Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Thursday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we interview Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares about the state’s new antisemitism task force, and talk to Israeli long-distance runner Beatie Deutsch, who is in Kenya training for the Tokyo Marathon. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Jeff Zients, Danielle Haim and Mohamed Alabbar.
Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen is visiting Kyiv today, the first time an Israeli minister has traveled to Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion. Cohen is set to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
Cohen will formally reopen the Israeli Embassy in Ukraine and will visit Babyn Yar and Bucha, a city just outside Kyiv where Russian forces killed over 450 civilians in March last year.
“In the last year, Israel has stood by the Ukrainian people and by the side of Ukraine,” Cohen said, according to a statement released by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “Today we will raise the Israeli flag at the Israeli embassy in Kyiv, which will return to continuous activity with the aim of strengthening relations between the countries.”
Speaking at the Babyn Yar memorial site, Cohen said, “We stand today in this painful place, where more than 30,000 Jews were murdered in a process that preceded the terrible Final Solution that led to the annihilation of more than one and a half million Jews in the territories of the former Soviet Union.”
“Standing here today as a foreign minister of the State of Israel and a representative of the government of Israel, I can guarantee that we will do everything to protect our people and provide them with security against those who sow evil against them,” Cohen added.
The student government at the University of California, Berkeley is scheduled to vote tonight on a resolution to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.
OLD DOMINION DUTY
Under shadow of Charlottesville, Virginia AG sets up antisemitism task force

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares last week announced the creation of a statewide task force that will monitor and combat antisemitism in Virginia, citing the deadly 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally as the guiding influence behind the move. “Virginia is particularly sensitive after, I think, one of the most shameful, darkest chapters in modern Virginia history,” Miyares said of the Charlottesville incident, in a Monday interview with Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch. “Virginia made national news for all the wrong reasons then.”
State of hate: The Old Dominion is now at the forefront of growing national efforts to fight antisemitism. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, signed an executive order on his first day in office in January 2022 creating a commission to examine antisemitism in the commonwealth. The commission’s report, which was released in December, included a detailed list of 21 recommendations policymakers could adopt to make the state better equipped to fight antisemitism. The task force was its first and most immediate suggestion. “The idea is having a coordinated response,” explained Miyares. “The best way to fight bad information is good information, and having that level of coordination both on law enforcement and education, so everyone knows this is a broad problem.”
Get the facts: Many law enforcement officers come from parts of Virginia, “particularly rural areas, that don’t have a very visible Jewish community,” Miyares said. One proposal is to require officers in the Virginia State Police to visit the state Holocaust memorial in Richmond during their training. A 2020 survey from the Claims Conference found that 63% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 did not know that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. “They have no idea that there was this horror that happened, and it happened in one of the most highly educated societies in Europe up to that time, and so it can happen anywhere,” said Miyares. “It’s so critically important that those that are in law enforcement understand that.”
Going abroad: In March, Miyares and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat, will lead a bipartisan delegation of U.S. attorneys general to Auschwitz and then to Israel. Weiser’s mother and grandparents are Holocaust survivors. “We thought it was important to start off with seeing the face of antisemitism, the horror of it at its absolute worst, and then the symbolism of then going from Poland to what is the amazing miracle that is the modern state of Israel,” Miyares said, adding that Israel must be part of conversations about antisemitism. “Israel is held to a standard that no other country seems to be held to.”