Daily Kickoff: Inside Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Mideast meetings
Good Monday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we talk to Rep. Marlin Stutzman about his recent meeting with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa in Damascus and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz about her conversations with Israeli and Arab leaders during her recent trip to the Middle East. We report from a gathering in Denver of moderate Democratic elected officials from around the country, and interview former JFNA executive Elana Broitman about her newly released comic book about a menopausal superhero. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Nathan Fielder, Menachem Rosensaft and Hussein al-Sheikh.
What We’re Watching
- The American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum continues today. John Spencer, Ellie Cohanim and Bill Kristol will all speak on the main stage.
- Canadians head to the polls today in a federal election pitting Prime Minister Mark Carney and his Liberal Party against Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.
- The Hostage and Missing Families Forum is hosting an event tonight at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan featuring former Israeli hostage Noa Argamani as well as the relatives of slain hostages Omer Neutra, Itay Chen and Shiri Bibas.
What You Should Know
A QUICK WORD WITH JI’S JOSH KRAUSHAAR
As official Washington spent this weekend at the parties surrounding the White House Correspondents Dinner, an intimate group of moderate Democratic elected officials, policy wonks and strategists met in Denver to present ideas for rehabilitating their party from the center, Jewish Insider Editor-in-Chief Josh Kraushaar reports in a dispatch from the event.
Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), gathered together a lineup of prominent Colorado centrists — Democratic Gov. Jared Polis and Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) and Michael Bennet (D-CO), among them — along with some former red-state Democratic officials, including former Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) and former Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) to brainstorm ideas for a new moderate movement.
Of note: Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO), a rising star in the party who is rumored to be mulling a Senate bid as Bennet runs for governor, was in attendance and gave a paean to former President Bill Clinton’s brand of politics, directly quoting from a seminal speech from the then-candidate breaking with the left and calling for a more-mainstream direction for the party.
Neguse quoted from Clinton’s 1991 Democratic Leadership Council speech: “Our burden is to give the people a new choice rooted in old values, a new choice that is simple, that offers opportunity, demands responsibility, gives citizens more of a say, provides them responsive government.”
Neguse, Colorado’s first Black member of Congress, first ran for office as a progressive but has grown more pragmatic over time — and sounded like the type of future national leader the party is looking for. If Bennet wins the governorship in 2026, Neguse would be a strong contender to be appointed to his Senate seat.
Not at the moderate Democratic event: Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is running for governor and will be clashing with Bennet in the primary. In an interview with JI at an outreach event for Black voters, Weiser said he plans to position himself as a “populist problem solver” — while playing up his strong voice against President Donald Trump’s policies.
Weiser touted the fact that he’s already filed 13 lawsuits against the Trump administration, saying he’s on the front lines of fighting the “lawlessness of the White House.” In the campaign, he plans to contrast his active record litigating Trump’s immigration and tariff policies in the state with Bennet’s time as a lawmaker in Washington.
But Weiser also sounded like he would be tacking to the senator’s left in the primary.
Weiser’s speech on Saturday centered on how he would fight to protect DEI programs in the state. Asked about what he thought about the Democratic Socialists of America movement — which has a foothold within the party in Denver — he noted their “deep empathy for how working class people are struggling.” He also noted that he endorsed against a DSA-backed legislator who went on an anti-Israel, antisemitic rant in the state House.
Weiser, who speaks openly about his Jewish faith, also slammed the Trump administration for its overreach in cracking down against antisemitism, saying he was “horrified” about Trump’s actions. “Using antisemitism as a cudgel against marginalized individuals or to take away freedom is so horrifying to me,” he told JI.
Bennet, for his part, underscored how Colorado is one of the biggest Democratic success stories because it has nominated candidates who focus on returning results over red-meat slogans. On a PPI panel, he talked passionately about how the country’s health care and education systems are broken — and the Democratic Party has done little to fix it.
“Where is our agenda to reform the education system for the American people? Joe Biden said not a word about it, and these people deserve better than Donald Trump, who is destroying both what’s left of our health care system and what’s left of our education!”
