Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden depart following a Medal of Honor ceremony event in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday, July 5, 2022, in Washington, D.C.
Most years, the White House Hanukkah party is the hottest Jewish ticket in town. This year, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden are adding another Jewish celebration to the official calendar: They’re hosting a Rosh Hashanah reception at the White House on the morning of Friday, Sept. 30.
Invitations to the event, a copy of which was viewed by Jewish Insider, were sent out on Monday.
The party “in celebration of the Jewish New Year” will take place in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Biden previously hosted a Rosh Hashanah reception at the Naval Observatory when he was vice president. Last year, he addressed more than 1,000 rabbis in a virtual Rosh Hashanah call.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz accused officials from Meta, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok of providing ‘insulting,’ ‘frustrating’ and ‘pandering’ responses
A hearing convened by a multinational group of lawmakers to question representatives of Meta, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok about the proliferation of antisemitism on their platforms grew heated on Friday, as lawmakers accused the tech companies of providing “insulting,” “frustrating” and “pandering” answers on their efforts to counter antisemitism.
The panel was organized by the Inter-Parliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism, a group comprised of lawmakers from around the world. Lawmakers questioned Neil Potts, the vice president of public policy, trust and safety for Meta; Michele Austin, the director of public policy for the United States and Canada for Twitter; Kevin Kane, the manager of government affairs and public policy for YouTube; and Eric Ebenstein, director of public policy for TikTok.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), a co-chair of the task force, opened the questioning with a back-and-forth debate with Potts over his company’s slow response times to addressing antisemitic content and its algorithmic amplification of hateful content.
She next questioned Austin about why Twitter does not have a specific policy against Holocaust denial; Austin declined to commit to developing such a policy, responding that she would “take that [feedback] back” to the company, while insisting that they had “actioned Holocaust denial tweets consistently.”
“I think we’re all starting to see — anyone watching this — why we’re eventually going to have to regulate the way that this content is handled, as opposed to just leaving it to you, the companies, to make sure you’re complying with standards that really aren’t very transparent,” Wasserman Schultz said partway through the proceedings.
She added later that the companies must do a better job of enforcing their own internal policies if they hope to avoid further government regulation.
At multiple points during the hearing, the social media representatives were questioned on whether they viewed anti-Zionism as inherently antisemitic, or as hate speech in its own right. They largely avoided the question, much to the “frustration” of Wasserman Schultz.
Facebook’s Potts acknowledged that attacks on Zionism are sometimes used as a proxy for attacks on Jews in general, the only executive testifying to make such a linkage.
“We understand that there are occasions where the criticism of Zionists is also used to attack people based off of their ethnicity, based off of their religion. So when we hear those attacks based on being Jewish or being Israeli, those are not allowed,” Potts said. “We have also noticed that there are nuances to that when people call for boycotts, or criticize entities and governments, we do want to make sure that we have space for that speech.”
Canadian Member of Parliament Anthony Housefather, who co-chairs the task force, pressed the executives on whether it would be acceptable on their platforms to say that “Jews are white nationalists who support apartheid” — expecting, he said, that they would be able to say easily that such a statement would not be allowed. The executives each declined to answer definitively.
“Not even the word Jew in that context is necessarily something that you can tell us as executives of companies that you can take down — that’s pretty disturbing,” Housefather responded.
As she closed out the hearing, Wasserman Schultz — while thanking the executives for appearing before the task force — said she felt they had failed to grapple with antisemitism as a “viral toxic infection that drives real world violence.”
“Each of you in some way mentioned your pride in acknowledging Yom Hashoah and other specific Jewish holidays. And frankly, so often that comes off as pandering,” she said. “For you to only scratch the surface or to pander and use examples like ‘some of your best friends are Jews,’ is insulting and frustrating. So I would just suggest in the future when you’re testifying on this topic that perhaps we might not want to use those kinds of examples and be more specific and intentional about being forthcoming in your responses.”
Michael Levitt, a former Canadian Member of Parliament and current president of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, delivered a dour final statement.
“You, the executives of these massive companies, have been derelict in your duty to do right,” Levitt said. “I failed to hear a real and meaningful commitment from any of you today, beyond platitudes and window dressing. I implore you to do more and to do it now. The safety and future of our Jewish community depends on it.”
