Daily Kickoff
Good Monday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we preview the battle on Capitol Hill facing Jack Lew ahead of his first confirmation hearing to be ambassador to Israel, and report on the Israelis who are stepping in to help amid the government’s faltering assistance to survivors and the families of the Hamas terror attack. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Micah Goodman, Rep. Ritchie Torres and Yossi Sagol.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spoke from Israel on Sunday while leading a bipartisan Senate delegation to show solidarity following last week’s Hamas massacre, Haley Cohen reports for Jewish Insider.
Schumer told reporters that the Senate “will pass a bipartisan appropriations bill as soon as we can,” adding it cannot wait for the House to “straighten itself out,” a reference to the chaos surrounding the House speakership. A strong bipartisan package will pressure the House, Schumer said, adding that the “generous” package will come next week.
Earlier on Sunday, Schumer met with 12 families whose members are being held hostage by Hamas. “I was in tears hearing the stories,” he said, adding that it was a day he will remember forever.
The delegation — which also includes Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) — met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, National Unity party leader Benny Gantz, now a member of the emergency unity government, and President Isaac Herzog. Schumer said these meetings provided a clearer picture of what aid Israel needs.
Schumer’s visit follows trips to the region last week by Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Speaking last week alongside Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Austin said that Hamas’ atrocities were “worse than what I saw with ISIS.”
Blinken, who traveled to Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates — where he visited the Abrahamic Family House (see video) — Qatar and Saudi Arabia over the weekend, will return to Israel this week for continued discussions with Israeli officials.
In a phone call on Saturday, Netanyahu invited President Joe Biden to Israel later this week. Biden also tapped Ambassador David Satterfield as the special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, tasked with leading “a whole-of-government campaign to mitigate the humanitarian fallout of Hamas’ terrorist attack against Israel, supporting critical efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is slated to arrive in Israel tomorrow, days after a delegation of European officials visited the country.
Back in Washington, Biden’s nominee to be ambassador to Israel, former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, will face an uphill battle this week as Democrats attempt to push through his confirmation, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. Following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Lew’s confirmation process was fast-tracked, with a confirmation hearing scheduled in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. But Lew will face significant pushback from Republicans in the Senate.
“Jack Lew is an Iran sympathizer who has no business being our ambassador,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It’s bad for the United States, it’s bad for Israel to have an Iran sympathizer as our ambassador to that country. He helped Iran evade American sanctions and he lied to Congress about it.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, offered similar criticisms on Fox Business on Friday, saying that he has “real concerns” that Lew has “lied to Congress in the past about some of the financial arrangements that were made under the Obama administration.” The accusations of lying to Congress relate to allegations, leveled in a 2018 Senate report, that Lew and other Obama administration officials lied to Congress about granting Iran access to the U.S. financial system as part of the Iran nuclear deal. Read the full story here.
gaza war: day 10
In show of support for Israel, U.S. ramps up its troops in Mediterranean
The U.S. continued to ramp up its support for Israel over the weekend, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordering an additional aircraft carrier – the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower – to begin making its way to the Eastern Mediterranean. “The Eisenhower CSG will join the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which arrived earlier this week,” a Department of Defense statement said. In addition, the statement said, the U.S. Air Force will also deploy to the region squadrons of F-15, F-16 and A-10 fighter aircraft, Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash reports.
Biden’s words: In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday night, President Joe Biden, who is reportedly mulling a trip to Israel in the coming days, said the U.S. would provide the Jewish state with “everything they need.” He said he believed that Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that carried out the mass brutal attack against Israel on Oct. 7, should be “eliminated,” adding that it would be a mistake for Israel to reoccupy Gaza. The president also warned Hezbollah, the Shiite militia group in Lebanon, not to spark an additional conflict on Israel’s northern border.
Throughout the weekend: The IDF continued its retaliation assault on Gaza with military jets striking key Hamas targets and individuals, as well as limited ground raids inside the territory in order to shore up the border area and collect critical intelligence, a spokesman for the army told journalists on Saturday.
Death toll and hostage count: Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the death toll from Hamas’ brutal terror attack and the fallout this past week has caused the death toll in Israel to surpass 1,400 people, with a further 3,500 people injured, some critically. In a televised statement on Saturday, IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said that the families of some 289 soldiers had been notified of their deaths in the Oct. 7 attack. On Monday, Hagari said that the army had been in contact with more than 199 families informing them that their relatives were likely being held hostage in Gaza by Palestinian terrorists.
shifting sentiment
Squad members face new vulnerability over anti-Israel activism
In the wake of Hamas’ bloody rampage in Israel — and the equivocating reactions to it by the far-left flank of the Democratic Party — some of the most prominent members of the Squad are facing the biggest political backlash they’ve seen in their political careers, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.
