At the second annual Holocaust commemoration event in Cairo, Egypt on Monday, survivor Ruth Cohen urged the roughly 150 dignitaries present to use their positions of influence to educate the public about history’s lessons and secure a safer future for the younger generations. 

German Ambassador to Egypt Frank Hartmann hosted the gathering at his residence in the Zamalek neighborhood of Cairo. The event, held last year at a local hotel on the Nile River, was coproduced with the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. 

U.S. Chargé d’Affaires to Egypt Ambassador Daniel Rubinstein and Israeli Ambassador to Egypt Amira Oron delivered remarks at the event, in addition to Ambassador Hartmann. The event later featured a cello performance by Kira Weiss who played Ernest Blotch’s Prayer From Jewish Life. 

Rob Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, moderated a panel discussion with Cohen, as well as Egyptian Ain Shams University professor emeritus Dr. Nasser Kotby, who is the nephew of Dr. Mohamed Helmy, the first Arab to be honored as a Righteous Among the Nations; and Dervis Hizarchi, chairman of the Berlin-based Kreuzberger Initiative against Antisemitism.

“The Holocaust teaches us about human nature, that there is great capacity for good as well as for evil,” said Cohen, 92, an Auschwitz survivor who was born in Czechoslovakia and whose mother, brother and cousins were killed in the gas chambers.“ That when one group in a society is singled out for persecution, other groups are likely to be targeted too. In small and large ways each individual has the capacity to hurt or to heal, to savage or to save. Perhaps one of the most important lessons to know on today’s commemoration of the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is that Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz, nor should it be solely defined by it. It began with words and small acts, then infinitely larger ones that resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews.”

“As I look around the world, I see groups like the Yazidis, the Rohingya and Uighurs being persecuted and subject to incarceration, violence and even genocide,” Cohen continued. “I’m scared [by] the alarming rise in antisemitism and violent and deadly attacks on Jews in the US and elsewhere. It’s important to see the stunning denial of the Holocaust, and how the experiences of the survivors and victims are being distorted in the very place where it happened. I am so disheartened and sadly convinced that we have not learned the lessons of this history, my history, teaches. I implore everyone, especially those in leadership positions, to be motivated by this history. Use your authority and influence to push back against those who perpetuate the worst instincts in human behavior. Events like this one are important. They have educated about the importance of learning from history. Are you going to do what you can to ensure that everyone’s children, grandchildren and great grandchildren don’t face the same atrocities? We can do better. We must do better. Shukran.” 

Kotby said his life’s mission was to work for “love and compassion versus war, hate and prejudice.” 

“I want to end my life working for this cause. And in front of you all, I am taking the first step. Who will meet me? Who will meet your view? I don’t see steps coming up, step forward,” he urged the audience, drawing members of the crowd to join him at the front of the room. “Step forward. Yes, we should work hard that peace and compassion and prosperity will prevail and hate and prejudice will end.”

In a similar vein, Hizarci emphasized the importance of interfaith friendship and dialogue. “We have to find ways how to come together and to solve the problems which targets and threatens all of us,” he said.

Hermann stressed that the memory of the Holocaust had become part of Germany’s collective identity. “We shall never forget our historic responsibility as Germans,” he said. “And it is our duty as a nation as and as humans, to keep the memory alive, and make sure that history does not repeat itself. Never forget, and never again. This has become a supreme priority of our education…and of our foreign policy.”

Last week, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi held a similar event at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates’ capital that featured remarks from Cohen and the UAE’s Minister for Culture and Youth Noura Al Kaabi. 

As he enters his second year in office, Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, finds himself at the center of a heated and increasingly personal debate over a case involving the brutal assault of a Jewish man in Times Square. 

The veteran prosecutor, whose closely watched handling of the high-profile tax fraud investigation into former President Donald Trump’s real estate company successfully capped off an otherwise turbulent introduction to city politics, is now facing scrutiny for offering what many are denouncing as an overly lenient plea deal to one of four defendants charged with targeting a Jewish resident of Nassau County, Joseph Borgen, in an antisemitic attack nearly two years ago.