The panel of social media executives was preceded by another panel featuring the State Department’s antisemitism envoy Amb. Deborah Lipstadt, former Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Irwin Cotler, Organization of American States Commissioner to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Fernando Lottenberg and Israeli antisemitism envoy Noa Tishby.
Tishby blasted model Bella Hadid for her social media posts targeting Israel. “It has an impact. She is, in effect, to an audience of tens of millions, calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. But nobody is going to cancel Bella Hadid. No social media platform is going to suspend her.”
The former envoy to the U.K. shared with the queen how the Royal Air Force helped his family survive the Holocaust
Tolga Akman - WPA Pool/Getty Images
Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom Mark Regev speaks during the annual Holocaust Memorial Commemoration event, co-hosted with the Israeli Embassy, at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office on January 23, 2019, in London, United Kingdom.
New diplomats arriving to the United Kingdom are required to present their credentials to the reigning monarch. Mark Regev, the last Israeli envoy to present his credentials in person to Queen Elizabeth II, who died last Thursday at 96 after a 70-year reign and whose funeral is today, felt pressure to make the most of his short time with her.
“I needed to decide what I wanted to talk to her about,” recalled Regev, who headed Israel’s embassy in London from June 2016 through 2020. When his replacement, Tzipi Hotovely assumed the role, she presented her credentials remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I called then-Prime Minister and Foreign Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and asked him if he had a message for the queen. He sent me something very complimentary about the way she conducts herself as the queen and about what she has done for the United Kingdom, but I still had a few minutes to fill.”
Regev decided that he would relay to the queen the story of his late father, a Jewish citizen of Germany during World War II.
“The whole family was going through a very difficult time, they were in a very precarious situation as Jews in Germany,” Regev relayed to Jewish Insider. “Then one night, the RAF Bomber Command flies over and bombs the place where they’re living to kingdom come and in the fire and death, chaos and confusion, the family managed to escape — they literally ripped off their Jewish stars, and went into hiding.”
During his audience with the queen, Regev, whose family later emigrated to Australia, emphasized how British soldiers, who have in the past been criticized for bombing civilian populations in Nazi-occupied Europe, had saved them during the war. While the queen responded as the consummate professional, Regev said, later that evening the foreign office official who had accompanied the royal matriarch during the credentialing’s ceremony told him that she was in fact quite moved by his personal tale.
“Who knows if he was just being nice to me,” quipped Regev. “But maybe she did actually appreciate hearing the Regev family story.”
“I was always very impressed with the queen and thought she was the consummate professional,” Regev told JI in an interview last week. “Obviously, when I met her, she was already in [her] 90s and I would see her at events like the Christmas party every year, where there would be a big line of like 150 ambassadors, each with their partners, and she would shake everyone’s hand, say a nice word and move on. That’s hard work!”
“She took her role very, very seriously,” he continued. “I had real respect for the way she conducted herself, and I think everyone who saw her or met her was impressed with her ability to do the job.”
During his four years as ambassador, the former envoy, who served for years as Netanyahu’s foreign press spokesman and who now heads the Abba Eban Institute for International Diplomacy at Reichman University in Herzliya, said he learned “how much the British people appreciated the queen and her role – there is no doubt that the royal family is a big part of British identity.”
The monarchy is also a big part of British Jewish identity, Regev continued, pointing out that British Jews say a special prayer for the queen and the royal family every Shabbat but adding that it is above and beyond the prayer.
He also said the British-Israel ties were solid and strengthening, especially with the installation of new U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss.
“As ambassador, your role is to advance the bilateral relationship between Israel and the country where you’re posted,” Regev explained. “Ultimately, the trajectory of British-Israel relations has been very good over the last years; we’ve been constantly moving in the right direction.”
“By the time I left the U.K., Truss was already foreign secretary, and she was the best foreign secretary for Israel there has ever been,” he continued, adding, “whenever I met her at events she always expressed herself as a friend of Israel.”
As for his new position at the Abba Eban Institute for International Diplomacy, Regev, who replaced Israel’s new ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, said that his vision is to “enhance Israel’s soft-power reach and train the next generation of Israeli spokespeople.”