‘Scarlet letter’: “This is a scarlet letter that far-left candidates will have to wear,” Jake Dilemani, a Democratic strategist in New York, told JI last week. “There is a 100% chance that members of the Squad are going to be tagged with these far-left positions that are out of sync with the mainstream of the party and the general public.”
Sharp contrasts: Bhavini Patel, a councilwoman in the Pittsburgh area who recently launched a House campaign with backing from Jewish and pro-Israel activists, is drawing sharp contrasts on the conflict between Israel and Hamas as she seeks to knock off freshman Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA). “Our member of Congress waited to speak out, and then offered qualified remarks,” Patel said last in a statement to JI last week. “It’s not enough.”
Minneapolis matchup: In Minneapolis, Don Samuels, a former city councilman, is preparing to announce a rematch against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), an outspoken progressive whose fierce criticism of Israel he plans to highlight in the lead-up to next year’s primary. Samuels is likely to announce his campaign in mid-November, according to a Democratic operative working on the launch.
Backlash to Bowman: And as he weighs a challenge to Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), whose increasingly hostile positions on Israel have faced backlash in his heavily Jewish district, George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, has indicated that he could mount a challenge as soon as next month. “I’m mindful of the speculation that swirls about me and the parameters of what a race would mean,” he told JI on Friday. “But whenever and whatever I’ve decided to do, I’ll do it full force.”
Read the full story here.
Torres’ take: In the New York Post, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) condemns the left’s silence on last weekend’s Hamas terror attacks. “Something is rotten in the state of America…. The time has come to confront not only the symptoms but the disease: a Democratic Socialist industrial complex that indoctrinates young Americans with an anti-Israel hatred so virulent that it renders them indifferent to the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Anti-Israel extremism, which has been given a veneer of mainstream respectability in law schools and legislatures, is aided and abetted by the sheer spinelessness of so-called ‘leaders’ — from public officials to the presidents of colleges and universities.”
nation in crisis
As death toll rises, Israelis fuming at government’s failures
As Israelis continue to count the dead from the mass terror attack carried out by Hamas, and brace for a likely prolonged war in Gaza, the country is fuming over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to prevent the heinous assault — and the government’s delayed and disorganized response in helping the thousands of victims and addressing the families of those still missing. Even as the government’s failures in the face of the worst attack the Jewish people have experienced since the Holocaust continue to come to light, Israeli citizens have shown incredible resilience, Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash, Tamara Zieve and Lahav Harkov and eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross report.
Mass mobilization: Thousands of ordinary people have stepped in to assist where the government has fallen short, providing shelter and essential items – food, clothing and emotional support – to the estimated 50,000 Israelis who have fled from southern border communities and to the soldiers, including 360,000 reservists, as they gear up for what military leaders are warning could be a prolonged war.
Seeking accountability: On Saturday, one week after Hamas’ attack in which more than 1,400 people were killed and an estimated 160 people were taken hostage in the Gaza Strip, hundreds joined a vigil in Tel Aviv being held by the families of those still missing. Initiated by Avihai Brodtz, whose wife, Hagar, and three children are being held in the Palestinian enclave, many of those who joined held signs with the names of the missing and others waved Israeli flags or displayed banners saying Netanyahu was responsible for the attack. Some called on him, and other members of the government, to resign.
dem divisions
Most progressive Democrats tempering calls for Israeli restraint against Hamas
A week into Israel’s war with Hamas and ahead of Israel’s expected ground invasion into Gaza, Democrats’ factional differences on Israel policy are showing some early signs of reemerging, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. But even some progressive Democrats, who typically put pressure on Israel to de-escalate and cease-fire, are stopping short of the criticism of Israeli actions they’ve employed in previous rounds of conflict.
The letter: On Friday, a group of 55 House Democrats, led by progressive Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Jim McGovern (D-MA) — who have been frequently critical of Israeli policy — wrote a letter to President Joe Biden urging the administration to caution Israel that its response needs to be carried out according to international law. “We write to express our concerns regarding the unfolding humanitarian situation in Gaza as Israel responds to Hamas’ terrorist attack,” the letter reads.