Borgen, now 30, has said he was wearing a yarmulke when, in an incident captured on video, he was violently beaten while walking to a pro-Israel demonstration in Midtown Manhattan during the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which coincided with an uptick in antisemitic incidents across the U.S. He has recalled being punched, kicked and pepper-sprayed during the assault, for which he was hospitalized. 

The six-month plea bargain recommended for Waseem Awawdeh, a 24-year-old Brooklyn man accused of striking Borgen four times with a crutch in an attempted gang assault, provoked an outcry from Jewish leaders in New York City and its surrounding suburbs, some of whom have seized on the chance to cast Bragg as misguided in his approach to crime.

Renewing charges that Bragg, a Democrat who took office last January, has been insufficiently aggressive in pursuing criminal convictions, Bruce Blakeman, the Republican executive of Nassau County, dismissed the deal as “a slap on the wrist” and characterized Awawdeh as a “ringleader” in the attack during a press conference held earlier this month. Meanwhile, in a significant escalation of rhetoric, Dov Hikind, a former state assemblyman from Brooklyn, called on protestors “to go to the DA’s house” as he delivered remarks at a rally in Lower Manhattan late last week.

The case is shaping up to be another potential test of the district attorney’s relatively brief tenure, which began on rocky footing after he released a controversial policy memo pledging to seek prison sentences only for the most severe offenses. Bragg, who faced calls for his ouster from Republican leaders during the midterms, has since tempered his approach to such crimes.

In his first public comments to address the Borgen case, Bragg, 49, said in an interview with Jewish Insider on Friday that he was “aware of the broader discussion” around the investigation but refrained from responding directly to accusations from some of his most vociferous critics. Instead, he insisted that his office is simply following the facts at hand. “Our focus is where it must be,” he said in a phone conversation, “which is the evidence that will be put forth and that does come forward during our investigation.”

“We take these cases extraordinarily seriously,” Bragg averred. “That sort of hate has no place in Manhattan.”

Despite the uproar over the sentencing recommendation, Borgen, whose public statements addressing the case have largely remained diplomatic, told The New York Post last week that he believes the prosecutors involved in the investigation “are doing the best job they can do at this point.” 

Awawdeh, who reportedly called Borgen a “dirty Jew” during the attack and later said he would “do it again,” did not initiate the assault and left before it was over, according to a spokesperson for Bragg’s office. He has no prior criminal convictions.

“We do this in all of our cases, a kind of individualized justice depending upon a person’s role in the charge conducts” and “a person’s criminal history or lack thereof,” Bragg, a former federal prosecutor who has long advocated for a holistic approach to criminal justice, said broadly of the deal offered to Awawdeh. “We’re looking specifically at the person, the crime and the person’s role in the crime.”

While Bragg said that “all of the offense conduct plays a role” in the investigation, he explained that his office is, unlike the general public, for now privy to what he characterized as “the full context of conduct.”

Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School, said she was unable to weigh in on the merits of the plea deal “without knowing more about the details of the case,” even as she acknowledged that it “has provoked a great deal of outrage and the nature of the crime was horrific.”

“But the DA has to consider multiple factors in determining what plea deal to offer,” she wrote in an email to JI, adding: “It is impossible to scrutinize a plea deal without fully understanding what role this defendant played and a host of other facts that bear on the proper plea deal and sentence.”

Bragg said his office is “requiring felony hate crime pleas and incarceration, at the minimum,” for three of the four defendants in the case, including Mohammed Othman and Mahmoud Musa, who must plead to the top charge of assault in the second degree as a hate crime, a Class C felony with a minimum sentence of three-and-a-half years in state prison and a maximum sentence of 15 years. 

“That is, in our view, serious, the three-and-a-half to 15,” Bragg said, “and is commensurate, in our view, with the charged conduct.”

A fourth defendant, Faisal Elezzi, has been offered a plea to attempted assault in the third degree as a hate crime, a Class A misdemeanor with a “sentencing condition” of “intensive programming,” a spokesperson for Bragg’s office told JI.

Bragg declined to comment on the specifics of the case, which he inherited from his predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., because it remains ongoing. The defendants are due back in court on March 9, when more details of the case are likely to be made public.

“We do the work,” Bragg said. “We are in the arena. We are in the court. We’ve got an obligation to focus on the facts and the facts and the evidence, and that’s where, certainly, my focus is and the office’s focus in every case, including this case.”

