Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Thursday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we report on a new effort by business councils representing the UAE, Israel, India and the U.S. to partner with one another, and we talk to Jewish communal leaders about the outlook for the Supreme Court to strengthen religious accommodations in the workplace. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Rep. Barbara Lee, Naftali Bennett and Dana Bash.
We’re back today with the second installment of Jewish Insider’s five-part investigation into the 1984 cold-case killing of the rabbi of a prominent Washington synagogue. Catch up on Part One here.
In part two, JI’s Gabby Deutch covers the aftermath of the brutal murder, the beginnings of a police investigation and the loved ones who gathered to say goodbye. More below.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s two-day 50th anniversary summit kicks off today in the D.C. area. The think tank has long influenced the Republican Party’s agenda, especially on foreign policy.
The event’s first day will feature presentations by Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Tim Scott (R-SC), J.D. Vance (R-OH), Rick Scott (R-FL) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), as well as a China-focused panel including Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Ambassador Robert Lighthizer, the Trump administration’s trade representative.
Tomorrow’s headliners are Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, along with a panel featuring former Trump administration official Ken Cuccinelli, who is now leading a pro-DeSantis PAC.
The event could provide DeSantis an opportunity for a course-correction for his nascent, but unannounced, presidential campaign. DeSantis was in D.C. this week meeting with lawmakers, in what appears to have been a mostly unsuccessful bid to court support for his prospective campaign that instead exposedgaps in DeSantis’ relationships with his former D.C. colleagues and his state’s congressional delegation.
Several Florida lawmakers have enthusiastically endorsed former President Donald Trump in recent days, and most others who met with the Florida governor have declined to endorse him. Some major GOP donors have also said in recent days that they’re backing away from the potential presidential hopeful.
From a foreign policy perspective, several of the speakers in the Heritage lineup, including Lee, Vance, Hawley, DeSantis, Carlson and Roy, are among the growing GOP faction expressing skepticism of or opposition to U.S. military aid to Ukraine and other aspects of American engagement abroad. The once-hawkish think tank itself opposed additional aid to Ukraine last year.
Stay tuned for updates from the conference as JI Capitol Hill reporter Marc Rod will be covering the gathering.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers, Holocaust survivors and administration officials will gather for a commemoration of the Days of Remembrance for the Holocaust.
LOOKING AHEAD
Supreme Court appears poised to expand religious workplace accommodations, advocates say

The Supreme Court appears poised to expand protections for religious accommodations in the workplace, but may not fully overturn its previous precedent on the matter, Jewish communal leaders said following Tuesday’s oral arguments in a case on the subject, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.
Looking up: Jewish leaders told JI that they saw in Tuesday’s oral arguments in Groff v DeJoy a widespread willingness to dispense with the “de minimis” standard, which was established in the 1977 case Hardison v TWA. “I walked out of the court pretty confident that our side is going to win, but it’s very hard to know how broad or narrow the decision will be made,” Nathan Diament, the Orthodox Union’s director for public policy, told JI. “From the point of view of religious observers, there’ll be an advance, is what it looks like,” Marc Stern, the chief legal officer for the American Jewish Committee, told JI. “But it won’t be the radical change that some hoped for and it won’t be the radical change that some feared.”
Middle ground: Court watchers highlighted that several of the conservative justices, particularly Neil Gorsuch, seemed eager to find a narrow compromise position. Gorsuch at one point specifically stated his interest in finding “common ground.” “Some courts have taken this ‘de minimis’ language and ruined it and say anything more than a trifling [hardship] will get the employer out of any concerns here,” he said. “And that’s wrong, and we all agree that’s wrong. Why can’t we just say that and be done with it and be silent as to the rest of it?”
Coming soon: Nathan Lewin, a constitutional attorney who argued the Hardison case and helped craft the underlying legislation, said that the outcome of the case may “[depend] on how firm Gorsuch is in the proposal he made.” Lewin filed a brief in the Groff case for the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs (COLPA). “If Gorsuch is firm in that opinion… then I’m afraid that’s what the court will do,” Lewin said. “That’s certainly what the attitude of the chief justice [John Roberts] will be, and probably even [Amy Coney] Barrett, [Brett] Kavanaugh would go along with that. I’m hopeful that Gorsuch just threw that out as a legalistic possibility, but he realizes that in the real world, that’s not going to end this.”