He added: “Trump is not the cause of all our problems. He is the symptom of the lack of economic mobility that we have, the sense that people no matter how hard they work, can’t get ahead.”
peace prospects
Syria’s al-Sharaa discussed prospects for normalization with Israel with GOP lawmaker
New Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa last week discussed his conditions for normalizing relations with Israel with Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN), who was one of the first American lawmakers to visit the country since the overthrow of the Assad regime, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.
Conditions: During a meeting at the presidential palace in Damascus, al-Sharaa told Stutzman that his concerns in Syria’s relationship with Israel are keeping Syria as a unified country and not allowing regions to be divided off, Israel’s military encroachment into Syria around the Golan Heights and the Israeli bombing campaign targeting Syrian military assets. Al-Sharaa said any agreement with Israel would have to address those points, but Stutzman told JI last week that al-Sharaa said that, “outside of those couple of items — and I’m sure there’s going to be other issues that he would bring to the table, but he was open to those conversations about normalizing relations with Israel.” Stutzman said he felt al-Sharaa was being honest and upfront about those conditions. He said they did not specifically address the issue of whether al-Sharaa’s government is seeking to reclaim the Golan Heights.
TAKING ON TEHRAN
Wasserman Schultz: Arab, Israeli leaders say Iran deal must cover proxy activity
Arab and Israeli leaders are insisting that any U.S. deal with Iran also include provisions to address Iran’s other malign activities in the region, including support for terrorist proxies, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod following a trip earlier this month to meet with Israeli and Arab leaders in the Middle East. Wasserman Schultz traveled with Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) to the Middle East for the third time since Oct. 7, 2023, visiting Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan.
Common goals: “There was a very clear urgency that the leaders we spoke to had to make sure that we … don’t let Iran up from their very weakened state. They’ve been badly pummeled and had significant defeats,” Wasserman Schultz told JI last week. “The consensus across the region, no matter where we went, was that we needed to make sure that continued and that we prevented them from achieving their nuclear weapons goals and that we particularly prevented them from continuing their support for terrorist activity.”
trump talks
In Time interview, Trump says he would meet with Iranian supreme leader
President Donald Trump said he’d be open to meeting directly with Iran’s president or Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but also suggested that the U.S. could attack Iran to keep it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, in an interview with Time magazine, released on Friday. When asked if he would consider such a meeting, the president responded, “Sure,” Jewish Insider’s Danielle Cohen reports.
War stance: Pressed if he is worried Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could “drag you into a war” with Iran, Trump responded, “No. By the way, he may go into a war. But we’re not getting dragged in.” The president clarified that he did not mean the U.S. wouldn’t join a war if Israel initiates one: “You asked if he’d drag me in, like I’d go in unwillingly. No, I may go in very willingly if we can’t get a deal. If we don’t make a deal, I’ll be leading the pack.”
BOOKSHELF
Turning the page: how a former Jewish nonprofit exec found her superpower in storytelling
It’s an unlikely origin story for a comic-book superhero: standing at the front of a boardroom in a snazzy blazer, delivering an important presentation until it’s derailed by … a hot flash. That’s when she begins to discover her superpower. Meet Mina, the star of “Holy Menopause: Adventures of a Middle-Aged Superheroine,” a new comic book published by Bunny Gonopolskaya, the pen name of Elana Broitman, a former Jewish communal executive and government affairs consultant who is most familiar to Jewish communal leaders not as an artist or a writer, but as the former senior vice president of public affairs at Jewish Federations of North America until September 2023. Broitman talked to Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch about her new book.
Sexism shift: Broitman, 58, has held senior roles in the private sector, on Capitol Hill and at nonprofits. She never felt like sexism held her back in her career until she hit menopause — and sexism combined with more subtle ageism to make a potent, toxic combination. “I felt gaslighted and ignored,” Broitman told JI in an interview last week. “My way of working through emotions was always to just do some art. I started with a painting of an elderly Wonder Woman, because my whole concept was, Hey, we’re pretty badass, right? We’ve made it here. We have all this wisdom. We can do lots of things, and we’re not about to get dismissed.”