Even as the six-month plea deal has been met with disapproval from a cohort of outspoken detractors, Bragg, who is Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, has emphasized that countering a rise in hate crimes remains a “top priority,” as he claimed in an interview with JI last summer. Such offenses “tear at the fabric of society,” he said on Friday, adding: “They’re different when someone’s being attacked because of their religion or their race or their national origin.”

Last year, Bragg successfully lobbied for $1.7 million in additional funding to expand his office’s hate crimes unit, which he had characterized as under-resourced amid an uptick in attacks against Asian Americans, Jews and other minority groups across the city.

Since the funding was released this past July, Bragg’s office has staffed up while building a sizable docket of cases. The unit, led by Hannah Yu, is now operating with 20 specially trained hate crimes prosecutors, in contrast with just three during the same time a year ago, according to Bragg. It has also hired two new senior investigative analysts while increasing outreach to underserved communities with the help of victim services counselors fluent in such languages as Cantonese and Mandarin, among other efforts.

“As a result of this work, our hate crimes prosecutions are up 20% on the year,” said Bragg, whose office initiated 92 new hate crimes cases in 2022. “Our docket is, sadly and tragically, at an all-time high, and probably even sadder than that, we still note that this is an underreported crime.”

He suggested that the growing docket of cases was the result of both rising hate crimes and the recent influx of resources allowing the unit to take on additional investigations. “I think that our outreach certainly has directly led to some reporting,” he said. “I also do think, sadly, that hate crimes are up.”

More broadly, robberies, burglaries and other major crimes have also increased overall during Bragg’s time in office, even amid a contemporaneous decline in murders and shootings across New York City.

In a demographic breakdown of his office’s open hate crimes investigations shared with JI, the highest number of cases, 44 in total, were said to be motivated by anti-Asian bias, followed by 32 cases involving members of the LGBTQ community. The hate crimes unit is currently working on 16 antisemitic cases, which represent the third largest share of hate crimes prosecutions now under the office’s purview.

“That’s a very high number,” Yu, the hate crimes unit chief, said in an interview with JI last week. “They range from incidents involving the placement of a swastika on a building to some very serious cases.”

The office is now bringing charges in another high-profile antisemitic incident involving two defendants, Christopher Brown and Matthew Mahrer, who were arrested this past November in an alleged online terror plot to attack the Jewish community in Manhattan. The suspects are scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday following a grand jury indictment last month. 

Brown is facing a top indicted count of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree as a crime of terrorism, while Mahrer is charged with a top count of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree. The district attorney’s office has enlisted its director of intelligence for counterterrorism to help prosecute the two defendants, Yu said, while noting that a senior trial counsel is the lead assistant district attorney on the case. “These are very serious crimes,” Yu told JI.

Yu, who took over the hate crimes unit in 2021, said her team is “seeing a persistent number of assaults and harassment cases against the Jewish community,” amid what she described as a “troubling” uptick in antisemitic incidents.

Last year saw more than 250 antisemitic hate crimes reported to law enforcement across New York City, according to a recent analysis of police data conducted by The Times of Israel.

“Whether we can connect that to recent rhetoric that we’ve seen from celebrities and the like about the Jewish community, I can’t say for sure,” Yu told JI. “But there is, it seems, an increase in harassment of Jewish people, threats communicated either over the phone or by email — and those require extensive investigation, which we’re doing right now.”

The office’s docket of cases listed as antisemitic, while unusually large, still falls short of providing “the full picture of” related ongoing work, Yu added. “There’s a lot of pre-arrest investigations and post-arrest investigations that are happening,” she said, referring in particular to cyber-related crimes. “There’s very little that we don’t look at when we are trying to see if there’s any sort of bias-related motive evidence,” Yu explained. “If there’s a pattern, we’re looking at each incident to see if there was a statement made at every incident.”

The 20 prosecutors who work in the unit have also received additional training, Yu said, to enhance their skills at identifying antisemitic tropes and interviewing victims and witnesses from immigrant communities, among other things. “We’re really expanding our knowledge base,” she told JI.

As the office has worked to bolster its hate crimes unit over the last six months or so, it has increased engagement with pro bono legal advocates and nonprofit organizations, including the Asian American Bar Association of New York, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. 