What’s missing: The letter and other similar statements do not, however, explicitly call for a cease-fire or de-escalation, as have been common among progressive Democrats in previous rounds of conflict. The softening language, even from leading House progressives who are often critical of Israel, suggests that the shock and brutality of Hamas’ attack, at least in the short term, show how the politics surrounding Israel within the Democratic Party have shifted. The Hamas attack has, at least for now, pushed Democratic attitudes back toward sympathy for Israel, new polling has shown. Most of the lawmakers who signed onto the letter are also co-sponsoring a resolution that expresses staunch support for Israel, which doesn’t make any mention of the Palestinians.
eye on europe
Pushback in Brussels against top EU officials showing strong support for Israel
Hamas’ bloody rampage in southern Israel is exposing deep fault lines among European Union leaders, as a call to cut off funding to the Palestinians and shows of support for Israel were met with fierce push-back. The situation became further muddled on Saturday when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made a solidarity visit to Israel, and announced a day after that the group she leads will triple its humanitarian aid to Gaza. All of it has left EU funding for the Palestinians an open question, and the internal debate — including a review of such aid — is being met with incredulity by non-government organizations working to strengthen Europe-Israel relations, Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov reports.
Follow the money: Emmanuel Navon, CEO of ELNET, one such NGO, told JI: “How can you possibly review and monitor where the money is going when it’s being spent by Hamas?…Hamas is not a European country that honestly fills out forms pledging the money will only go to hospitals and writes reports. Any money to the Gaza strip is controlled by Hamas.”
Digital dustup: The dustup began last week with a series of posts. “As the biggest donor of the Palestinians, the European Commission is putting its full development portfolio under review, worth a total of EUR 691m,” European Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Oliver Varhelyi posted last Monday. “All payments immediately suspended. All projects put under review. All new budget proposals, [including] for 2023 postponed until further notice. Comprehensive assessment of the whole portfolio.”
Back and forth: Varhelyi’s statement set off a firestorm in Brussels that has European commissioners squabbling about cutting aid to the Palestinians while also pledging to increase it, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen facing criticism for being too pro-Israel, after she paid a solidarity visit without doing the usual throat-clearing about international law.
ivy league ire
Harvard donors push university to express support for Israel, threatening to pull funding and quitting boards
A growing number of prominent Harvard University alumni are condemning the school’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis, seeing it as insufficient and condoning terrorism. Some are threatening to pull funding if Harvard doesn’t change course — while others have already made the move, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen reports.
Sagol’s statement: In two letters sent on Saturday, one to the university’s president and the other to the dean of Harvard Business School, Yossi Sagol, chairman of Sagol Holdings Corporation and 2008 HBS alum, said he will withhold his recent donation to the business school and instead give it to the families of victims of the terrorist attacks if the school does not more clearly express its support for Israel and its condemnation of the Hamas terror group. Sagol would not disclose the amount he donated to HBS.
More from Cambridge: Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer and his wife, Batia, announced on Friday they are quitting Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government executive board in protest over how university leaders have responded to the massacre. Ofer is ranked No. 80 on Bloomberg’s billionaire index.
And at UPenn: Jon Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah and a GOP candidate for president in 2012, told University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill on Saturday that his family will halt donations to the university, joining a growing number of prominent alumni condemning American university responses to Hamas’ massacre of Israelis last week. The Jon M. Huntsman Hall and the Jon Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at UPenn are both named in honor of the Huntsman family.
Impartiality ‘no longer an option’: Huntsman wrote in the letter, “Moral relativism has fueled the university’s race to the bottom and sadly now has reached a point where remaining impartial is no longer an option.” Huntsman, a 1987 Harvard graduate whose family has donated tens of millions to Penn over the course of three generations, wrote that the university had become “almost unrecognizable” due to administrators’ response to antisemitism.
Situation at Stanford: Administrators at the Bay Area university are investigating claims that an instructor called Israel “a colonizer” and forced Jewish students to stand in the back of the classroom, claiming “That’s what Israel does to Palestinians.”
Read the full story here and sign up for eJewishPhilanthropy’s Your Daily Phil newsletter here.