Worthy Reads
Power Chats: Semafor’s Ben Smith spotlights the growing use of “power group chats,” in which dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of power brokers and public figures engage in debate and conversation through the group messaging features of Signal and WhatsApp. “But their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. … The chats are occasionally marked by the sort of thing that would have gotten you scolded on Twitter in 2020, and which would pass unremarked-on on X in 2025. They have rarely been discussed in public, though you can catch the occasional mention in, for instance, a podcast debate between [Mark] Cuban and the Republican entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, which started in a chat. But they are made visible through a group consensus on social media. Their effects have ranged from the mainstreaming of the monarchist pundit Curtis Yarvin to a particularly focused and developed dislike of the former Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz.” [Semafor]
Has Ben-Gvir Really Changed?: The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood reflects on his interaction with Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir at an event in New Haven, Conn., in which Ben-Gvir was pressed about his previous support for Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein, whose portrait was displayed for decades in Ben-Gvir’s home. “[Ben-Gvir] framed his transformation as moral, and said he was not who he was when he was 17. Getting married and having six kids mellows a man out, he said. His whole answer took no more than a couple of minutes. I told Ben-Gvir that I found his contrition perfunctory and unconvincing, and I challenged him, if he was sincere, to prove it. I asked him to tell us all what it was like to idolize a murderer — and then to tell us what he would say to his younger self, or someone still in the thrall of a terrorist, to persuade him to give up violence and mellow out sooner rather than later. He couldn’t even bring himself to pretend. He just asserted that he had changed. ‘I’m sure you did things when you were 17 that you are not proud of,’ he said. (He removed the portrait when he was 44.) And he said again that time and family make a difference — but he added not a word about the inherent value of human life, or the disgrace brought upon religion and country by someone who massacres civilians, especially in a moment of total vulnerability.” [TheAtlantic]
Corbyn-ism Coming to America: In the Jewish Chronicle, Shany Mor raises concerns about the “Corbynization” of left-wing American circles. “As with so many more benign trends, Britain is just ten or so years ahead of the US. And the long march of geostrategic antisemitism’s institutional capture in the US is only about a decade behind Britain’s. Each major milestone – the capture of academia, the arts world, the various NGOs, a few major newspapers and journals of the smart set – was reached on these shores well before crossing the pond. And just as in Britain, so in the United States there is no realistic path to building a majority coalition around antisemitism either in its geostrategic or conventional forms. … American liberals, American Jews, and especially liberal American Jews would be well advised to be extra vigilant about this British import, which no tariff will protect them from. The British experience of the 2010s has a few useful lessons and warnings for what awaits the Americans in the 2020s.” [JewishChronicle]
Word on the Street
American and Iranian negotiators concluded a third round of nuclear talks in Oman over the weekend, amid disagreements over Iran’s domestic uranium enrichment; the parties will meet in Europe in the coming weeks…
The Trump administration restored thousands of foreign student visas — largely for students who had committed minor or dismissed infractions — that had been previously revoked…
Donald Trump Jr., alongside investment banker Omeed Malik and Alex Witkoff, the son of Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, is opening a members club in Washington; Malik’s 1789 Capital had previously invested in Tucker Carlson’s new media company…
The chair of the United Arab Emirate’s Executive Affairs Authority met in Washington last week with senior Trump administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff…
Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA), Troy Carter (D-LA) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) introduced a resolution commemorating Jewish American Heritage Month…
Reps. David Kustoff (R-TN) and Wasserman Schultz introduced legislation to enable Holocaust survivors to recoup pre-Holocaust insurance policies, the latest in a long series of congressional attempts to move the issue forward…
The Los Angeles Times spotlights a lawsuit between Irish hotelier Patrick McKillen and members of the Qatari royal family over the alleged lack of payment for work done on the Maybourne Beverly Hills…
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar spoke on Friday to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro about the recent arson attack at the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg…
