Susan Rice, the outgoing director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, said on Monday that the White House is “aiming to release” its national strategy on antisemitism later in May, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Strategy preview: Rice, speaking at the Anti-Defamation League’s National Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., yesterday, said that the strategy will focus on “actions we all can take throughout society to raise awareness and prevent antisemitism, to protect Jews and to build allyship across communities.”

Commitment: “The Biden-Harris administration is deeply committed to this work because we are alarmed by the rise of antisemitism in the United States and the fact that shockingly, it’s becoming normalized,” she said. “Antisemitism is an affront to our Constitution. It threatens our country’s most essential ideals, including freedom of religion. Antisemitism undermines and corrodes our democracy… and thus it threatens our very way of life.”

Looking back: Rice has been a leader on the White House’s newly formed task force for combating antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate, but, in her ADL speech, she traced her connections to the Jewish community back much further. “Washington’s Jewish community shaped so much of my upbringing,” she said, growing up in a mixed black-Jewish neighborhood in Shepherd Park, in a home once owned by the Israeli Embassy with a mezuzah on its door. 

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Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) announced on Monday that he would not seek reelection to a fourth term, kicking off what is set to be a competitive and expensive Democratic primary campaign for a rare open Senate seat in the heavily Democratic state, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch and Marc Rod report. 

Core values: In an emotional video announcing his retirement when his term ends in 2025, Cardin spoke with his wife Myrna about how the Jewish values of tzedakah (charity) and tikkun olam (repairing the world) have guided him in his nearly six decades in elective office. The 79-year-old Cardin, who is generally not viewed as a partisan firebrand, has a reputation as a staunch advocate for the U.S.-Israel relationship. The race to replace Cardin may be a test of whether the next wave of Democratic legislators in Maryland will be as reliably pro-Israel as their predecessor. 

On deck: No one has officially announced an intention to run for Cardin’s seat. But among those considering it are Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, who has hired political staff for a potential run, and Rep. David Trone (D-MD), who has reportedly told people close to him that he would spend up to $50 million of his own money on the race. Other possible candidates include Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a progressive who led the second impeachment proceedings against former President Donald Trump in January 2021; Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando; former Congressman John Delaney; and Baltimore County Executive John Olszewski.

Temperature check: “I haven’t heard any serious statewide candidates about whom I have concerns about the U.S.-Israel relationship,” Howard Libit, executive director of the Baltimore Jewish Council, told JI. In Congress, Trone and Raskin are both vocal about Israel, but approach the matter differently. Trone is closely aligned with AIPAC, while Raskin is more in tune with J Street. 

Close contacts: Alsobrooks has led the majority-Black Prince George’s County since 2018. The county, Maryland’s second largest, has a much smaller Jewish population than Montgomery County or Baltimore County. But she has a good relationship with Jewish advocates in the Washington metropolitan area. In December she spoke at the D.C. JCRC’s annual legislative breakfast, and shared how her parents and grandparents worked alongside Jewish activists during the civil rights movement. Alsobrooks traveled to Israel in 2019 with a delegation organized by the American Israel Education Foundation, a nonprofit associated with AIPAC. 

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The day before BuzzFeed announced, in mid-April, that it was shuttering its news division, Ben Smith, the intrepid journalist and digital media pioneer, was seated in a Manhattan coffee shop and waiting for a tea that would never arrive as he contemplated the rise and fall of the social web, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports. As the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, where he lent institutional authority to a media site known for viral quizzes and cute animal photos, Smith had sought to balance a need for clicks with a focus on scoop-driven reporting that won a Pulitzer Prize while ruffling the feathers of the legacy media class. 

Unsustainable: The proposition, largely dependent on referral traffic from social media companies like Twitter and Facebook, was never as tenable as it may have seemed at BuzzFeed and competitors of its ilk, which have struggled to stay afloat or no longer exist. “It has not ended particularly well for that generation of companies,” Smith, 46, told JI during a recent interview in Little Italy, not far from the offices of his new media venture, Semafor, which launched last fall.

Traffic signal: But even Smith, who co-writes a dishy weekly newsletter on the media industry and was previously a media columnist for The New York Times, acknowledges that he had not anticipated the sudden demise of BuzzFeed News, which he left in 2020 after a decade-long run. “I had no idea,” he said in a brief email to JI days after the closure. In many ways, however, Smith had already written its epitaph in his richly reported and somewhat rueful first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, which was published on Tuesday.

