Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Monday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we interview Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff in Krakow about his approach to combating antisemitism, and look at Jordanian hesitations toward joining the Abraham Accords. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Anita Dunn, Zvi Schreiber and Tony Blinken.
In major population centers across Israel this weekend, an escalated police presence could be felt — and seen — from shopping centers to tourist sites and religious institutions, following a Palestinian terror attack outside a northeast Jerusalem synagogue on Friday night that killed seven Israelis, and a subsequent attack the following morning in Jerusalem’s Old City in which a father and son were shot by a Palestinian assailant. The shooter in the Old City attack, a teenager from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, left a note for his family that read in Arabic, “God, or victory, or martyrdom. Forgive me, mother, you’re going to be proud of me.”
Among those killed in the Friday night attack in the Neve Yaakov neighborhood, which took place as evening prayers concluded, were a 14-year-old boy and a married couple who ran toward the gunshots to assist others who’d been struck. The attacks in Jerusalem followed a raid in the West Bank city of Jenin, where Israeli security forces carrying out a counterterror raid engaged in a firefight with Palestinian militants in which seven gunmen and two civilians were killed.
The Friday night terrorist attack was condemned by the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, both of whom were subsequently condemned by Hamas.
Jewish organizations including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Jewish Federations of North America and the Anti-Defamation League expressed their shock and outrage following the attack.
Pope Francis on Sunday called on Israel and the Palestinians to engage in dialogue, saying, “It is with great pain that I hear of the news coming from the Holy Land… The spiral of death which is growing every day does nothing but kill the little trust that there is between these two peoples.”
The uptick in tensions is expected to be a topic of conversation for Secretary of State Tony Blinken when he arrives in Israel this afternoon. Blinken, who was in Egypt earlier today, will first meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, followed by meetings with Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Israeli President Isaac Herzog later today. Blinken will also meet with Opposition Leader Yair Lapid tomorrow.
Stateside, dozens of U.S. law professors signed a letter about proposed judicial reforms in Israel, saying they are “deeply worried that the speed and scale of the reforms will seriously weaken the independence of the judiciary, the separation of powers and the rule of law.”
Harvard Law School professor Jesse Fried, who led the statement along with Harvard professor Oren Bar-Gill and the University of Utah’s Amos Guiora, told JI that the goal of the statement was “to provide support to Israelis arguing that the reforms go too far. My own view is that the Israeli Supreme Court has over-reached in various respects, and its power needs to be curtailed. But I’m concerned about the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction.”
The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalemannounced today that Israel meets the non-immigrant visa refusal rate requirement of being below 3% in order to qualify for the Visa Waiver Program. It emphasized, however, that Israel still needs to take additional steps, including passing three laws and setting up the technical requirements in order to join the program.
Among the attendees at this weekend’s annual Alfalfa Club dinner held annually on the last Saturday in January in D.C., per Politico Playbook: David Rubenstein, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), UAE Ambassador to the U.S. Yousef Al Otaiba, Dina Powell McCormick and David McCormick, David Solomon, Mike Bloomberg, Ron Klain, Howard Friedman, Karen Friedman, Jamie Diamond and Michael Milken.
postcard from poland
Tracing his family history in Poland, Emhoff explains his approach to antisemitism

On a cold Sunday morning, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff sat in Krakow’s historic Jewish quarter at a trendy coffee shop called Cheder, the Hebrew word for a traditional Jewish primary school. Bookshelves crammed with Jewish volumes in Polish, English and Hebrew covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Poland was for centuries the beating heart of Jewish life in Europe, and half of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were Polish. Fewer than 10,000 Jews live in this country that once was home to one of the most vibrant and diverse Jewish communities in history. So there was no better place for Emhoff, the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president, to visit in order to viscerally understand what happens when antisemitism is taken to its most extreme, brutal manifestation. “This happened. This is real. If you don’t believe me, go — go see what I saw,” Emhoff told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch, two days after an emotional visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on the 78th anniversary of its liberation.