“There’s just a constant stream of communication with our community-based organizations,” Yu told JI. “We can’t do the job without them, because they may have information that we’re not privy to.”

In keeping with what Yu described as Bragg’s “vision for fairness and justice,” her unit, she said, has referred many of its cases to the office’s Pathways for Public Safety division, which was launched last year in an effort to promote alternatives to incarceration “without jeopardizing community safety,” according to a statement announcing the initiative. 

The goal, Yu elaborated, is “to see if there are other programmatic” legal avenues — such as substance abuse programs and mental health court — that could possibly “make sense” in lieu of what Bragg has criticized as an excessively punitive criminal justice framework often more focused on securing convictions than addressing root causes of crime.

“We want to achieve many goals through these hate crime resolutions, whether it’s letting the victim know that we care and achieving closure and justice for the victim,” Yu said, “but also preventing these crimes from happening again, which may involve rigorous treatment and programmatic efforts to really allow the defendant to be in a place where they will not commit a crime like this again.”

While even the plea deal given to Awadeh was too cushy for some of Bragg’s most strident critics, the district attorney said his office will continue to prioritize hate crimes investigations using an “individualized” approach to justice, as the recently expanded unit works through a record number of cases.

“There’s a lot more work to do,” Bragg told JI in the interview on Friday. “But we are, I think, well-positioned from a kind of human and institutional resources perspective.”

Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) announcement last Thursday that he will seek the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Dianne Feinstein sets off a race in the state’s 30th Congressional District, where L.A. Unified School District board member Nick Melvoin filed papers to run earlier this month.

“My main calling is, how do I amplify my impact for the communities that I fought really my whole adult life for, in a larger setting?” Melvoin, a Democrat, told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. A Los Angeles native, Melvoin taught middle school through Teach for America before going to law school and mounting a successful bid for a seat on the school board in a 2017 upset. Melvoin, a charter school advocate, defeated an incumbent in a race with heavy outside spending.

The seat hasn’t been open for more than two decades; Schiff was first elected in 2000. The former California state senator garnered national attention in 2019 as one of the House Democrats responsible for managing the first impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

“We’re seeing what’s happening in Washington, both with the changing of the guard on the Democratic side with a new leader, but also the craziness that we saw [last week],” Melvoin, 37, said, referring to the 15 rounds of voting that it took to elect a House speaker. “I do think there’s a need for new voices, younger voices, people who can work across lines of difference and not be burdened by the politics of yesterday.”

One reason he’s entering the race is in response to the recent “rise in antisemitism, pro-BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] on university campuses, the ethnic studies curriculum that we’ve been fighting in L.A., as a progressive and a strong Zionist,” said Melvoin, who is Jewish. “In Congress, I don’t see as many of those candidates, especially in the Democratic Party, as I would like.” 

Melvoin was referring to a lengthy statewide debate over a proposed model ethnic studies curriculum, early iterations of which praised the BDS movement and did not educate about antisemitism. Similar debates have played out in LAUSD, the nation’s second-largest school district. 

“I also think not unlike what’s happening in America in the last few years, we have a government in Israel that I think a lot of us, particularly those on the Democratic side and slightly more progressive side, are not particularly fond of, but making sure that that doesn’t undermine [Israel’s] bipartisan support is really important,” said Melvoin. “There are other issues, education actually used to be one of them, that I think used to have a bipartisan consensus. And now our polarization has made it very entrenched.”

The race in the 30th District, which stretches from West Hollywood to Pasadena, has already drawn significant interest. Nine candidates have filed paperwork to run, including actor Ben Savage, who mounted an unsuccessful bid for the West Hollywood City Council last year, State Del. Laura Friedman and entrepreneur Josh Bocanegra. 

In California’s so-called “jungle primaries,” the top two vote-getters advance to the general election potentially setting up two Democrats to face off in November.

A bipartisan sanctions bill reintroduced last week aims to impose sanctions on high-level Iranian regime officials in response to the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini last year and the subsequent crackdown on protesters.

The MAHSA Act, named for the Iranian woman who died in custody after being detained by Iran’s Gasht-e-Ershad — known more commonly as the “morality police” — for an alleged violation of headscarf laws, was introduced last week by Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) and 18 co-sponsors from both parties.