‘Untold story’: It chronicles the trajectory of the media startup craze in New York City through the prism of two storied websites and the people who created them: Jonah Peretti, the idealistic data whiz who founded BuzzFeed in 2006, and his acid-penned foil, Nick Denton, the British-born reporter who had launched Gawker, the now-defunct gossip blog, four years earlier. “It’s sort of an untold story,” Smith explained. “It was a real moment of dynamism and interesting stuff happening. And it was all right around here. It was right here.”

Belated reckoning: The book, he suggested, was an opportunity to get some distance from the industry he is currently navigating while coming to terms with a previous era that has long been of interest to him. “What I was trying to do,” he explained, “is really give insight into the origins of where we are now, where this all came from, and how these people in this part of Manhattan were thinking about it when they were sort of toying around with all these forces 20 years ago.” And how it ended? “We were all here,” he said, “for the ending.”

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Amid warnings of more U.S. bank closures and a world economic slowdown, Saudi Arabia is looking for new opportunities to pour the kingdom’s petroleum wealth into international investment. Two Saudi cabinet ministers, accompanied by representatives of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, traveled to Beverly Hills, Calif., this week for the annual Milken Institute Global Conference, where the world’s top bankers and investors are discussing global financial predictions, The Circuit’s Jonathan H. Ferziger reports.

Diversifying the economy: The Saudi minister for economy and planning, Faisal Alibrahim, spoke on Monday about his government’s eagerness to “leapfrog away from oil” and diversify the economy through investing abroad in technology companies and developing commercial industries at home. Fueled by its $620 billion Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia is distributing venture capital and promoting the desert kingdom as one of the world’s fastest-growing tourist destinations.

Gloomy forecast: Alibrahim and his fellow cabinet member, Investment Minister Khalid Al-Falih, joined panel discussions at the Beverly Hilton after a parade of bankers and world financial figures painted a gloomy picture of the coming months. The day had started with news that U.S. federal regulators had seized the offices of First Republic Bank and engineered its acquisition by JP Morgan Chase & Co.

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Elsewhere at Milken: Apollo CEO Marc Rowan said concentrated losses are expected for the commercial real state market.

Bonus: Laura Lauder called for the tens of billions of dollars “sitting in cash” in donor-advised funds in the United States to be used for socially constructive impact investments, saying this represents “the biggest opportunity for philanthropy in America,” during an onstage panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, eJewishPhilanthropy reports.

Following Saudi Arabia’s resumption of ties with Iran in March, the Gulf nation is poised to play a critical role in American foreign policy, Israeli political calculations and China’s efforts to expand its influence across the region. Yesterday, three close observers of the U.S.-Saudi relationship wrote their own independent analysis of the state of play.

From Riyadh to Washington: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Bradley Bowman, Orde Kittrie and Ryan Brobst map out a potential path forward for U.S.-Saudi relations. “Many of America’s partners in the Middle East, including the Saudis, now believe the United States is a strong power acting like a weak one and that Washington is interested in little more than finding the nearest exit,” they write. “Meanwhile, even as American security assurances seem less reliable, Iran is advancing toward a nuclear weapon, doubling down on its decades-long asymmetrical strategy of terrorism, and bolstering its drone and missile arsenal. These twin perceptions of increased threat and a less reliable United States are heightening Saudi Arabia’s sense of insecurity.” FDD’s Mark Dubowitz also suggests eight steps the U.S. could take to build a strong, long-lasting relationship with Riyadh.

Picking priorities: In a report released Monday morning, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Rob Satloff argues that the question of when Riyadh might normalize relations with Israel misses the point. “​​The more appropriate question to ask is ‘As Saudi leaders prioritize the critical and potentially controversial reforms necessary to achieve the kingdom’s strategic objectives, where do they place the idea of a high-profile breakthrough to normalization with Israel?,’” Satloff writes. “Absent an intensive presidential-led effort to negotiate U.S. incentives for Riyadh and thereby change the Saudis’ balance of risk and gain, in all probability the answer to that question is ‘Not that high.’”

Biden’s bet: Capstone’s Daniel Silverberg looks at how the Biden administration is addressing the role that China plays in Washington’s foreign policy decisions. “Diluting Chinese inroads in Saudi Arabia is key to President Biden’s approach,” Silverberg explains. “The Saudis control oil that is needed in the short term to power the green transition, and they bring extensive capital to the table to compete against Chinese bidders on African mines, help build solar projects in Angola, and fund power generation in Zambia… This approach could yield direct security benefits. It allows the administration to keep the Saudis in the US camp on issues of dire consequence to the US. Administration officials are pushing for Saudi engagement precisely because they can help the US with critical minerals mining, 5G, and global infrastructure — the drivers of the global green transition and diversification from China.”