Daily Kickoff: Jeffries meets Bibi + Interview with novelist James McBride

👋 Good Tuesday morning!

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we report on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ delegation to Israel, and interview author James McBride about his new book out today. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Jennifer Senior, David Krumholtz and Harvey “Bud” Meyerhoff.

A report set to be released today by the Anti-Defamation League delves into the rise of left-wing antisemitism in four Western European nations, finding that “its penetration into the political mainstream is cause for concern and has in some cases alienated Jews and other supporters of Israel,” Jewish Insider’s Melissa Weiss reports. The challenges facing European Jewish communities, the report suggests, “can be a bellwether for what is to come for the U.S. Jewish community.”

The ADL partnered with four European organizations — the U.K.’s Community Security Trust, French magazine K., The Jews, Europe, the 21st Century, German NGO Amadeu Antonio Foundation and Spain’s ACOM — to look at how left-wing antisemitism manifests in each country.

In the U.K., CST found “strong crossover between the pro-Palestine movement, the far left of the Labour Party and other left-wing groups including some Trades Unions.” CST noted that “antisemitic discourse” on social media was found at “every level” of the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, but added that “the situation at the time of writing” — with the party under the leadership of Keir Starmer — “is somewhat different to that which existed” under Corbyn.

In France, K. suggested that members of the country’s Jewish community face “a rapidly growing left-wing antisemitism that includes both anti-Zionism and traditional antisemitism.” K. wrote that left-wing activists in France follow a recognizable pattern: “to engage in antisemitic rhetoric, to deny that antisemitism exists on the left, to excuse the antisemitism of those assumed to be political allies, and then to claim that they are the real champions in the fight against antisemitism.”

Amadeu Antonio writes that in Germany, “Israel-centred antisemitism is a major contributor to the normalisation of antisemitism,” and warns that discourse around antisemitism is “having an impact on politics, art and culture, the politics of remembrance, subcultures and the political left.” Amadeu Antonio added that despite government efforts to push back against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, the movement is growing “not least in leftist, anti-racist and post-colonial circles,” which has begun to cause “debates and alliances to be hijacked by anti-Israel activists.”

But in Spain, some members of the government “openly defend the dissolution of the State of Israel and who are close to its most vicious enemies,” ACOM writes. The organization notes a shift away from right-wing antisemitism that has taken place over six decades, by which “anti-Israel antisemitism of the political left accounts for the overwhelming share of antisemitism, while the Spanish right is almost entirely pro-Israel and guards against antisemitism.” ACOM bluntly adds, “The BDS movement and the extreme left are the same thing in Spain.”

The case studies, the ADL suggests, “demonstrate that the prevalence of antisemitism within elements of the political left in Western Europe is shaped by post-WWII political trajectory, by individual political leaders, and by left-wing non-governmental groups.” Above all, the report “highlight[s] the need for the American Jewish community and supporters of Israel more broadly to pay close attention to the trends happening in elements of the political left in Europe and to remain alert to the potential for them to spread around the world.” Read the full story here.

Jeffrey Gunter, the U.S. ambassador to Iceland under former President Donald Trump, jumped into the Nevada Senate race on Monday. Gunter also serves on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, and is a leading GOP donor.

“I was honored and humbled to serve as President Trump’s ambassador to Iceland, where I fought the deep state, I fought China and I fought Russia’s influence in the Arctic in the great high north,” Gunter said in a video kicking off his campaign.

Gunter also endorsed Trump in his campaign video, and has been a longtime champion of the former president on his social media.

Gunter, a dermatologist, is the third Republican to run in the GOP primary against Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV). Republican leaders, led by National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Steve Daines (R-MT), are championing the candidacy of retired Army Capt. Sam Brown, who ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2022. Former Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant, an outspoken election denier, is also running.

Gunter faced a tumultuous tenure as ambassador, fueling an unusual amount of staff turnover in his office. At the onset of the pandemic, he moved back to California and handled the job remotely until then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Gunter to return to Reykjavik in May 2020.

dem delegation

Jeffries tells Netanyahu that he hopes the PM will seek a broad consensus on judicial reform

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) walks to a House Democrat caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on May 31, 2023 in Washington, D.C.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting in Jerusalem on Monday that he hoped the current government would seek “a broad consensus across the ideological spectrum” before any further changes are made relating to its plans to overhaul the country’s judiciary. Jeffries, along with Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), is in Israel this week leading a delegation of 25 House Democrats as part of the AIPAC-linked American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash reports.

