As a descendant of those who fled persecution because they were Jewish, it is especially meaningful to be here tonight as we light this menorah in our nation’s capital and under the protection of its laws.” Garland also spoke about rising antisemitism, saying, “All Americans have a moral obligation to stand up against… hate. Together we must stand up against the disturbing rise in antisemitism, and together we must stand up against bigotry in any of its forms. Our democracy depends on it.”
The annual event was organized by the American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad) and featured remarks by the organization’s Executive Vice President Rabbi Levi Shemtov, its founding director Rabbi Avraham Shemtov and winners of a youth essay contest, as well as a performance by the United States Army Band.
Tonight is the annual White House Hanukkah party, hosted by President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden. The first family will debut the first menorah to be added to the White House permanent archives collection, rather than using a menorah loaned to them from a Jewish community institution or museum. The menorah was created by the White House’s carpentry shop.
“The first-ever White House menorah is a work of historic importance, and it’s also a work of love,” said the first lady. “Its beauty reminds us of the Hanukkah miracle and the joy it inspired. From this day forward, this menorah is a permanent piece of the White House — the People’s House.”
Elsewhere in Washington, congressional leaders are expected to release their negotiated 2023 omnibus budget today. An individual familiar with the negotiations told Jewish Insider‘s Marc Rod on Friday that negotiators were close to locking in $360 million in funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program. The individual said that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had emphasized the recent uptick in antisemitism in talks about the funding level.
podcast playback
Presidential historian Tevi Troy joins JI’s ‘Limited Liability Podcast’

When it comes to the who’s who of Washington, few are plugged in like Tevi Troy. A bona fide presidential historian, the New York native has written three books about the nation’s top office. He has served as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, was the White House Jewish liaison and a senior adviser under former President George W. Bush and is the founder and former CEO of the American Health Policy Institute. In a conversation on Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast,” Troy, who is currently a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, spoke with co-hosts Rich Goldberg and Jarrod Bernstein about Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu, America’s COVID-19 response and Iran.
On the Bibi-Biden dynamic: “You know, about Bill Clinton, they used to say this thing about, ‘you may disagree with him on policy, but he’s pro-Israel in his kishkes,’ and that Obama didn’t pass the kishkes test. I think that Biden may be more in the Clinton camp in that there’s disagreement on policies, but he’s got a kishkes affiliation with Israel, and I think that makes it a little easier in some ways, but that said, there are stark disagreements between the Biden administration’s policies and where Bibi is likely going to want to go. I think he [Bibi] is effective politically at using the Americans as a foil, but you have to be careful, because America is Israel’s most important ally and America provides a lot of assistance to Israel, so it’s a careful line to walk. I think Bibi has largely done it well, although I think that speech to the joint session of Congress [arguing against the Iran nuclear deal] certainly hurt him in the views of congressional Democrats, and I think Democrats largely, and I think he would probably not do something like that again in the future, but it’s definitely something that will complicate this next term that he has coming.”
On the Iran deal: “I don’t think a deal — the deal that the Biden administration may or may not still be negotiating — is going to solve the problem. I don’t think the absence of a deal is going to solve the problem. I think you need some paradigm changer to solve the problem. One of those paradigm changers is kinetic action, which I think has a lot of problems with it and I’m not advocating it; another is if Iran, the current…government falls…But I don’t think that if the two alternative pathways are deal or no deal, neither one is going to solve the problem…The reason I have problems with the deal is because it is giving concessions and a great deal of money to Iran for a deal that will not solve the problem or stop Iran from engaging in its terroristic behavior, and they don’t even claim to be addressing that in the deal. So that’s why I have a problem with the deal.”
Read more and listen to the podcast here.
Bonus: In the Wall Street Journal, Troy and Rabbi Stuart Halpern look at how presidential administrations through the years have marked Hanukkah.