Israel has excelled in some industries, said Regev, citing defense, strategy and intelligence issues but, he added, “Where Israel needs room for improvement is in soft power. Just like Britain had the queen, Israel has soft-power assets too and needs to use them.”
The Inter-Parliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism — an international coalition of lawmakers formed in 2020 including lawmakers from the U.S., Canada, the European Union, Israel, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand — is set to hold its first in-person hearing Friday morning in Washington, featuring testimony from high-ranking officials from Meta, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.
“This has been a more than two-year effort since when we launched the task force to assess and analyze the problem and the challenges that are presented in trying to stop the infectious spread of online antisemitism,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), one of the group’s co-chairs, told Jewish Insider. “We know that there is a huge problem, we know that it leaps out of the virtual world into the real world.”
She explained that Friday’s hearing will give the lawmakers the opportunity to “present a united front to the social media platforms to be able to ask them pointed questions about what their policies are” and “try to hold them accountable and make sure that we can make a real difference.”
Canadian Member of Parliament and Task Force Co-Chair Anthony Housefather argued that a multinational effort to counter online antisemitism is critical because of the inherently multinational nature of social media.
“Whatever content is posted in the United States is seen in Canada, is seen in South Africa, is seen in the UK and vice versa,” Housefather told JI. “If you solve something in one country, you’re really not solving the problem because it doesn’t mean it’s cutting it off somewhere else.”
The social media executives, Housefather noted, will be testifying before the task force voluntarily.
European Parliament Member David Lega, who hails from Sweden, said he’s hoping the in-person hearing will help “build a stronger network” to combat the “global challenge” of online antisemitism.
“But I think it’s extremely important that we do it together with the big tech companies,” Lega continued. “I don’t want to see them as an enemy in this. I would think that we would gain a lot better results if we can do it together. So the hearing for me is fact-finding as a start, not quite a challenge. I think that’s important.”
In remarks at a Thursday luncheon at the Capitol Visitors Center, hosted in conjunction with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Wasserman Schultz noted that, despite multiple years of work together through the Task Force, she and Housefather had never met in person until this week.
“This historic summit, and our commitment to be here together in person shows the urgency of our efforts to create a world that is far less polarized and divided,” she said at the event. “I am so thankful for the partnerships that we’ve forged, and for the chance to continue this mission with all of you.”
William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents, told JI, “This interparliamentary task force is essential given the fact that the scourge of antisemitism transcends national boundaries. It is essential to bring together members of Congress and parliaments from across the globe to work together to combat Jew-hatred in all its manifestations.”
One potential obstacle to the cross-border initiatives the task force’s members envision is the differing regulatory regimes and speech protections afforded by the various governments whose lawmakers are involved in the task force.
Wasserman Schultz told JI that finding commonalities and developing a “basic regulatory scheme… that can have a floor of protection” is “really what the task force is all about.”
Housefather said the U.S.’ First Amendment protections likely make it the most challenging environment for cracking down on online antisemitism. But, he said, there are still possibilities, including urging platforms to make stricter content moderation policies and pursuing greater transparency for the algorithms the companies use to recommend content.
“We’ll look at it from the perspective of where the rules give you the most difficulty implementing [a crackdown on antisemitism] and drive it from that direction,” he said. “There’s ways within the framework of laws that we all have that we can push some duty of care on the platform.”
Wasserman Schultz said she anticipated algorithm transparency to come up at the hearing.
Lega pointed to multinational efforts to combat and eliminate child sexual abuse content online as a potential roadmap for navigating the various regulatory regimes involved in this effort. Unlike antisemitism and other hate speech, child sexual abuse content is not protected by the First Amendment in the U.S.
Lega also said he’s also hoping to get advice from American legislators about setting up an Abraham Accords caucus within the European Parliament.
The U.S. Israel Education Association founder and executive director got candid about the importance of bringing members of Congress through the region
Despite the strong relationship between the United States and Israel, not many members of Congress have actually visited the Jewish state. Heather Johnston, this week’s guest on Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast,” is working to change that. Johnston, the founder and executive director of the U.S. Israel Education Association (UIEA), an organization that educates members of Congress and helps them foster stronger ties between the two countries, has been bringing senior government officials on tours to Israel since 2011. Additionally, Johnston is the founder and director of JH Israel, a leadership nonprofit; in her work for that group, she teamed up with former Ariel Mayor Ron Nachman to establish the National Leadership Center in Ariel, which brings together students from across Israel to take part in a series of obstacle courses, and connect the lessons they’ve learned to their everyday lives. Johnston sat down with co-hosts Rich Goldberg and Jarrod Bernstein to discuss her organizations and what it’s like bringing lawmakers to Israel.