Shared values: Speaking to journalists at a press conference at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem following the group’s meeting with the prime minister, Jeffries said that despite recent steps taken by Netanyahu’s government, including passing legislation last month that weakens the power of the judiciary on overruling government decisions, “we can continue to lean into the shared democratic values related to the judiciary, which is based on the principles of a respect for the rule of law, and an independent judiciary that serves as a check and balance on other parts of the government.”

Raising concerns: Jeffries told journalists that his group — which includes a number of progressive lawmakers — raised concerns with Netanyahu during their meeting about a recent rise in violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis. “We wanted to get the prime minister’s perspective on how this issue could complicate efforts to eventually achieve peace in the region,” Jeffries explained. “Prime Minister Netanyahu made it clear to us that he doesn’t condone violence, no matter where it originates, and I take him at his word.”

Read the full story here.

rescue mission

Israel, Jewish Agency working to extract Israelis, eligible immigrants out of Ethiopia as fighting escalates

The Israeli government is closely monitoring the fighting in the Amhara region of Ethiopia and working to extract the more than 100 Israeli citizens in the area, as well as the dozens of local Jewish community members waiting to immigrate, as clashes continued between government forces and the Fano militia group, an Israeli official familiar with the matter told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.

Flare-up: The fighting began last week between the Ethiopian National Defence Force and the regional militia group, apparently driven by the national government’s efforts to weaken and disband such paramilitary groups, including those — like Fano — that had worked with the ENDF during Ethiopia’s civil war in Tigray, which ended last November. As battles between Fano and the ENDF escalated in recent days, the Ethiopian government declared a state of emergency, halting almost all travel into and out of Amhara, including from the city of Gondar, home to one of Ethiopia’s largest Jewish communities, which has seen some of the fiercest battles.

Israeli reaction: In response, Immigration and Absorption Minister Ofir Sofer organized an “emergency forum,” made up of representatives from his office, the Foreign Ministry, the National Security Council, the Mossad and the Jewish Agency, according to the Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic.

Read the full story here and subscribe to eJewishPhilanthropy’s Your Daily Phil newsletter here.

author interview

‘I want people to get along’: James McBride on the Black-Jewish neighborhood in his new novel

James McBride/ ‘The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store’ book

Chicken Hill is not a place you want to live. At least, not judging by the first chapter in a new novel by National Book Award-winner James McBride. The mostly fictional Pottstown, Pa., neighborhood, now extinct, was “wretched” and “ramshackle” by the 1970s, he writes at the outset of the book, which sets up a mysterious murder — and then turns back in time, to the 1920s and 1930s, to work up to the 1972 discovery of the body. Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch spoke with McBride in a recent interview about The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which is out today.

Intersecting trajectories: The world that McBride creates in his new novel is a far cry from the exceedingly negative adjectives ascribed to Chicken Hill at the start of the book. His Chicken Hill is a vibrant if slightly rundown neighborhood on the margins of Pottstown, a place where the town’s immigrant Jewish community and its Black residents intersect in ways small and large.

How to get along: “I just wrote the book because I want people to get along,” McBride told JI. “I want people to be happy. I want people to see how we struggle in America as immigrants and how Jewish and Black people manage to get along in this small town.”

Real issues: McBride, 65, is no Pollyanna — his book presents the racial complexities of Jews and Blacks trying to get along and to get ahead, two goals that often come into conflict throughout the story. A Jewish couple at the center of the book, Moshe and Chana Ludlow, grapple with whether to leave the neighborhood for a more upwardly mobile area where many other Jews have moved. But the Ludlows’ fate becomes linked with that of their Black neighbors when they agree to hide a deaf Black boy, at risk of institutionalization, in the theater Moshe owns.

About equality: “I wanted to sort of write something that speaks to the whole business of equality,” McBride said. “It’s hard to find the magical stuff that makes stories go. This isn’t a nonfiction book. This is a book about characters who do things that are courageous, and that are funny.”

Read the full story here.