Strategy session: Over the past several months, Emhoff has emerged as a visible advocate for the Jewish community and a figurehead in the national fight against antisemitism. But while in Poland, Emhoff was careful to only characterize his role as that of a listener, maybe even a catalyst or a cheerleader, but certainly not that of a policymaker. Instead, he offered a window into his approach to the issue, articulating a big-tent vision for combating antisemitism that requires building a broad base of support across party lines while avoiding some of the more contentious questions around antisemitism, like the place of anti-Zionism or Islamist extremism. “This whole thing is to listen and bring back good ideas that we can use as we’re building out our national plan,” he said. “We’re not that granular yet,” he said, when asked whether he intends to focus on more specific forms of antisemitism like jihadism or anti-Zionism. “There are certain aspects that we’ve discussed in terms of security, funding and how to address particular issues, but I’m really right now just focused on listening, gathering information, bringing it back, and then trying to figure out the best way to deal with it.”
Fine line: Emhoff has been reluctant to speak about where Israel fits into the White House’s approach to antisemitism, even as many Jewish leaders have argued more forcefully in recent years that anti-Zionism often veers into antisemitism. Still, the topic was impossible to avoid, even while in Poland. Hours after Emhoff wrapped up his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Palestinian terrorist killed seven Israelis as they were leaving a Friday night prayer service in Jerusalem. The next morning, after a Saturday morning tour at the Oskar Schindler Enamel Factory in Krakow, Emhoff addressed the incident. He said he had spoken about it with his wife on the phone. “This is a terrorist attack. This is murder. This is something that’s horrible. These were people who were just praying in a temple, living their everyday lives, and were murdered in cold blood,” he told reporters. “It’s something that we need to just stop. And that’s why we’re doing this work. And that’s why I’m gonna continue to do this work. But it’s also — we stand with the people of Israel on this. We’re committed to the security of Israel.”
Coming home: After a two-hour drive through winding roads in the Polish countryside, blanketed by snow, Emhoff’s motorcade pulled up to the town hall in Gorlice, the town where his great-grandmother was believed to have lived before she fled to the U.S. roughly 120 years ago. A mural was painted on the wall, dated 2005, marking Gorlice’s 650th anniversary. Before World War II, the town’s population was more than half Jewish. Now, none remain. (Many were killed in an August 1942 massacre memorialized in a forest outside town, where a mass grave marks the site of the tragedy.) “Everyone wants to know where they come from. I think that’s important to know, and to see this beautiful place, to see how it was, but to see the violence that happened here, and all over Europe to disrupt what were ordinary lives,” Emhoff told reporters. “These were ordinary people just living their lives but because of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, antisemitism and hate, it led to mass murder. And that’s why we have to do this work. And that’s why I’m doing everything I can on behalf of our administration, with our partners and friends in Europe, to make sure that we push back so this does not happen again.”
League of nations: On the next leg of his trip, Emhoff attended a convening on Monday of antisemitism envoys in Berlin, alongside Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to combat and monitor antisemitism. There, he heard from representatives from European nations, including Germany, Romania, Austria, Croatia and the United Kingdom, that have been dealing with surging antisemitism for many years. Earlier in the trip, he also met in Krakow with Jewish and interfaith leaders about tolerance and antisemitism. “It was a real good lesson,” Emhoff told JI of the Krakow roundtable, that “no matter where you land politically, on a religious spectrum, it’s committed towards [fighting] the scourge of antisemitism.” He pointed to specific ideas that they discussed, like engaging young people, dealing with legal issues, involving the private sector and NGOs, and mobilizing educators and historians.
Read the full story here.
Bonus: At Monday’s meeting of international antisemitism envoys, Felix Klein, the German federal commissioner for Jewish life in Germany, announced that an expanded version of the group will meet with the White House Interagency Antisemitism Task Force and members of Congress in Washington at the end of February, at the invitation of the American Jewish Committee.