The U.S. Israel Education Association in a nutshell: “Well, I founded this organization with the intent of being able to educate senior members of Congress and to serve them toward a strong U.S.-Israel collaboration, and to help them to discover their lanes of action and ways they can lead inside that collaboration.
“It’s a bipartisan organization, so we’re not lobbying, we’re not trying to move issues to the right or to the left, it’s really staying in the middle and bringing both Democrats and Republicans into the collaboration on things they can work on together. That’s part of our base. And then secondly, it’s a wide Jewish and Christian audience that care about this. So we have a broad base of Jews and Christians in the United States, primarily, but also in other parts of the world, and certainly in Israel.”
On what sets the UIEA apart from similar organizations: “We established the first-ever trips [for members of Congress] through the West Bank. So if you can imagine, the U.S. State Department did not allow U.S. officials to cross the Green Line into a Jewish community inside the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, and so we started those tours. And why is that important? Well, it has brought to light an entirely different narrative than what’s been reported in the news, and even on Capitol Hill. When you can take a congressman or a senator to see it for themselves, to actually see industrial zones and businesses where Palestinians and Israelis are working together, you can interview for yourself… and interview the business leaders down there and find that 90% want to or are working with Israelis. Well, these are really important things to do inside of a tour like that.
“Well, this is a paradigm shift for a congressman, a U.S. official who’s never been introduced to anything like that. It has had an impact, so much so that legislation and the policy changed between Democrats and Republicans on the Hill in the way of supporting and coalescing around. And legislation was passed with bipartisan support to change the way U.S. investment is put into the West Bank. So part of that investment now is going to Jewish communities, not just Palestinian, to further joint business between Palestinians and Israelis.”
On the importance of leading trips through tours of the West Bank: “I think that everybody’s a little bit out of their comfort zone to go into the West Bank, because it’s new, it’s novel that our U.S. leadership would go through there, but how critically important it is. And so the response across the board…if you’re a congressman today, whether you’re a Democrat to the far left or you’re Republican to the far right, when you see Palestinians and Israelis in the workforce together, when you see and hear testimonies from Palestinians that they want to and are actually in joint business with Israelis, and that their income is three times what it was, that is music to the ears of any human being that cares about people. When it comes down to it, Palestinians want success and prosperity. They want to be able to trust their institutions, they want to have business, they want to pass on inheritance to their children, just like anybody else does. They are regular folk. And for the most part, the papers reveal the activists and radical elements all the time, but that’s not the average Palestinian. So whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, to come on my tour, you’re going to get to see the regular folk, interview them, and understand where the movements are taking place, and where you’ve got large tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Palestinians today, now, inside the workplace with Israelis.”
On “nearshoring” America’s pharmaceutical supply chain from China to the Middle East: “I think all of us went through COVID-19, right. It was such a difficult season, and it was so befuddling and chaotic and churning, and one of those areas that was so destabilizing, we’re still feeling the effects of it today, are the change in our supply lines, the cut to our supply lines, the inability to get certain products. And the biggest and most dangerous of those was the pharmaceutical and life sciences supply chain. There were critical, and still are today, critical components to our medications, from aspirin to contrast solution for an MRI that if you went out today to try to go get an MRI, you may or may not have contrast solution for your MRI today. Those are things that have challenged the average lawmaker and are challenging the average American today as well. So it was a natural-born thought to consider how might we now, with a new Middle East Abraham Accord, nations now joining a nexus with the United States and Israel, a staging ground if you will…is there a way to take some of our critical supply chains, pharmaceutical industry, and move out of China? Can Congress incentivize that toward our friendly nations? Toward Morocco, Bahrain, toward the UAE, who has an incredible amount of medical research clinical trial ability — Morocco being a staging ground in the Middle East for manufacturing — there’s a lot of potential for that. And so we have brought that education to the Hill for Congress and are doing the background writing and research on all of these nations to be able to further explain why this is so important that we consider this for the future.”