Worthy Reads
Hitting Close to Home: NBC News’ Peter Nicholas, Monica Alba, Peter Alexander and Megan Lebowitz report on the atmosphere in the White House as it carries on with official business as staffers grapple on a personal level with the terror attacks in Israel. “A White House official working on the response to the attack said that at different times this week, every member of the team has looked at one another teary-eyed. In meetings, people will start speaking and their voices will crack, another official said. Some Biden administration aides have family members or friends who are serving in the Israeli military. As the body count rises, they’ve been carrying out assignments while texting loved ones to make sure they’re safe. ‘We deal with mass casualty events with some amount of frequency on the national security team,’ a senior official said. ‘But this one has at times felt like more than any one person can bear. It’s clear people are carrying their grief with them.’” [NBCNews]
Campus Conundrum: The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf examines how Hamas’ terror attack is playing out on American campuses. “But one cannot cheer what Hamas did and retain moral high ground; nor can one declare solidarity with campaigns of civilian slaughter and remain in solidarity with liberal humanists, progressive wonks, or adherents of international human rights or the beloved community. Though many on the left, including many critics of Israel, bear no responsibility for its pro-Hamas faction, newly aware observers cannot help but wonder what flawed ideas informed the violence-endorsing statements. So this episode will rightly cause some who deferred to leftists on social justice to regard their views with less deference and more skepticism. Virtue signaling on campus will change as radical views are seen as less virtuous. New scrutiny will be applied to concepts like ‘decolonization.’ Academics who oppose othering and dehumanization should be newly attentive to the ways colonizer and oppressor can be misused to justify atrocities.” [TheAtlantic]
The Human Shield Edge: The New York Times’ Bret Stephens suggests that Hamas bears full responsibility for Israeli and Palestinian deaths resulting from the Oct. 7 terror attack. “Hamas also achieves practical and propagandistic goals by putting Palestinians in harm’s way. More civilians in combat zones mean more human shields for its forces. More dead and wounded Palestinians mean more sympathy for its side and more condemnation of Israel. That’s why Hamas turned Gaza’s central hospital into its headquarters during the 2014 conflict. It’s why it stored rockets in schools. It’s why it has used mosques to store guns. It’s why it fires rockets from Gaza’s densely populated areas. It does all this knowing that Israel, which has agreed to abide by the laws of war, tries to avoid hitting those targets — and, when it does hit them, that it will result in accusations of war crimes and diplomatic demands for restraint. Either way, Hamas gains an edge.” [NYTimes]
Refugee Relocation: In The Wall Street Journal, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz and Jonathan Schanzer call on Hamas’ benefactors in the region to absorb Palestinians fleeing the Gaza Strip. “But Egypt doesn’t need to be the final destination for Palestinians looking to escape. Cairo should call for a special session of the Arab League to wrestle with the sensitive topic of Gazan refugees. Nations that have normalized relations with Israel — such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco — and those that could in the future, like Saudi Arabia, might then discuss a novel solution: urging Hamas’s sponsors and enablers to take responsibility. Iran, Hamas’s chief financier and arms supplier, should absorb the majority of Gazans looking to flee. Talks over the summer already set the stage for direct flights between Tehran and Cairo. The regime has cynically boosted Palestinian jihadists for decades, which has brought misery and destruction not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq — anywhere terror proxies operate.” [WSJ]
Hamas and the Academy: U.S. News & World Report executive chairman and CEO Eric Gertler writes that university presidents need to reconsider how they are responding to Hamas’ terror attack and the fallout on their campuses. “But what we have seen forces us to again confront the type of world in which we want to live. Civilized vs. extremist? How will we define the rules and values for how we conduct ourselves in this world? This is about human rights – and it is existential for all of us. Within this context, university presidents and deans must confront a particular challenge as some of their constituents – faculty and students – seem to have lost sight of the values that have moved the world forward. Many have read the initial response by the leaders of Harvard University reacting to a statement released by 34 student groups supporting Hamas’ actions. It was a watered down statement to incorporate the views of 18 deans and administrators at Harvard – and subsequently criticized by a former Harvard president questioning the values of the institution he used to lead. The result: newly appointed President Claudine Gay released a second and stronger statement condemning the barbaric attacks. Harvard is not alone. Similar battles of words and actions are occurring on university campuses across the country. The presidents of many universities must now answer to the facts. What they do and what they say matters.” [USNews]
Worthy Listen: Appearing on the “What Matters Now” podcast, Micah Goodman considers the challenges Israel faces in the region and in the West. “There’s two emotions we have to be thinking about: love and fear. We want love. We want Western civilization to love us. We want Bono to sing songs about us. We want Madonna to share stories on Instagram about how much she admires us and loves us. That’s what we want in the West. We want to be loved in the West. In the Middle East, we don’t want to be loved. We want to be feared. It’s a different emotion. We want that Hezbollah will have a panic attack when they think about the Israeli Defense Forces. We want Iran to shiver when it thinks about the possibility of a military interaction with Israel. We want the Middle East to have fear from us. We want two things: We want love and we want fear. You want love from the West. You want fear from the Middle East…Everything that we are going to do to restore the fear is going to erode the love. Everything we do that will guarantee that the Middle East is afraid of Israelis — of these crazy, unpredictable Israelis — everything we do in order to build that myth back again, it’s going to make people in the West not like us, not love us. And the other way around, if we will try to keep the West loving us and writing songs about us, we will not restore the fear of the Middle East from us. So it’s a zero-sum game.” [WhatMattersNow]
Around the Web
Haley’s View: The New York Times looks at former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s relationship with Israel through the lens of her time in Turtle Bay.
