Daily Kickoff
Good Wednesday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we spotlight potential GOP vice presidential pick and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, talk to Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt about how rising global antisemitism is impacting elections at home and abroad and report on the launch of the first-ever Knesset-House Parliamentary Friendship Group. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: David Ellison, Ivanka Trump and Rabbi David Wolpe.
Ed. note: The next Daily Kickoff will arrive on Monday, July 8. Happy Fourth of July!
What We’re Watching
- All eyes are on Washington today as President Joe Biden faces increasing pressure to drop his reelection bid following last week’s debate. Biden will meet for lunch today with Vice President Kamala Harris, as polling shows her with a formidable showing in a theoretical matchup against former President Donald Trump. As the two meet for lunch, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients will hold an all-staff call for White House staffers. This evening, Biden will speak on a call to Democratic governors. Some, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker — both of whom have been floated as possible presidential candidates — are flying to Washington to attend the meeting in person. More below.
- Voters in the U.K. will head to the polls tomorrow, with Labour expected to win in a landslide victory. Even U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a Conservative, appears resigned to his party’s upcoming election loss, tweeting yesterday encouraging voter turnout to “stop the supermajority.”
- Iranians head to the polls on Friday for the runoff between former nuclear negotiator and hard-liner Saeed Jalili and cardiac surgeon Masoud Pezeshkian. Turnout is expected to be low, owing to widespread distrust in the government and elections.
- And in France on Sunday, voters will cast ballots in the final round of elections between the country’s opposing far-right and far-left parties. With just days to go, more than 200 candidates — largely from the country’s leftist parties — withdrew from Sunday’s elections in an effort to form a united front against Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party.
- The U.S. Embassy in Israel is hosting its annual Fourth of July celebration this evening in Jerusalem.
- Reps. David Kustoff (R-TN) and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) are in Israel today. This morning, Kustoff was at the Knesset for Speaker Amir Ohana’s launch of the Knesset-House Parliamentary Friendship Group. Gottheimer, who was in the United Arab Emirates before traveling to Israel, will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today. More below.
What You Should Know
The dam is breaking.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) on Tuesdaycalled for President Joe Biden to step aside from the presidential race, the first elected Democratic lawmaker to do so, with several additional elected officials expressing lukewarm enthusiasm at the prospect of Biden continuing to run, Jewish Insider Editor-in-Chief Josh Kraushaar writes.
Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) slammed the Biden campaign in a Semafor interview for its “dismissive attitude towards people who are raising questions for discussion.”
The New York Times, in a sign of the shifting media focus on Biden’s mental acuity, published a front-page expose on the president’s health, headlined: “Biden’s Lapses Are Increasingly Common, According to Some of Those in the Room.”
The growing alarm in Democratic circles over Biden’s ability to effectively run against former President Donald Trump comes as a new CNN poll, conducted after last week’s debate, found that Biden performs notably worse than every other Democrat tested against Trump – including Vice President Kamala Harris.
The poll finds Trump now leading Biden by six points, 49-43%, while Harris would keep the race within the margin of error, only trailing Trump 47-45%. All other Democrats tested, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, performed better against Trump than Biden.
New battleground state polling numbers leaked to Puck from a trusted Democratic pollster show Biden trailing by significant margins in battleground states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada, with the president running neck-and-neck with Trump in Democratic-leaning states like New Hampshire, Virginia and New Mexico. That portends a Trump landslide, one that would likely sweep in unified GOP control of Washington.
Biden’s campaign is hastily trying to prove he can handle unscripted events, scheduling a Friday interview with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, and holding an event in battleground Wisconsin the same day. Biden will also be holding a press conference at next week’s NATO summit in Washington, D.C. Those events may prove to be the last best chance to convince the American public that Biden is up to the job for another four years.
But as polls continue to show the damage in the aftermath of Biden’s disastrous debate, along with fresh data showing Harris running a more competitive race, expect growing calls for a change at the top of the ticket.
The only realistic way to replace Biden without creating a political mess is convincing Biden to step aside and anointing Harris as the heir apparent.
Harris is likely not the strongest candidate that Democrats could field (in a vacuum), but the reality is that Democrats don’t need their strongest candidate in this political crisis, but a nominee who can keep up with the typical expectations of a presidential candidate in the homestretch of a consequential campaign.
running mate debate
Doug Burgum emerges as veepstakes favorite of pro-Israel Republicans
As former President Donald Trump prepares to announce his running mate before this month’s GOP convention, some of the party’s leading pro-Israel donors are weighing in to voice their approval of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who is a finalist on the vice presidential shortlist. Burgum, a traditional conservative who briefly ran for president last year before dropping out and endorsing Trump, is not a household name to national audiences. But the wealthy former Microsoft executive has in recent months emerged as a top pick for vice president — and an attractive choice for some erstwhile Nikki Haley champions who have raised concerns about another leading contender, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), over his America First foreign policy views, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.