The creation of The National Leadership Center in Ariel: “About 23 years ago, my husband and I got involved with the nation of Israel. It was during the time of the Russian aliyah — Russian Jews were pouring into Israel in the 1990s, and we arrived at that time… As you can imagine, Ben Gurion Airport was just packed with Russian Jews who were carrying only their suitcases. And so we came in at that critical time, and we met Mayor Ron Nachman, who had founded the city of Ariel, which is inside the area of Samaria, or the West Bank…And he was the principal leader; he dropped two tents out of a helicopter and established that city. It is the ancient home of Joshua — Joshua was buried right down the street with Caleb. Joshua had to have that city in his day, and Israel has to have that city in modern times, not a single thing has changed.
“It is the high point, it is the waistline, it’s the strategic security front in giving up the Sinai Peninsula. Ariel Sharon sent Mayor Ron Nachman to establish that city. So, it’s become sort of the regional hub. It is where we shook hands together and agreed to build a national leadership site on those hills in Samaria. And today we’ve had more than 85,000 young Israelis come across the Green Line out of Tel Aviv. They’ve [probably] never been into Samaria to see their biblical heritage sites, and understand what’s taking place there. The content surrounds the biblical heritage on the life of Joshua, Caleb, Esther, David, Moses. They’re climbing on big events — ropes courses — and challenging events, like there’s not another site like it in Israel today. So the IDF is training there, the Mossad, special forces, all of the major youth movements in Israel are doing their leadership training at our site that we helped establish. It’s Jewish-run, there’s about 35 Jewish leaders in education that are there running that site.”
Bonus Question: Johnston’s favorite place to eat in Israel? “I love the Mamilla rooftop. To go on top of the Mamilla hotel is to look out and see the walls of Jerusalem at sunset, and to enjoy their great wine, to enjoy their great Israeli Mediterranean food — probably one of my best spots.”
Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — including several who have been critical of the ongoing Iran nuclear talks and did not support the original 2015 agreement — voted unanimously on Thursday to block a Republican measure to compel the Biden administration to turn over the current draft of the deal to Congress.
The measure had been introduced under special procedures that would have forced the full House to vote on it later this month if the committee had not taken it up at its business meeting this week — in what one Democratic staffer described as an act of procedural “funny business.”
Committee Democrats include Reps. Dina Titus (D-NV), Dean Phillips (D-MN), Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), Kathy Manning (D-NC), Jim Costa (D-CA) and Juan Vargas (D-CA), all of whom signed on to a recent letter expressing concerns about the talks, as well as Reps. Albio Sires (D-NJ) and Ted Deutch (D-FL), who voted against the original deal. Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL) also opposed the original deal. All voted to block the resolution.
Committee Chair Greg Meeks (D-NY) argued that the measure would have created a “harmful precedent” of forcing the administration to turn over to Congress pending negotiating documents; that it was a “partisan exercise that threatens the… long-standing strategic posture of not negotiating in public”; that it could violate executive privilege; that it was superfluous due to statutory requirements for congressional review of Iran nuclear agreements; and that committee members had access to information on the status of negotiations through classified briefings as recent as Wednesday of this week.
The measure, he continued, “risks directly damaging the administration’s ability to successfully conduct negotiations, threatening to upset allies and allow[ing] for the premature leaking and manipulation of sensitive materials.”
Ranking Member Michael McCaul (R-TX) responded, “I think we should have all documents. We have had classified briefings, and that’s good. But we need all the documents, and we need to know what exactly is happening, and the American people deserve no less.”
McCaul added that Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman had “given assurances” to him that the administration will submit any deal for congressional review, a prospect some Republicans had questioned earlier this year.
The committee also advanced by a voice vote the bipartisan Peace and Tolerance in Palestinian Education Act, which seeks to increase oversight of lesson plans created by the Palestinian Authority and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which have been repeatedly found to contain anti-Israel and antisemitic content that has at time expressed support for terrorism.
“It requires… the State Department to tell us what the State Department already knows internally, and that is whether the textbooks used in UNRWA and Palestinian Authority schools are educating for peace or are educating for terrorism,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), the bill’s lead sponsor, said.
The legislation passed the committee by unanimous consent in late 2019, but was never approved by the Senate. It was reintroduced earlier this year, with a Senate companion bill.
