Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Thursday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we cover Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press conference in Jerusalem and report on a GOP governors’ initiative to commemorate Jewish American Heritage Month. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Avi Hasson, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Norm Brownstein.
In today’s penultimate installment of “Who Killed Kesher’s Rabbi?,” Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch describes the last night of Rabbi Philip Rabinowitz’s life — and the clues it gave detectives when they began to investigate his 1984 murder.
High-ranking police officialspromised the rabbi’s family members and congregants that they would find the culprit who killed the rabbi in his Washington home. They even identified a suspect. So why has no one been arrested to date? Read more below, and catch up on the rest of the series here.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis teased a potential 2024 presidential run at a conference in Jerusalem earlier this morning, JI’s Ruth Marks Eglash reports. “If there’s any announcements on this, they will come at the appropriate time,” the Florida Republican said at a press conference following his appearance at the Celebrate the Faces of Israel event, a project of The Jerusalem Post and the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem. Read more here.
The Florida governor also ceremonially signed into law new hate crimes legislation that passed through the state legislature earlier this week.
Addressing the Israeli government’s proposal for judicial reforms, DeSantis said America must respect Israel’s right to make its own decisions about its own governance. “We must be a strong ally and not butt into Israel’s internal affairs,” he said. “It seems to me, that it’s healthy to flush this stuff out… you’re a smart country, you’ll figure it out, it shouldn’t be for us to butt into these important issues.”
DeSantis also downplayed a report from NBC News last night that he is expected to announce a presidential bid as soon as mid-May.
DeSantis noted that he and his wife, Casey, gathered holy water from the Sea of Galilee to baptize their three children, drawing applause from the audience, which also included Museum of Tolerance Chairman Larry Mizel, prominent Denver attorney and super-lobbyist Norm Brownstein, philanthropists Miriam Adelson and Sylvan Adams, venture capitalists Yitz Applbaum, Michael Granoff and Max Fink, RJC’s Matt Brooks and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
DeSantis also met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog today.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides also stopped by the conference, albeit not for DeSantis’ speech. Nides and Friedman jointly addressed the conference, where they shared highlights from their recent March of the Living trip.
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican, is expected to announce a Senate run this afternoon against Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) today, sources tell JI. Justice’s entrance in the race lands Senate Republicans a marquee recruit in a must-win contest. Justice will still have to get past Club for Growth-backed Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV) in a GOP primary. All eyes are now on Manchin to see if he seeks a third term or steps aside.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee will hold a fundraiser next month in Midtown Manhattan that is set to include six U.S. senators, according to Eric Levine, a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who told JI’s Matthew Kassel that he is hosting the event.
The fundraiser on May 23, he said, will be attended by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), John Thune (R-SD), Susan Collins (R-ME), Todd Young (R-IN), Ted Budd (R-NC) and Steve Daines (R-MT), the chairman of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm.
“I’m sure we’re going to discuss retaking the Senate and what hurdles there are,” Levine, who is hoping to raise “a couple of hundred thousand dollars,” said in an interview on Wednesday. “It should be one of the biggest NRSC events in the city this year.”
The House passed a bill yesterday to raise the debt ceiling and enact deep spending cuts across many areas of the federal budget. The bill represents an opening salvo for Republicans in negotiations with the White House to stave off a U.S. debt default. With four Republicans voting against the bill, the final, deciding vote was cast by Rep. George Santos (R-NY), who had previously said he would oppose the bill.
ON THE HILL
House Foreign Affairs passes MAHSA Act, with promises to continue negotiations
The House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced the MAHSA Act, a bill aiming to increase sanctions on Iranian leadership, on Wednesday by a unanimous voice vote, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said they intend to continue negotiations on the bill, which had been the subject of intensive talks and controversy leading up to yesterday’s vote.
Background: Ahead of the markup, HFAC Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) introduced an amendment that would have altered language in the original bill stating that the president “shall… impose” sanctions listed within the bill to instead state that the president “shall… pursue” the sanctions. The proposed change prompted backlash from some Republican lawmakers and Iranian diaspora activists who had been rallying support for the bill.
