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.”

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During her tenure in Congress, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has, on some occasions, found herself at odds with pro-Israel groups over key Middle East policy issues. But speaking to pro-Israel Democrats at a virtual candidate forum on Wednesday evening, Lee, a veteran progressive lawmaker now running for an open Senate seat in California, struck a largely conciliatory note as she emphasized her “commitment to a two-state solution and to Israel’s security and a Palestinian state,” Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.

Peace and security: “This, for me, is not just a job or a political position,” the long-serving Bay Area lawmaker told participants who tuned into a Zoom event hosted by the advocacy group Democrats for Israel California. “This is something that I truly believe in, and that’s global peace and security.” An anti-war activist who has long been sharply critical of the American foreign policy establishment, Lee, 76, has supported legislation that would place restrictions on U.S. aid to Israel and was among a small group of House members who voted against a resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting the Jewish state.

Contrasting candidates: On such issues, Lee’s record stands in contrast with her Democratic primary opponents, Reps. Katie Porter (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), who have both followed a more  mainstream approach  concerning Israel. The two candidates have also recentlyspoken with Democrats for Israel California.

From both sides: Still, while Lee’s approach has drawn criticism from AIPAC, for instance, she said on Wednesday that local activists on the left have also found fault with some of her positions, citing her support for funding Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system as one source of tension. “I get pickets from every side of the spectrum,” Lee averred. “It’s like, ‘Barbara, why do you support the Iron Dome?’ Well, I’ve always voted for the Iron Dome. I’ve visited. I know how it protects Israelis, I know what it does, and so I’ve supported it. But people in my district, for the most part, picket me because of that.” 

Envoy for peace: Near the end of the forum, Lee returned to the subject of eventually reaching a resolution between Israelis and Palestinians, floating a suggestion that she does not seem to have mentioned publicly before: a new special envoy to focus on promoting a two-state solution. The congresswoman has proposed the idea to President Joe Biden as well as Tony Blinken, the secretary of state, she informed viewers. “We need a person in the White House who does nothing but two-state solution work,” Lee insisted. “We need somebody who really believes that it can be done, and that’s all that’s in their portfolio.”

Read the full story here.

This is the second installment of a five-part series we’ll be releasing over the next two weeks. If you missed Part One, read it here first. 

The first thing visitors to Rabbi Philip Rabinowitz’s Georgetown home noticed was the books.

Ratty paperbacks and small pocket-sized prayer books and gorgeous leather tomes, with titles in English, Hebrew and Yiddish. They covered the walls, the desk in his study and the stairs. There wasn’t enough space for everything he wanted to learn. There wouldn’t be time, either.

On the morning of Feb. 29, 1984, the rabbi’s blood was splattered across the bookshelves and on top of a stack of papers on his desk. It covered a tan rug in the center of the study and a chair behind the desk. Nothing was out of place; the three-story townhouse had not been ransacked. Whoever had entered the home was not a thief — nothing of value was stolen.

Howard Smith didn’t notice any of this at first. All he saw when he walked through the open front door at 8:15 a.m. was a figure lying facedown on the floor. His first thought was that the 63-year-old rabbi had passed out and fallen unconscious. Smith hurried to the phone on the rabbi’s desk and dialed 911. He hoped the rabbi could still be saved, but the stillness of the scene signaled otherwise.

Within a decade, Washington would gain a reputation as the nation’s “murder capital.” But in 1984, the city’s homicide count hadn’t yet begun to spike. Ambulances and police cruisers arrived swiftly to the rabbi’s home, blue lights flashing and sirens blaring. Medics brought Rabinowitz’s body to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, near the city jail, by ambulance. They pronounced him dead at 11:30 a.m. Police officers later estimated he had died around 8 p.m. the night before.

Smith, the young NASA astrophysicist who discovered the bloody crime scene, went with the police back to the station, where he filled out a police report and answered a few questions. He never heard from anyone from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) again.

A spokesperson for MPD declined to make any department officials available for an interview, and the department denied Jewish Insider’s Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the police investigation.

“This case remains under investigation,” MPD public affairs specialist Alaina Gertz told JI in an emailed statement in December. “However, there are no active leads we are currently pursuing in this case.” That doesn’t mean police never identified any suspects. 

Read the rest of Part Two, ‘Holiest of All Things,’ here. Look for Part Three in your inbox on Monday. 

A joint effort by India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the U.S. to stimulate trade is picking up momentum. Under the banner of theI2U2 Initiative, business leaders from the four countries signed a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday pledging their cooperation in the project’s six target areas: water, energy, transportation, health, food security and space, The Circuit’s Jonathan Ferziger reports.

Mini-lateral partners: Meeting at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington D.C., the heads of the UAE-India Business Council, the UAE-Israel Business Council and the U.S.-UAE Business Council approved the document calling for private sector involvement in the partnership, following up on the I2U2 Business Forum held in the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi in February. Faizal Kottikollon, chairman of the Indian council, said in a statement that he was “committed to rally our members’ support behind this mini-lateral through the signing of this MoU.” His Israeli counterpart, Dorian Barak, said the four-way initiative is “emerging as an important pillar of regional economic integration.”

Biden boost: The I2U2 group – a play on the four countries’ initials – was established in 2021 as an outgrowth of the Abraham Accords. Among the activities planned by the business councils, according to their joint statement, are promoting the I2U2 initiative with a series of events held in the four member countries aimed at stimulating commercial ventures. The councils intend to commission a series of papers by think tanks, scholars and thought leaders exploring business opportunities in the six target areas. Those would be supplemented by recorded video interviews made available on websites and other platforms.

Food security: Joining the council leaders at the St. Regis were Jose Fernandez, U.S. under secretary of state for economic, growth, energy and the environment; Yousef Al Otaiba, UAE ambassador to the U.S.; Sripriya Ranganathan, India’s deputy chief of mission to the U.S.; and Eliav Benjamin, Israel’s deputy chief of mission to the U.S. The first project announced after the video conference in July was a $2 billion investment by the UAE in developing a series of food parks across India that would use Israeli and U.S. technologies to reduce food waste, conserve fresh water and use renewable energy sources. A second project is a hybrid renewable energy initiative in India’s Gujarat state to generate 300 megawatts of wind and solar capacity along with a battery system to store the energy.

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