Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Friday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we interview Ohio Senate candidate Matt Dolan and get an on-the-ground account from the Israeli-American Council’s confab in Austin. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff, Doug Emhoff, Nikki Haley and Jake Sullivan.
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 Jewish Insider and eJewishPhilanthropy stories, including: Inside the Shabbat dinner at Davos; Daniel Gordis’ blunt message at AIPAC’s confab; Third time’s the charm for Michigan’s John James; With Israel committed to expanding hours at its border crossing with Jordan, an upgrade is next; White House, Congress standoff over F-16 sale to Turkey returns to the fore; Spiritual care documentary ‘A Still Small Voice’ debuts at Sundance; and Nearly three years later, these Jewish programs created for the pandemic are still running. Print the latest edition here.
In an address to the U.S. Conference of Mayors gathering in Washington, D.C., yesterday, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta made a plea for cities to use the FBI’s National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to report hate crimes. “Hate crimes instill fear across communities and undermine our democracy. But we cannot be effective in prevention and prosecution of hate crimes without more accurate and comprehensive data collection and reporting,” she said.
Gupta’s address comes a month after the FBI’s annual hate crimes report found a significant drop in incidents — due not to an actual decrease in attacks, but to the lack of reporting, which is voluntary, by more than 7,000 local agencies, including major metropolitan areas such as New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. A long-planned overhaul of the FBI’s reporting mechanism included a multiyear, $100 million transition to the new system.
NIBRS, Gupta said, “collects substantially more detailed data for each individual criminal incident, and it provides a richer and more complete picture of all crime nationwide, including hate crimes.”
The Harvard Kennedy School reversed course yesterday and offered a fellowship in the university’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy to former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, a week after The Nation published a story suggesting that he was denied the post because of his criticisms of Israel.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who earlier this week penned an op-ed blasting the news outlet for its reporting, told us that he found it “deeply disturbing that a campaign rife with antisemitic claims around Jewish power and influence, such as the claims made by The Nation, was successful in getting Harvard to reverse its decision.”
“The antisemitism that was so visibly on display is ugly,” Greenblatt added, noting the ADL’s concern “when an individual is offered such a position in the wake of an antisemitic, conspiratorial narrative that was spun by anti-Zionist activists that blamed Jews and Israel-supporters for the initial rescinding of the offer.”
Davos has wrapped, but there’s one more event to come today: the annual Shabbat dinner, hosted by World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab and his wife, Hilde. Read more about what attendees can expect at tonight’s dinner.
the buckeye seat
Matt Dolan’s second shot at the Senate

During the last election cycle, Matt Dolan, a Republican state senator in Ohio, took his time weighing a bid for the U.S. Senate, embarking on a statewide listening tour as a prelude to launching his campaign to succeed retired Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), a like-minded moderate conservative. Dolan, who jumped into the race months after his opponents had declared their candidacies, ultimately finished third in the Republican primary. The 58-year-old state legislator from suburban Cleveland is now moving at a swifter pace as he seeks to position himself for a more favorable outcome in 2024. Earlier this week, Dolan was first out of the gate in announcing that he would run for the seat held by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), a three-term Democratic incumbent and former longtime congressman who is expected to face a competitive reelection campaign, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.
Bashing Brown: “I think I have a record that I can prosecute Sherrod Brown’s case and also say, ‘Here’s what I’ve done,’” Dolan, who chairs the Ohio Senate’s finance committee, said in an interview with JI on Thursday. “Though I haven’t spent 30 years in Washington, in my shorter period of time in Columbus I’ve been able to get things done.” He argued that Brown’s record in Washington is “out of step and out of touch with Ohio,” citing recent remarks in which the senator claimed that he does not “hear much about immigration from voters, except for people on the far right.” To Dolan, such comments were dismissive of what he regards as a pressing matter. “Our southern border is a security issue, it’s a humanitarian crisis and it’s an economic issue,” he told JI. “How are we going to solve those problems if our senator doesn’t even recognize those problems?”
Defining conservative: In the interview with JI, he cast himself as a fiscal conservative who is in favor of “low taxes,” “limited government,” “less regulation” and “educational choice,” among other things. “These are all Republican truisms,” he said, “and I believe I have a conservative record.” Still, Dolan suggested that the conservative label as he sees it has been diluted in a party where such issues have frequently taken a back seat to culture war debates, partisan flamethrowing and conspiracy theories espoused by hard-right lawmakers who have gained prominence in both chambers of Congress. “What does that mean anymore?” he said. “What is a conservative? Is it loyalty to a person? Is it you have to just be louder than the next person to be more conservative? I don’t know. But I do know this, that if we don’t elect Republicans, like me, who want to go and engage and implement these conservative principles, we’re going to go backwards.”
Insight on Israel: Dolan took his first trip to Israel in August last year on a weeklong state Senate delegation focused on the country’s innovation economy as well as potential partnerships with Ohio. Dolan said he was impressed with “the economic opportunities that Israel is developing” and how business leaders he met in Tel Aviv are “taking a lead in technology. Because of its size, for these investments to pay off, they have to be able to scale them worldwide,” he said. “So it’s really, really interesting that Israelis are truly into relationship-building, because that helps the entrepreneurs who are there.” Dolan said he arrived in Israel a day before Palestinian militants had fired rockets into Israel from Gaza. “Then the day after I left Israel, there was a terrorist attack [near] the Western Wall,” he told JI. “You begin to understand the daily concern and diligence that Israelis have to live with.”
Foreign policy: Dolan cast his opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement as a central point of distinction between himself and Brown, who supported the deal when it was brokered by the Obama administration. More recently, Brown has expressed skepticism of the Biden administration’s halting effort to reenter the deal. But Dolan also described some disagreements over foreign policy with members of his own party, including [Sen. J.D.] Vance, who have endorsed an isolationist approach to U.S. investment abroad, not least in Ukraine. “I am for supporting the Ukrainian effort with American resources,” Dolan said, “so that we make a strong statement to tyrants all over the world that any invasion of other countries is not going to be sat idly by.”