A bipartisan group of 79 House members wrote to the Trump administration on Friday seeking answers about the pause in funding disbursements for a program that provides security grants to vulnerable nonprofits, one of many grant programs affected by an across-the-board funding freeze at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The lawmakers, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), called it “critical” for all institutions that have been awarded a grant from the Nonprofit Security Grant Program to receive their funds. 

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers will reintroduce legislation on Friday reauthorizing the Binational Industrial Research and Development Energy program, an initiative aimed at boosting the energy partnership between the U.S. and Israel, Jewish Insider has learned.

Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Buddy Carter (R-GA), Brad Schneider (D-IL) and Joe Wilson (R-SC) will reintroduce the BIRD Energy and U.S.-Israel Energy Center Reauthorization Act during Friday’s pro forma session. The legislation “extends and expands the successful U.S.-Israel energy partnership through 2034, ensuring continued collaboration on clean energy innovation, energy security, and economic growth in both nations,” according to a release set to go out Friday. 

Just hours before President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to start dismantling the Department of Education, the department’s Office for Civil Rights opened its latest batch of antisemitism investigations into several universities. Jewish legal and education experts were left divided over how the cuts will impact the newest Title VI complaints — and the government’s ability going forward to hold schools accountable for rising antisemitism.  

“We have heard directly from OCR that complaints that we have filed — some of them a while ago and some of them more recently — are being opened for investigation,” Denise Katz-Prober, director of legal initiatives at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told Jewish Insider. “The opening of these investigations does signal that the Department of Education and OCR are being active and forceful in addressing the antisemitism that’s plaguing so many campuses,” she said.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing on the surge of campus antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on March 27, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the committee’s chairman, announced.

The hearing, scheduled for 10 a.m. ET, is titled, “Antisemitic Disruptions on Campus: Ensuring Safe Learning Environments for All Students,” according to an announcement from Cassidy. Witnesses’ names have not been made public yet. 

A group of 44 House Democrats is demanding that the State Department immediately fire Darren Beattie, the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, who has come under bipartisan criticism for past offensive comments and far-right affiliations.

Beattie, who was fired from the first Trump administration for attending a white nationalist event, has voiced white supremacist views, demeaned Black people, women and other minorities and promoted a series of stances at odds with U.S. policy, including brushing off Chinese aggression and genocide of the Uyghur population and expressing support for Russia. Beattie had also personally attacked Secretary of State Marco Rubio online.

The doctor who hired Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University assistant professor and kidney specialist who was deported over the weekend to Lebanon after federal agents said she “openly admitted” to supporting Hezbollah, declined to say whether he would have hired her had he known about her support for terrorists. 

Dr. Douglas Shemin — the former chief of Brown Medicine’s Division of Kidney Diseases and Hypertension, who hired Alawieh in spring 2024 — told Jewish Insider that Alawieh “had a very good background” that included medical training at Yale University. 

A widely followed social media service in the United Arab Emirates is pushing a boycott campaign against Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce platform, after its president endorsed a recent social media comment critical of biased media coverage against Israel.

In a series of dramatically worded Instagram posts on Wednesday, Smashi, a digital information service owned by the Dubai-based media group Augustus Media, took aim at Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s president, over a brief social media remark voicing agreement with a fellow tech entrepreneur who had denounced a news article for uncritically citing casualty figures provided by Hamas.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifted Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) a silver pager, a nod to Israel’s operation last fall against Hezbollah that detonated thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by the terror group’s members in Lebanon, during their meeting in Jerusalem on Wednesday. 

The Pennsylvania senator was given the present alongside his wife, Gisele Fetterman, while the two were hosted by the prime minister and his wife, Sara, in Netanyahu’s Jerusalem office. “What can I give a man who has everything? How about giving him a beeper? This is a silver-plated beeper. The real beeper is, like, one-tenth the weight. It’s nothing, but it changes history,” Netanyahu said to Fetterman in a video shared by the prime minister’s office of the gift exchange.