Mideast policy: Fred Zeidman, a top GOP donor who had backed Haley for president, said he was impressed with Burgum’s address at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership summit in Las Vegas shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, when he met privately with the governor for an hour-long conversation that touched on Middle East policy. “The thing that always stands out to me is his support of Israel — not only what he had to say about it in his speech, but also back in private conversation,” Zeidman said in an interview with JI on Monday. “He understands it, and for that reason I don’t question his support under any circumstance.”
fighting antisemitism
Lipstadt: Dilemma faced by French Jews in elections is similar to challenges for U.S. Jews
Since French President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections last month, French Jews have faced an agonizing choice: support a far-right party with historical ties to Holocaust deniers, or vote for Macron after he endorsed a far-left party with a prominent member who has called the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks a “legitimate action.” In an interview with Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch on Monday, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, called the “conundrum” facing French Jews a “microcosm … for so much of what we’re seeing. Where do I go?” she said. “If I’m a college student, where do I find my home? What’s a comfortable place to be?”
Striking similarities: As a State Department official, Lipstadt’s remit is foreign policy: working with foreign governments to fix their own issues associated with antisemitism and advance shared global priorities combating hate. But she hinted that the discussions among French Jews who feel stuck between two political extremes that espouse different forms of antisemitism mirror those happening stateside. “I would guess that there’s some people who would not see it as that different from some conversations going on in the United States,” Lipstadt said.
text trouble
Columbia administrators mocked Jewish community concerns in private texts
Columbia University administrators mocked concerns in the Jewish community about antisemitism and anti-Israel activity on campus, as well as accusing the community of using the issue for financial and other gain, in private text messages released on Tuesday by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Some of the text messages, exchanged between administrators during a panel on Jewish life on campus, were revealed last month in a Washington Free Beacon report, which included images of the text chat captured by an onlooker. The full text chat, requested by the committee, reveals a further level of vitriol, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.
Mockery messaging: The texts from the officials appeared to downplay and denigrate the concerns expressed by the Jewish campus leaders and students. “Comes from such a place of privilege … hard to hear the woe is me, we need to huddle at the Kraft center. Huh??” Susan Chang-Kim, the chief administrator of Columbia College texted the group. At the end of the panel, Cristen Kromm, dean of undergraduate student life, sent two vomiting emojis into the chat, to which Chang-Kim responded, “I’m going to throw up.” Kromm added, “amazing what $$$$ can do.”
pushing for a probe
ADL urges state AGs to investigate anti-Israel groups, alleging violations
The Anti-Defamation League is urging the attorney generals of New York and Arizona to investigate WESPAC (Westchester Peace Action Committee) and the Alliance for Global Justice, accusing the anti-Israel nonprofit groups of potentially running afoul of federal law. WESPAC has been accused of funding anti-Israel encampments on campuses, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.
Sponsoring scrutiny: In letters to New York Attorney General Letitia James and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, Steven Sheinberg, the ADL’s chief legal officer, highlighted that the AFGJ sponsors the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which Israel considers a subsidiary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist group and which has supported Hamas.
friendship goals
Knesset, House launch parliamentary friendship group to strengthen U.S.-Israel ties
The first-ever Knesset-House Parliamentary Friendship Group held its inaugural meeting in Jerusalem on Tuesday, with its American chairman, Rep. David Kustoff (R-TN), and Israeli MKs Boaz Bismuth (Likud) and Idan Roll (Yesh Atid), as well as Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana in attendance. The theme running through the event was shared democratic values between Israel and the U.S., and the need to protect those values from enemies who seek to destroy them, Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov reports.
Common threats: Kustoff warned that “we are facing a rebuke of Western cultural values, a rejection of a free and liberated society, a direct attack on morality, truth, reason and goodwill. … We are fighting barbaric terrorism, combating a global enemy. … The relationship between the U.S. and Israel is a true friendship, rooted not only in shared values, but the willingness to protect those values in the face of adversity.”