The bill instructs the administration to determine whether U.S. sanctions can be applied to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Ebrahim Raisi and any member of their offices; any economic entities overseen by those offices that are involved in human rights abuses or terrorism and officials of those entities; and other Iranian state officials.

In a statement, Banks indicated that he’s uncertain the legislation will be able to be enacted into law in the current Congress, in which Democrats have control of the Senate, and under the current president. “Two years from now, Congress will be ready to work with a reasonable administration to hold Iran accountable,” Banks, who is mounting a run for Indiana’s open Senate seat in 2024, said.

“Regular Iranians like Mahsa Amini are being murdered and persecuted by the Iranian regime, but the Biden administration is still trying to cozy up to Iran’s senior officials so he can cut an even more disastrous nuclear deal,” Banks added. “Even European leaders have done more than the White House to hold Iran accountable for its human rights abuses. This is worse than Obama’s lead-from-behind diplomacy.”

The legislation is co-sponsored by 15 Republicans, Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Mike Waltz (R-FL), Claudia Tenney (R-NY), Joe Wilson (R-SC), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), Rob Wittman (R-VA), Randy Weber (R-TX), Pat Fallon (R-TX), Tom McClintock (R-CA), Greg Murphy (R-NC), Diane Harshbarger (R-TN), Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-WA), Michael Guest (R-MS) and Doug Lamborn (R-CO), and three Democrats, Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL).

The bill had a total of 33 co-sponsors, all but one of them Republican, following at the end of the previous Congress, after its initial introduction in late October.

House Democrats announced finalized committee assignments for returning members on Friday, including formally selecting Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has promised to hold a vote to remove Omar from the committee.

The fate of that vote may be teetering, however, following Rep. Ken Buck’s (R-CO) announcement over the weekend that he won’t support removing Omar from the committee, arguing that Republicans “should not engage in this tit for tat.” With Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) absent as he recovers from an injury, McCarthy cannot afford to lose any more GOP votes unless he picks up Democratic support.

McCarthy did not comment on when a vote on the issue will be held and it did not appear on Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s (R-LA) weekly schedule released on Sunday, but it could happen as soon as this week.

Omar said yesterday on CNN that she had “used words at the time that I didn’t realize were trafficking in antisemitism,” referring to old tweets claiming that Israel had “hypnotized the world” and that support for Israel is motivated by money.

The Minnesota congresswoman said she has apologized for those statements and continues “to work with my colleagues and my community to fight against antisemitism.”

“My work is clear, the collaboration and work that I do with my Jewish colleagues is very clear,” she said. “The reason that the Democratic caucus has not removed me and will not support my removal on the Foreign Affairs Committee is because I have done the work to make sure that I do not support any bigotry.”

Omar also insisted that she had never “made any comparisons” between Israel and the U.S. and terrorist groups, in reference to comments she made in 2021 that were slammed by Jewish Democrats and that she later walked back.

She claimed that efforts to remove her from committees are driven by politics and a belief that she, as a Muslim, African refugee does not belong in Congress or on the Foreign Affairs Committee, highlighting islamophobic comments by her colleagues and accusing them of being “ok with trafficking, in their own ways, in antisemitism.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is Jewish, appeared alongside Omar on CNN and said that he believes that the accusations of antisemitism are a “pretext,” highlighting some Republicans’ ties to antisemites and white nationalists, particularly Nick Fuentes.

Here’s who else is joining — or leaving — some key House committees:

Foreign Affairs

Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) told JI after a J Street trip to Israel last year that, “One of my greatest takeaways is that to be pro-Israel is to be in favor of recognizing, understanding and dealing with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,” and said she’s worried that the prospects for a two-state solution are “slipping away.” She had previously traveled to Israel with the American Israel Education Foundation, and spoke at J Street’s D.C. conference last year. She was endorsed by both AIPAC and J Street.

Rep. Sheila Cherfilus McCormick (D-FL) told JI after visiting Israel with AIEF last year, “We have to step up and do as much as we can to protect Israel and our interests, because they’re not going to stop. Iran’s not going to stop. There are people who are committed to terrorizing Israel, and so we have to be even more committed to protecting Israel.” 