In The Wall Street Journal, Eugene Kontorovich calls on the Trump administration to again withdraw from UNESCO over what he alleges is antisemitism within the body, years after the Biden administration reversed a decision by the first Trump administration to pull out…
The NYPD is investigating clashes that took place last week outside of Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, between demonstrators and counterprotesters during a surprise visit by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir…
“60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley addressed the recent departure of the show’s executive producer in the final minutes of Sunday’s episode; Pelley cited disagreements with CBS parent company Paramount+ over the show’s coverage of “the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration”…
In the latest episode of HBO’s “The Rehearsal,” comic Nathan Fielder compared Paramount+ to Nazi Germany after discovering that a 2015 episode of his “Nathan for You” comedy series that dealt with antisemitism was removed from the streaming service…
NPR spotlights the “shlissel challah,” a key-shaped loaf that is traditionally made the Shabbat after Passover…
Israel slammed the Spanish government’s cancellation of a €6.6 million deal that would have seen Madrid purchase 15 million bullets from Israel’s IMI Systems…
Israel sent its envoy to the Vatican, Yaron Sideman, to attend the funeral of Pope Francis, opting against sending an official Israeli delegation, days after Israel’s Foreign Ministry deleted a post memorializing the pontiff, who died last week…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Shin Bet head Ronen Bar of lying to an Israeli court that Netanyahu had demanded personal loyalty from him…
Senior Biden administration official Amos Hochstein said that Israel “missed” an opportunity to reach a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia last year…
Hussein al-Sheikh was appointed vice president of the Palestine Liberation Organization amid an ongoing debate over who will succeed 91-year-old Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas…
Israel struck a Hezbollah facility in southern Beirut that contained precision missiles on Sunday evening…
At least 40 people were killed in an explosion at the port of Bandar Abbas in Iran following the outbreak of a small fire in a section of the port with large shipping containers…
Iran’s Infrastructure Communications Company said it repelled a large cyber attack the day after the port explosion…
Amateur golfer Jay Sigel, whose plans to go pro were deferred for several decades by a college injury, died at 81…
Pic of the Day
Attorney and professor Menachem Rosensaft, who was born in a displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen, spoke at a memorial ceremony on Sunday at the concentration camp marking the 80th anniversary of its liberation.
Birthdays
Comedy writer, television producer and showrunner, Daniel Joshua Goor turns 50…
Former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., he also served four terms in the Knesset, Zalman Shoval turns 95… White House chief of staff for Presidents Reagan and Bush 41, secretary of the Treasury and secretary of state, James Baker turns 95… Retired judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals (now known as the Supreme Court of Maryland), Judge Irma Steinberg Raker turns 87… Retired four-star United States Marine Corps general, Robert Magnus turns 78… Retired SVP and COO of IPRO and former president of the Bronx/Riverdale YM-YWHA and the Riverdale Jewish Center, Harry M. Feder… Cantor who has served in Galveston, Texas, Houston and Buffalo, N.Y., Sharon Eve Colbert… Criminal defense attorney, Abbe David Lowell turns 73… Director of congregational engagement at Temple Beth Sholom of Miami Beach, Fla., Mark Baranek… Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Elena Kagan turns 65… American-born Israeli writer and translator, David Hazony turns 56… Director of criminal justice innovation, development and engagement at USDOJ during the Biden administration, Karen C. Friedman… Retired soccer player, she played for the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team from 1997 to 2000, Sara Whalen Hess turns 49… Founder of GlobeTrotScott Strategies, Scott Mayerowitz… Actress and film critic, she is the writer and star of the CBC comedy series “Workin’ Moms,” Catherine Reitman turns 44… Model, actress and TV host, known for her role in the soap opera “Fashion House,” Donna Feldman turns 43… CEO and founder of The Branch, Ravi Gupta… Freelance journalist, formerly at ESPN and Sports Illustrated, Jason Schwartz… Senior editor at Politico Magazine, Benjamin Isaac Weyl… President of Saratoga Strategies, a D.C.-based strategic communications and crisis management firm, Joshua Schwerin… Head coach of the women’s soccer team at Yeshiva University, Ryan Alexander Hezekiah Adeleye turns 38… Israeli artist and photographer, Neta Cones… Marketing director at College Golf Experience, Jeffrey Hensiek… Associate in the finance department of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, Robert S. Murstein… Senior reporter for Cybersecurity Dive, Eric J. Geller… Founder and CEO of Diamond Travel Services and CEO of A Better Way ABA, Ahron Fragin… Midfielder for Major League Soccer’s New York Red Bulls, Daniel Ethan Edelman turns 22…
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