Worthy Reads

👪 Spirited Away:The Atlantic’s Jennifer Senior reflects on how society treats mentally handicapped individuals, looking to her own family’s experiences. “When I first discovered that my mother had a younger sister, I reacted as if I’d been told about the existence of a new planet. This fact at once astonished me and made an eerie kind of sense, suddenly explaining the gravitational force that had invisibly arranged my family’s movements and behaviors for years. Now I understood why my grandfather spent so many hours in retirement as a volunteer at the Westchester Association for Retarded Citizens. Now I understood my grandmother’s annual trips to the local department store to buy Christmas presents, although we were Jewish. (At the time, my aunt lived in a group home where the residents were taken to church every Sunday.) I now even understood, perhaps, the flickers of melancholy I would see in my grandmother, an otherwise buoyant and intrepid personality, charming and sly and full of wit. And my mom: Where do you start with my mom? For almost two years, she had a sister. Then, at the age of 6 and a half, she watched as her only sibling, almost five years younger, was spirited away. It would be 40 years before she saw her again.” [TheAtlantic]

👟 Sneaker Saga: The Washington Post’s Rachel Tashjian looks at Adidas’ resumption of sales of its Yeezy stockpile, nearly a year after it dissolved its partnership with rapper Ye over his antisemitic comments. “Moral absolution has become an essential component of consumerism in 2023 — touting the green qualities of a product, or the race or gender of the object’s creator, to comfort a shopper. Brands that buck this trend are the subject of intense backlash. Late last year, consumers filmed themselves burning their Balenciaga gear when the brand released a pair of advertisements, one showing children with what appeared to be fetish gear and another with a document referring to a child pornography ruling, which led online conspiracy theorists to infer that it was endorsing child trafficking. Balenciaga is still struggling to bounce back from the scandal. What makes Yeezy different? Are shoppers just too exhausted to keep up with it all? Or did Ye just make really great shoes?” [WashPost]

🧕 Goodbye to the Hijab: In The New Yorker, Azadeh Moaveni spotlights the resistance to Iran’s restrictive modesty laws taking place in girl’s schools around the country. “The inspectors arrived the next morning. The teachers asked six girls from each grade to assemble in the schoolyard. Nina was not among them, but she knew the plan; she sat at her desk, doodling, her heart pounding with excitement. Outside, the winter sunlight cast shadows on the school’s weathered brick walls. One of the girls raised her arm, a cue arranged in a WhatsApp group the night before, and then she and the others pulled off their head scarves and tossed them on the ground. For a moment, no one said anything. Then the girls were told to go back to their classrooms. Nina’s teacher looked up in surprise as her students returned, bareheaded and flushed, but said nothing. The next day, nearly every girl in school showed up without a head scarf.” [NewYorker]

💰 On Offense: The Wall Street Journal’s Max Colchester looks at how Russian billionaires sanctioned following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine are pushing back against the sanctions that have frozen their wealth and paralyzed their businesses. “Western government officials say that the mass sanctioning should be viewed as part of a wider crackdown on Russia, which includes bans of key exports to the country aimed at crippling its economy, moves that have also had a limited effect. They also argue that Russian business people and politicians shouldn’t be allowed to continue with their normal lives while the Kremlin, whose patronage allowed them to grow rich, presses on with an illegal invasion. The aim is ‘to start to peel away the support [for Putin] because oligarchs have an outsize political and economic influence,’ said John Smith, the former director of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and a partner at the law firm Morrison Foerster. ‘We are not at that tipping point yet. But it doesn’t mean that we won’t get to that tipping point.’ Roman Abramovich’s lawyers recently appeared in a Luxembourg courtroom to appeal European Union sanctions against their Russian client, arguing the designation prevented him from ‘intervening effectively’ as a conduit for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, according to court documents.” [WSJ]

⛺ The Campers Aren’t All Right:The New York Times’ Ellen Barry reports on how Jewish sleepaway Camp Nah-Jee-Wah is handling a surge in mental health issues among campers. “In her role at NJY Camps, a network of Jewish overnight camps in Pennsylvania, Ms. [Heather] Klein spends her days sorting serious risks, ordinary unhappiness and squalls of parental anxiety. All day, as campers move in flocks from the dining hall to swimming, to crafts and archery, to their bunks, Ms. Klein zips around camp in a golf cart, outfitted with a fanny pack and a walkie-talkie. Summer camp has always involved a degree of emotional struggle. Homesickness is overcome; high dives braved; bunk mates won over. When adults in the industry refer to a ‘successful camper,’ they often mean one who sticks it out. But youth mental illness is an urgent problem in this country, a challenge the surgeon general has described as ‘the defining public health crisis of our time.’ Between 2001 and 2019, the suicide rate for Americans aged 10 to 19 jumped by 40 percent, and emergency-room visits for self-harm rose by 88 percent.” [NYTimes]

Around the Web

🇺🇦 Ukraine Aid: The White House plans to ask Congress for supplemental funding for Ukraine as soon as this week, with several individuals telling Punchbowl News the requested amount is expected to top $10 billion.

💬 Debate Stage: Former Vice President Mike Pence became the eighth GOP presidential candidate to qualify for the upcoming Republican presidential debate, slated for Aug. 23.