Backpedaling: Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) said he had negotiated with McCaul to introduce a compromise amendment that partially restored the original language — applying the “impose” language to congressionally approved statutory sanctions and the “pursue” language to sanctions imposed by presidential executive order. The Florida congressman explained that there had been “constitutional concerns” around the “impose” language in the original bill, relating to questions about whether Congress can mandate the president enact sanctions issued under executive orders.
Continued concerns: HFAC Ranking Member Greg Meeks (D-NY) indicated, however, that he had reservations. Lawmakers said that they had been negotiating to attempt to find an acceptable solution until 3 a.m. Wednesday. Meeks said that he had thought “we had an agreement” with McCaul on the legislation “but… my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have sought to change the deal that we had negotiated.” He argued the Mills amendment “adds unnecessary rigidity to the text” and “will add confusion in its implementation.”
More to come: Meeks explained that he planned to vote for the bill “to allow it to continue to progress to a conference [committee] with the Senate,” but emphasized that he wanted to continue negotiations. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who stood in for McCaul as HFAC chairman during debate over the MAHSA Act, promised that negotiations to address Meeks’ concerns would continue even after the committee approved the bill. “I, for one, will pledge to the ranking member that we will — regardless of what we depart today with in the way of a base bill — that obviously we want to reach the language that was being worked on. I believe we’re close,” he said.
WHO KILLED KESHER’S RABBI?
The Outsider
This is the penultimate installment of a five-part investigative series. Catch up on the earlier installments here.
The last night of Rabbi Philip Rabinowitz’s life started just like every other. Like always, he ended the day at his Georgetown synagogue, where he led the brief evening prayer service. It was a small group of men, made up of the synagogue’s most devout and those who needed to be with a minyan to say the Mourner’s Kaddish.
One of the men present for the minyan on the evening of Feb. 28, 1984, was the homeless Russian man who had been a regular Kesher attendee for the better part of two years. He was in his 40s or 50s, with a scruffy and somewhat unkempt look, usually wearing a cap that he kept on even inside the synagogue. He was restless that night, fidgety; he kept picking up items in the entryway to the sanctuary until Rabinowitz grew impatient with him.
“Put that down!” Rabinowitz said to the Russian, interrupting the prayer service. “Leave it alone. It’s not yours.”
It took a great deal for the rabbi to lose his patience. No one at Kesher remembers him talking to another congregant this way. Rabinowitz followed a Judaic school of thought that stressed stringent ethical standards: “If they wanted to admonish somebody, they did it very privately. They did it in an indirect sort of way,” said Reuven Schlenker, who frequented Kesher during this period.
Still, no one thought too much about the interaction. Not until later, when the rabbi was dead.
Read the rest of Part Four, ‘The Outsider,’ here. The fifth installment will land in your inbox on Monday.
SHOW OF SUPPORT
GOP governors commemorate Jewish American Heritage Month
Republican governors are commemorating Jewish American Heritage Month, which begins in May, with a new joint statement recognizing the achievements of Jewish Americans, pledging support for Israel and opposing antisemitism. “As public servants and governors, we support and recognize May as Jewish American Heritage Month — and call for observance to celebrate the historical, economic and cultural impact of the Jewish-American people who have strengthened our communities and emboldened our nation throughout history,” the governors write in their statement, which was first shared with Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel.
Signing on: The statement was signed by all 26 of the Republican governors in the United States who are now in office, including Ron DeSantis of Florida, Brian Kemp of Georgia, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas. It was led by Govs. Kim Reynolds of Iowa and Bill Lee of Tennessee, according to a spokesperson for the Republican Governors Association.
Pride of place: “We’re proud of the United States being the first country to recognize the State of Israel,” the governors write. “Since then, we’ve fostered an unbreakable bond between our two nations based upon shared values, ultimately leading to prosperous economic, educational and cultural partnerships.” They also promised to “stand with” their “constituencies who oppose antisemitism” and affirmed “the significance of Jewish-American contributions throughout U.S. history.”