Worthy Reads
A Better PM: The New York Times’ Bret Stephens posits how “a better prime minister” would govern Israel, laying out how Benjamin Netanyahu or another Israeli official could lead on the Palestinian issue, relations with Washington, the war with Hezbollah and other key areas. “A better Israeli prime minister would articulate the real stakes in this war — not a war of Israel against Hamas, but a multifront campaign against an ‘Axis of Resistance’ that includes not just Hezbollah and the Houthis but also their masters in Iran and its allies in Russia, Syria, China and North Korea. In other words, the fighting we see in Gaza isn’t a regional war between Jews against Muslims. It’s a battle in a long global struggle between the free and unfree worlds. A better Israeli prime minister would do this and more. Israel’s crises will abate when it gets one.” [NYTimes]
A Different Kind of Progressive: Politico’s Natalie Fertig profiles Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), the millennial progressive Democrat who flipped a red district in Washington State last cycle and whose votes have on occasion riled up the far-left flank of her party. “The intense anger directed at Gluesenkamp Perez reveals an interesting and fraught divide inside the Democratic Party. While party leaders are quite happy to retain her seat in a closely divided House, she has become engaged in a generational ideological debate with much of the party’s left flank — most prominently grassroots groups passionate about student loan debt forgiveness and support for Gaza — over who gets to define what helping working-class Americans actually looks like.” [Politico]
Word on the Street
In an attempt to prove President Joe Biden’s mental sharpness, White House officials leaked to The New York Times that the president “lectured” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and threatened that he’s “out” and Israel is “on [its] own” if the Israeli prime minister retaliated too forcefully against April’s Iranian missile attack…
Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), who represents one of the few Democratic-held districts that Trump carried against Biden in 2020, predicted in a Bangor Daily News op-ed that the former president will win in November, “and democracy will be just fine”…
Biden and Netanyahu are expected to meet when the latter travels to Washington later this month to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress, with details for the meeting, likely to take place at the White House, still being hammered out…
Hezbollah Deputy Leader Sheikh Naim Kassem said the terror group would cease its attacks on Israel if an immediate cease-fire was reached in Gaza…
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and House Democratic leaders endorsed embattled Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) a month ahead of her primary against St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell; House Democratic leadership has largely backed Democratic incumbents…
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rabbi David Wolpe suggests that despite rising antisemitism, the U.S. is still safe for Jews, and that the decision to stay in the U.S. rather than immigrate to Israel is “one vital for Jews and for America”…
Police in the Philadelphia suburb of Wynnewood charged a Drexel University professor with half a dozen offenses related to the theft of pro-Israel lawn signs; Mariana Chilton had previously advised Congress and the Department of Agriculture on issues related to food insecurity…
An arts center in St. Louis shut down an exhibition displaying pro-Palestinian works over concerns that some of the pieces contained antisemitic themes…
The Los Angeles Times corrected a photo caption that referred to Jewish groups, including the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, as “Pro-Israel vigilante/security companies for Zionist Defense training” after criticism from Jewish officials in the city…
Ivanka Trump sat down with Lex Friedman for a wide-ranging three-hour interview…
Ron Howard and Brian Glazer’s Imagine Entertainment is looking for a potential buyer…
David Ellison’s Skydance reached a preliminary agreement to buy Shari Redstone’s National Amusements for $1.75 billion, and plans to merge Skydance with Paramount Global…
A new online exhibition hosted by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan showcases the diary of a Jewish teenager in Vilnius who lived in that city’s ghetto before his murder by the Nazis in 1943…
Two people were wounded, one of them critically, in a stabbing attack in the town of Karmiel in northern Israel this morning…
Screenwriter Robert Towne, whose “Chinatown” won the 1974 Oscar for best screenplay, died at 89…
Pic of the Day
Yaakov and Noa Argamani attend the funeral of Liora Argamani, who died on Monday, several weeks after her daughter’s rescue from Hamas captivity.
Birthdays
Musician, best known as a harmonicist, Annie Raines turns 55…
WEDNESDAY: Civil rights attorney known for many high-profile cases, born Gloria Rachel Bloom, Gloria Allred turns 83… Winner of the Israel Prize in 1998, professor of mathematics at both Hebrew U and Rutgers, Saharon Shelah turns 79… Founder of an eponymous charitable foundation and a political office, Barbara Fish Lee turns 79… Leader at March of the Living in Miami-Dade and in Boca Raton, Leon Weissberg… Psychologist and board member of many non-profit organizations, Dr. Gail (Giti) Bendheim… Israeli celebrity chef, author of 32 cookbooks and culinary columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, Yisrael Aharoni turns 74… Actor who has appeared in film and television in the U.S., U.K. and Israel, Yair “Jonah” Lotan turns 51… Chief development officer at Sixpoint, Suzanne Greene… Pini Herman… Head of the pediatric oncology solid tumor program and associate professor of pediatrics at the Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York, Dr. Carolyn Fein Levy…
THURSDAY: Trial and appellate lawyer at Kreindler & Kreindler LLP where he has represented plaintiffs in commercial aviation accidents and other mass torts, Marc S. Moller turns 85… Journalist, attorney, author, political commentator and former television host, Geraldo Rivera turns 81… Philanthropist and former Wall Street junk bond titan, now chairman of the Milken Institute, Michael Milken turns 78… Activist, writer and Huffington Post blogger, Paul Rogat Loeb turns 72… News editor for YNetNews, Marcy Oster… Heiress and businesswoman, Jane Lauder Warsh turns 51… U.S. circuit judge of the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, David Ryan Stras turns 50… Partner at ICONYC labs, Eyal Bino… Pitching coach for MLB’s Chicago White Sox, Ethan Russell Katz turns 41… Cardiothoracic ICU nurse in NYC, he was profiled in the New York Times in 2020 for his religious work with dying coronavirus patients, Yaakov Shereshevsky…
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