Testing the Waters: Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) is conducting outreach in Democratic circles in New Hampshire as he mulls a potential primary challenge to President Joe Biden.
Domestic Disturbance: FBI Director Chris Wray warned of an uptick in domestic threats following last weekend’s Hamas attack.
Crypto Crackdown: Cryptocurrency critics on Capitol Hill are preparing to ramp up their efforts to regulate the industry, following last week’s terror attack in Israel; Hamas is believed to have received $134 million in cryptocurrency since 2021.
Fundraising Falters: Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), who are both facing reelection hurdles in their respective states, raised less in the third quarter than each did in the quarter prior.
Platform Problem: Speaking at New York’s Temple Emanu-El on Friday night, New York City Mayor Eric Adams blasted celebrities who have used their public platforms to “spew out” antisemitism.
Florida Flight: Nearly 300 Floridians were repatriated to the U.S. after the Gov. Ron DeSantis authorized their evacuation from Israel following the cancellation of most flights out of Ben Gurion Airport.
Crime Report: A Palestinian-American boy in Chicago was killed and his mother injured by the family’s landlord, who now faces charges of first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, two counts of a hate crime and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
Turtle Bay Talk: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called for Israel to rethink the evacuation order it issued to parts of the Gaza Strip, writing in The New York Times that any resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “requires full recognition of the circumstances of both Israelis and Palestinians, of both their realities and both their perspectives.”
Poison Pen: Dozens of senior showrunners jointly signed a letter criticizing the Writers Guild of America for its silence following the Hamas attack.
Next Gen: The New York Times talks to young American Jews about how they feel about the Hamas terror attacks — and how their social circles are responding.
Talking to a Terrorist: The New Yorker interviews Hamas senior political leader Mousa Abu Marzouk.
Revisionist History: In a sit-down with Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi denied — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that his country has ever engaged in antisemitism or persecuted its Jewish population.
Threats from Tehran: Iran threatened to intervene if Israel moves forward with ground operations in Gaza.
Spy Saga: The New York Times does a deep dive into the operations of Egypt’s spy service, following Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-NJ) indictment on charges of serving as a foreign agent to Cairo.
Mall Matters: The Wall Street Journal reports on how Carl Icahn’s bet against a mall in upstate New York has triggered claims from the magnate that the market is rigged.
Remembering: Poet Louise Glück, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2020, died at 80.
Pic of the Day
Israeli soldiers stationed along Israel’s border with Lebanon take a moment for prayer yesterday.
Birthdays
Film director, producer, screenwriter and creator of “The Naked Gun” franchise, David Zucker turns 76…
Israeli attorney, chairman of Maccabi Tel Aviv Basketball, Shimon Mizrahi turns 84… Retired CFO of Amtrak, Midway Airlines and Airlines Reporting Corporation, Alfred Samuel Altschul turns 84… National president of the Zionist Organization of America, Morton A. Klein turns 76… Professor of economics at Smith College and author of 24 books, Andrew S. Zimbalist turns 76… Director of strategy at AIPAC, Dr. Marvin C. Feuer… Novelist, short story writer and essayist, Elinor Lipman turns 73… Executive director of Clark University Hillel, Jeff Narod… Member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, David Linsky turns 66… Bestselling French novelist, one of whose books was made into Steven Spielberg’s “Just like Heaven,” Marc Levy turns 62… President of the American Academy in Berlin, he was the coordinator for counterterrorism during the Obama administration, Daniel Benjamin turns 62… Otolaryngologist who also specializes in facial and reconstructive surgery, he is married to the daughter of President Biden, Howard David Krein, M.D. turns 57… General partner at Battery Ventures Israel’s office, Scott Tobin… Actress best known for her television roles in “Undressed,” “Santa Barbara” and “8 Simple Rules,” Kala Lynne Savage turns 45… Founder and president of Bright Power, Jeff Perlman turns 44… Retired basketball player for the Seattle Storm of the Women’s National Basketball Association, she has five Olympic gold medals, Sue Bird turns 43… Founder and CEO at Social Studies, Inc., he is also the founder of The Gramlist, Brandon Jared Perlman… Four-time U.S. Army light-middleweight boxing champion who boxed with a Star of David on his trunks, Boyd “Rainmaker” Melson turns 42… Product management lead at the Washington Post, Jason Langsner… West Coast regional director at Foundation for Jewish Camp, Margalit C. Rosenthal… Deputy director of operations at NYC Health + Hospitals, Avi Fink… Director of communications at Mark43, Devora Kaye… Account executive at Joele Frank, Sam Ginsberg…