Background: Jewish American Heritage Month was first recognized in May 2006 by former President George W. Bush, who in a proclamation called upon “all Americans” to “honor the significant contributions Jewish Americans have made.”
Worthy Reads
🏢 Startup Nation: CEO of Start-Up Nation Central’s Avi Hasson writes that, contrary to gloomy forecasts for Israel’s high-tech sector in the face of internal strife, he remains hopeful that the Jewish state will emerge from its challenges stronger than ever. “From the moment of its birth, Israel has fought through turmoil. Its history is riddled with wars, terror, economic crises and floods of immigration, all in a piece of land with hardly any access to water or other natural resources. But these events helped foster a society, economy and country that is a marvel to the world today…This leading position didn’t come despite Israel’s myriad security and resource challenges, but in many ways as a result of them. Israeli culture is entrepreneurial, striving for solutions above consensus. It is a meritocratic society, enabling responsibility and decision-making down the ranks in the military, which cascades into business, community and civil society.” [JNS]
💔 A Tale of Two Nations: In The New Yorker, Bernard Avishai explores how a divided Israel can carve a path forward as clashing differences have reached a head over the subject of judicial reform. “Not unlike America commemorating its seventy-fifth year, in 1851, one feels that a rotten compromise struck at the time of the state’s founding has produced, in effect, two societies in Israel, one passably liberal and bourgeois, one traditional and supremacist, and that the latter has finally encroached upon the former in ways that make live and let live — once justified as unity against foreign enemies — intolerable…There is, of course, an asymmetry between these two worlds. Secular Israeliness can make room for new Jewish piety, as long as it is not expected to submit to it and pay for its strictures — the schools, the inspectors, the settlements. The Orthodox world, in contrast, feels panicked by challenges to authority structures grounded in revelation — the commandments you must perform to show you are God’s elect. The question is whether Israel can permanently endure as a society that is half commanded and half free.” [New Yorker]
🤯 The GOP’s Identity Crisis: Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, dissects the GOP’s internal divisions in Liberal Patriot: “Much has been said about the Republican Party’s ongoing identity crisis. But the reality is that it is not actually a crisis of identity — it is the ill-suited marriage of two worldviews that have little to do with each other, two sides who see America and the world completely differently. One is the group of traditional post-World War II conservatives, who, with the likes of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, wrested control of the GOP from the Harding-Coolidge faction who owned (and almost destroyed) the party before the Second World War — call them the OG-GOP. The other is a group of political left-behinds who almost certainly would have voted for Democrats in decades past — and many actually did so — before the Democrats became the party of woke coastal elites and petty authoritarians. Working class, big on industrial policy, suspicious of free trade, hostile to immigration, tolerant of big government, skeptical of American intervention overseas — this is the other, Neo-GOP.” [LiberalPatriot]
Around the Web
🗣️ McCarthy at the Knesset: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will address the Knesset plenum on Monday.
🏠 House Rules: After passing a debt ceiling increase with spending cuts in the House, McCarthy “appears to have proven his naysayers wrong…he clinched a major victory that eluded his GOP predecessors,” Politico writes.
🪙 On the Hill: Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Mike Braun (R-IN) introduced the Senate companion to a House bill seeking to honor former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Israel’s 75th Anniversary.
😨 Groundhog Day: Politicoreports on “the sense of fatalism that’s fast gripping Republicans of all stripes about the inevitability of Donald Trump again being the GOP standard bearer.”
✋ No Deal for Thiel:Peter Thiel, who has given approximately $50 million to federal and state candidates since 2000, is not planning to back any candidates for office in 2024.
👨 Trip Talk: Zionist Organization of America President Mort Klein met with Rev. Al Sharpton at the headquarters of Sharpton’s National Action Network, where the two discussed the Taylor Force Act and a potential trip to the Middle East.
📃 Getting Tough on Crime: New legislation in Michigan’s Statehouse seeks to update the state’s hate crimes laws and sentencing guidelines.