Rep. Greg Stanton (D-AZ) has expressed support in the past for the U.S.’s economic and security relationships with the Jewish state. Last year, he condemned Amnesty International’s “conscious decision… to target Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state” as “deeply antisemitic” and “yet another example of the many double standards Jewish people have endured for centuries.”

Leaving the committee: Reps. Brad Schneider (D-IL), Jim Costa (D-CA), Juan Vargas (D-CA) and Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX), each mainstream pro-Israel stalwarts who have voiced concerns about nuclear talks with Iran, will not be returning to the panel.

Homeland Security

Rep. Troy Carter (D-LA) is the former minority leader of the Louisiana Senate, elected in a special election in 2021, with endorsements from Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Jim Clyburn (D-SC). He voted with all Democrats last year in favor of the Nonprofit Security Grant Program Improvement Act and cosponsored, along with most of his colleagues, a resolution condemning the Congregation Beth Israel attack in Colleyville, Texas. He said in a tweet last year that he would “continue working for an enduring U.S.-Israel partnership that advances democratic values for generations to come.”

Departing: Many previous members of the panel, including Reps. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Ritchie Torres (D-NY), Emmanuel Cleaver (D-MO), Al Green (D-TX), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Dina Titus (D-NV), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) and Nanette Barragán (D-CA) are stepping off the panel. Slotkin had led a subcommittee to hone in on domestic extremism in the previous Congress, and Gottheimer and Torres are prominent voices against antisemitism on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Judiciary

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) is rejoining the panel after being removed as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee by McCarthy. Schiff, who is Jewish, has become an outspoken critic of right-wing extremism as a prominent opponent of former President Donald Trump and member of the Jan. 6 select committee.

Cycling off: Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), along with Dean and Stanton, are leaving the panel.

Armed Services

The panel did not add any returning members of Congress who were not previously on the committee. Reelected members who are not rejoining the committee include Reps. Rick Larsen (D-WA); Steven Horsford (D-NV); Jimmy Panetta (D-CA), who was a lead sponsor of the DEFEND Act last year; and Marc Veasey (D-TX), a co-chair of the House bipartisan antisemitism task force.

Read more on the freshman Democrats joining these committees and the Republicans.

OSWIECIM, Poland: On this snowy, gray morning here in Poland, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff walked through the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate to enter Auschwitz. Unlike most of the more than 1 million Jews who were transported here by Nazis during the Holocaust, Emhoff walked out of the gate, whose sign translates to “work makes you free,” an hour later. 

Donning a yarmulke, he walked slowly through the red-brick barracks and wiped tears from his eyes as he placed a wreath at a site where thousands of prisoners had been shot. The first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president, Emhoff has relatives who left Poland before the Holocaust.

Before leaving the camp, Emhoff attended a ceremony marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the United Nations-designated memorial day commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz 78 years ago. Two Auschwitz survivors spoke at the event. Piotr Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, used his remarks to focus on the war in Ukraine. “Once again innocent people are being killed en masse in Europe,” he said through a translator. Tomorrow, Emhoff will meet with Ukrainian refugees in Krakow. 

The visit to Auschwitz was Emhoff’s first stop on a five-day trip to Poland and Germany that is focused on promoting Holocaust education and combating antisemitism. Tonight, Emhoff will have Shabbat dinner at the Krakow Jewish Community Center with local Jewish leaders.

He was joined at the camp by several senior U.S. officials, including U.S. Ambassador to Poland Mark Brzezinski, Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, State Department Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues Ellen Germain and Rashad Hussain, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for religious freedom. 

House Democrats announced committee assignments yesterday for their freshmen members. We looked at the members joining some of the House’s key panels:

Foreign Affairs

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) replaces former Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), whom he succeeded in a South Florida district, on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Moskowitz, like Deutch, has pledged to be a vocal supporter of Israel. In an interview yesterday, he addressed concerns about the new Israeli government. Read JI’s full interview with Moskowitz about the new appointment.

Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) is the son of civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson. He told JI he had tagged along with his father on trips throughout the world, including to the Middle East, and witnessed anti-apartheid efforts in South Africa. Based on those experiences, he rejected accusations that Israel has engaged in apartheid, and said “we have to educate some members of our own Congress that there’s a history here.” He supports reentering the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran.