🏫 Campus Beat: Four Jewish professors at the City University of New York are under investigation for “’discrimination’ against BDS and radical Islamist antisemitic activists,” according to advocacy group SAFE CUNY.

📚 Book Buy: Paramount Global has reached an agreement for the sale of book publisher Simon & Schuster to private equity firm KKR for $1.62 billion.

👨‍⚖️ In the Courts: The man accused of firing a gun outside of a Jewish school in Memphis, Tenn., was given a $750,000 bond.

👩 Cuomo’s Fixer: The New York Times reveals that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s sister, Madeline Cuomo, was behind an online campaign to smear her brother’s accusers and to rehabilitate his image.

🤫 Gripe in Private: In The Hill, Douglas Schoen and Saul Mangel argue that President Joe Biden should express his concerns regarding the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul plans privately to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while publicly showing solidarity with the Jewish state.

👏 Role Rave: Collider praises actor David Krumholtz’s performance as physicist Isidore Isaac Rabi in “Oppenheimer,” describing Krumholtz as “the true breakout supporting talent.”

💻 Startup Struggles: Wired spotlights the ambitions of and challenges faced by Palestinian entrepreneurs in the startup scene.

🪧 Gaza Dissent: Officials in Gaza are cracking down on rare protests against Hamas, as tensions in the enclave rise over recent power cuts and the recent accidental death of a man killed in a building demolition.

🌊 Gulf Moves: The U.S. Navy is deploying 3,000 sailors and Marines to the Middle East in response to Iranian moves to seize tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

🤐 Squelching Satire: The Wall Street Journal looks at how free-speech crackdowns around the Arab world are affecting AlHudood, a popular Arabic-language satire site that has been compared to The Onion.

🗳️ On the Ballot: Iran opened registration for candidates for next year’s parliamentary elections.

🌎 Regional Relations:The New York Times looks at the UAE’s relations with China and Russia as it balances its relationship with the U.S.

🕯️ Remembering: Director William Friedkin, who won an Academy Award for “The French Connection,” died at 87. Developer Harvey “Bud” Meyerhoff, who as chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council oversaw the design and development of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, died at 96.

Pic of the Day

Olympic gold-medal gymnast Simone Biles makes a comeback Saturday after a two-year hiatus, performing a floor exercise at the U.S. Classic to Israeli pop star Noa Kirel’s Eurovision 2023 song “Unicorn,” and taking first place in the all-around, vault, floor routine and balance beam.

Birthdays

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman speaks at the 2019 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, March 26, 2019.

U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Trump administration, David Melech Friedman turns 65…

Actor and director, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1980 for “Kramer vs. Kramer” and in 1989 for “Rain Man,” Dustin Hoffman turns 86… Arlington Heights, Ill., resident, Elizabeth Gordon… Dutch diplomat and politician, he served as the speaker of the Dutch House of Representatives, Frans Weisglas turns 77… Greenwood Village, Colo., resident, Robert M. Schwartz… Tampa, Fla., resident, Roy D. Pulliam… Vancouver, Wash., resident, Juliana E. Miles Bagherpour…Former CEO of BusinessGhost, Michael Graubart Levin turns 65… Managing general partner of MLB’s Tampa Bay Rays, Stuart L. Sternberg turns 64… Chess grandmaster, once ranked 8th in the world, he is the director of the Brooklyn Chess Academy, Leonid Yudasin turns 64… White House chief of staff for the first two years of the Biden administration, Ron Klain turns 62… Film director whose works include nine Disney films, Jon Turteltaub turns 60… Digital strategist, Jonah Seiger… Orthodox Jewish blogger (Torahmusings) who serves as the book editor of the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Action magazine, Rabbi Gil Ofer Student… Film and television actress, Lindsay Sloane turns 46… MLB pitcher for 13 seasons and now assistant general manager for the Chicago Cubs, Craig Breslow turns 43… Author, freelance writer and editor, Sophie Flack turns 40… Director at Fundamental Advisors, Bara Lane… Canadian film and television actor, Jacob Benjamin “Jake” Goldsbie turns 35… Communications director at the North Carolina Association of Educators until last week, Sarah Garfinkel… Founder and managing partner at Avid Ventures, Addie Lerner… Director of marketing and communications at Alpha Epsilon Pi, Zachary Pellish… Head of marketing at Provenance, Morgan Furlong… Internet celebrity and fitness model, Jennifer Leigh “Jen” Selter turns 30… Jack Baum… Rob Schwartz…

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