👨⚖️ On the Bench:The New York Times spotlights Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is presiding over E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against former President Donald Trump and has previously presided over a number of high-profile cases.
🏫 Campus Beat: A bill passed yesterday by the New York State Assembly would require colleges in New York to report on their websites all hate crimes that occur on their campuses.
🥯 Bagel Bites: H&H Bagels found a loophole around Depression-era tax law regarding sandwiches: pumping cream cheese into bagels, rather than slicing them open.
🪧 Pro-reform Protest: Supporters of the Israeli coalition and its proposal for a judicial overhaul are planning a mass protest in Jerusalem tonight.
✍️ Done Deal: Ron Ninio, co-creator and showrunner of “Kvodo,” which was remade for Showtime as “Your Honor,” has signed with CAA for worldwide representation, Deadline reports.
🕯️ Remembering: Elections expert Roy Saltman, who in 1988 had warned about “hanging chads” — more than a decade before they would play a pivotal role in the 2000 presidential election — died at 90.
Song of the Day
To celebrate Israel’s 75th birthday, the Jewish Agency for Israel and Z3 Project partnered with Shaanan Streett, the frontman of Israeli hip-hop band HaDag Nahash, to create a song, “Ma Nishma, Israel,” that seeks to showcase the diverse voices of the Jewish people in Israel and overseas. The song incorporates lyrics submitted by Jews around the world expressing what Israel at 75 means to them.
Birthdays
Physician and a former NASA astronaut, she is a veteran of three shuttle flights with more than 686 hours in space, Ellen Louise Shulman Baker, M.D., M.P.H. turns 70…
Financial executive Harvey Hirsch turns 82… Turkish preacher now living in exile in Saylorsburg, Pa., Fethullah Gülen turns 82… Non-profit executive who has managed the 92nd Street Y, the Robin Hood Foundation, the AT&T Foundation and Lincoln Center, he is also the lead director of First Republic Bank, Reynold Levy turns 78… Former director-general of the Israel Antiquities Authority, he was previously a member of Knesset and deputy director of the Shin Bet, Yisrael Hasson turns 68… VP at Covington Fabric & Design, Donald Rifkin… Biologist and professor of pathology and genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine, he won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Medicine, Andrew Zachary Fire turns 64… Co-founder of Casamigos Tequila and owner of restaurants, bars and lounges worldwide, Rande Gerber turns 61… Former member of the Knesset for the Shinui party, Yigal Yasinov turns 57… Partner in 100 State Street Development, Elliot Mayerhoff… Showrunner, director, screenwriter and producer, Brian Koppelman turns 57… Founder and CEO of NYC-based Gotham Ghostwriters, Daniel Gerstein turns 56… Author, political analyst and nationally syndicated op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, Dana Milbank turns 55… U.S. senator (D-NJ) since 2013, he was previously the mayor of Newark, Cory Booker turns 54… Israeli television and radio journalist and former member of the Knesset for the Jewish Home party, Yinon Magal turns 54… Professor of science writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Seth Mnookin turns 51… Cinematographer and director, Rachel Morrison turns 45… Identical twin brothers, between the two of them they won 11 Israeli championships in the triathlon between 2001 and 2012, Dan and Ran Alterman both turn 43… Israeli screenwriter and producer, she has written numerous advertisements and screenplays, Savion Einstein turns 41… Deputy regional director for AIPAC, Leah Berry… Television and film actress, Ariel Geltman “Ari” Graynor turns 40… Basketball coach, analyst and writer, profiled by Sports Illustrated in 2018 as “the smartest basketball mind outside the NBA,” Benjamin Falk turns 35… Creative director at Trilogy Interactive, Jessica Ruby… Data scientist, Jonathan H. Glidden… Research fellow at Emory University, David Jonathan Benger… Founder and CEO of EREM, a consumer outdoor footwear and apparel company, Noah Swartz turns 30… MD/MPH candidate in the 2025 class at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Amir Kashfi…