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) told JI that the U.S. is “fortunate” to have allies like Israel and has a longtime relationship with the California Jewish community. She said last May that the U.S. has an “obligation” to reenter the Iran nuclear deal.

Homeland Security

Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) is an entrepreneur and former Michigan state representative who self-funded his campaign in the face of opposition from AIPAC’s super PAC, which raised concerns about his past support for legislation urging an end to aid to Israel and describing the country as an “apartheid state.” Thanedar has since walked back his support for that legislation. He also offered conflicting views on anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions laws in Michigan. In June 2022, he introduced legislation condemning antisemitism and urging law enforcement action.

Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) is a former prosecutor who received significant support from the pro-Israel community in his campaign against former Rep. Donna Edwards. Ivey said that former President Donald Trump had “unleashed the full force” of rising antisemitism and other forms of hate, and worried that “I don’t know if we can put it back in the bottle.” Ivey was also assigned to the Judiciary Committee.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) is a former federal prosecutor and the lead Democratic counsel in the first Trump impeachment trial representing Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, winning the support of the local Haredi community. He told JI that being pro-Israel is “very important to both me and… to the country,” and was supported by the United Democracy Project.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) is the former mayor of Long Beach and received support from United Democracy Project and others in the pro-Israel community. During the campaign he told JI, “For me, what’s really important about our relationship with Israel is Israel is the one place in the region where me, as an openly gay person, can walk around with my husband, and know that you are supported and that you are safe, and that you can be openly gay.”

Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) is a former member of the Illinois House, who told JI that she will “will oppose all forms of antisemitism and Islamophobia and will support legislation to secure the rights of Jews and Muslims to live without fear of violence and discrimination.” She was endorsed by J Street during the primary.

Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI), who has a Catholic mother and Jewish father, told JI he identifies “ethnically” as Jewish, and has faced “anti-Jewish slurs from a very young age.” He said public officials “need to model behavior that is kind and respectful and [be] unafraid to call out bias in all of its forms.”

Rep. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is the son of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and aligns with his father — a prominent pro-Israel Democrat — on a range of issues, including in foreign policy. “You have to be vocal and out front in opposition whenever there are any incidents of hate or antisemitism,” Menendez told JI.

Armed Services

Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) is a Navy veteran who told JI he saw firsthand the malign influence of Iran during his service in the Middle East, and called the U.S.-Israel relationship “imperative” for regional security.

Rep. Don Davis (D-NC) is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy whose election campaign received support from AIPAC’s super PAC.

Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC) is a major in the North Carolina Army National Guard who served in Afghanistan and is now a member of the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps. He is a former North Carolina state senator who was endorsed by AIPAC’s PAC, DMFI, J Street and JDCA.

Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-NM) is a former member of the Las Cruces, N.M. City Council. He was endorsed by DMFI, J Street and JDCA. 

Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI) is a former member of the Hawaii Senate and a fourth-generation Japanese American.

Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said in an interview with Jewish Insider on Thursday that she is “seriously considering” launching a campaign for the seat long held by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), who announced earlier this month that she would not seek reelection in 2024.

“When a big decision like this comes up, I’m pretty thoughtful about it,” Slotkin, a moderate Jewish Democrat who recently won a third term in a competitive district covering the Lansing area, told JI. “I want to make sure I talk to as many people as possible and solicit thoughts and counsel and just kind of have my ducks in a row before I make such a big decision.”

The 46-year-old congresswoman said she had not yet committed to a specific timeline for potentially announcing a bid. “I’m seriously considering it,” Slotkin said, adding later in the interview that she is “definitely” exploring a run for the upper chamber.

The rare open-seat race in Michigan, a key battleground state, is poised to be among the most high-profile elections of the coming cycle, where Senate Democrats will be defending their tenuous 51-49 majority. 

In addition to Slotkin, other Democrats who are reportedly weighing Senate bids include Reps. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and Debbie Dingell (D-MI) as well as Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Slotkin, a prolific fundraiser who has fared well in tough elections as a congresswoman, is widely viewed as a formidable contender for the seat, which Stabenow, 72, has held since 2001.

Slotkin, a former CIA and Defense Department official, said she had not been expecting Stabenow’s announcement in early January. “I was surprised that Sen. Stabenow, who has done so much for the state of Michigan, decided not to run in 2024,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting it.”