The committee revised the bill on Thursday, voting unanimously to add an amendment stating that claims that Israel is an apartheid state “should have no place” in Palestinian Authority curricula. The amendment’s sponsor, Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), framed the amendment as, in part, a way to “put members on the record” about such accusations.
“I find it incredibly concerning and disgusting that members of this committee have also participated in peddling these hateful talking points, with little to no recourse, either from leadership or within our institution,” Pfluger said. “In order to ensure that we are holding the PA responsible for their hateful propaganda, we must also consider the words that we use and the effect that they have.”
Pfluger also highlighted comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a committee member, referring to Israel as an apartheid state and making statements that many have argued are antisemitic. Omar did not vote on the amendment.
During the meeting, numerous committee members lauded Deutch for his service as the chair of the committee’s Middle East, North Africa and Global Counterterrorism Subcommittee. Deutch is set to leave Congress to head the American Jewish Committee this fall.
“I will miss him personally for all of the counsel… on the Middle East and the region,” Meeks said. “He’s been more than a member on this committee, he’s been a friend. He’s going to be drastically missed. But I still have his cell phone number… so still expect to get phone calls from me, even though you won’t be here. You can run, but you can’t hide, and so I will find you and still consult with you.”
Deutch’s Republican counterpart, subcommittee Ranking Member Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), said it has “been my honor to serve with him” and “I just wish him well for continued service that I know he will have.”
House members of the Abraham Accords Caucus announced plans for a trip to the Abraham Accords countries early next year during an event for civil society leaders from Abraham Accords member nations on Wednesday in recognition of the agreements’ second anniversary.
Reps. Brad Schneider (D-IL), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), David Trone (D-MD), Ann Wagner (R-MO), Lisa McClain (R-MI), Kathy Manning (D-NC), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and Ritchie Torres (D-NY) hosted representatives of Israel-Is, the Mimouna Association, il’Heure Joyeuse, UAE Youth Council, the King Hamad Global Center for Peaceful Coexistence and the American Jewish Committee, as well as a Fulbright Fellow from Bahrain for a roundtable discussion about the first two years of the Accords at the Capitol on Thursday.
“We want to bring members of Congress to see for themselves on the ground the fruits of what is a historic agreement, these Abraham Accords,” Schneider told reporters. “So to be able to go to Israel to go to Bahrain, to UAE, to Morocco, meet people who are benefiting from these accords, talk to those who are realizing those benefits… I think that’s something that would be good for all of my colleagues to experience.”
Wagner said the group is aiming to schedule the trip for February 2023.
The lawmakers and other panelists also discussed at length the positive effects they’ve seen from the Abraham Accords, their hopes for the agreements’ future and their plans to further support them.
McClain praised the caucus as a shining example of bipartisanship and progress in an often-stagnated Congress, and also reflected on her observations from a trip to the Middle East earlier this year.
“It was a feeling, it was an idea, it was quite frankly inspirational, to show if we actually work on something that’s positive, that we can work together,” she said. “That trickles throughout all the other areas of the world, and I am just blessed and honored to be part of this.”
Manning said that a group of young people from Abraham Accords member nations recently visited her district and traveled around the U.S.
“It was so exciting to me to see this is not a top-down agreement just among agreement, just among governments,” she said. “That’s what makes this whole effort extraordinary, transformation and will build a much stronger future for the region.”
The exchange comes from an upcoming book on Trump's tenure by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser
JIM WATSON and EMMANUEL DUNAND / AFP)
President Donald Trump delivers remarks at a Keep America Great rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on February 19, 2020.
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a ceremony in Jerusalem on January 23, 2020.
During a private meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Japan three years ago, then-President Donald Trump was apparently so eager to impress Vladimir Putin that he unwittingly set himself up for a stinging retort from the Russian president.
Following a tense exchange in which Putin had bragged of acquiring “hypersonic missiles” before the U.S., Trump countered with a characteristically self-centered boast, according to a forthcoming book on Trump’s presidency set to be released next week.
The former president suggested his popularity outside the U.S. was so strong that Poland was planning a military base in his name while Israel, he gloated, had just recently announced a new settlement, “Trump Heights,” in appreciation of his administration’s decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
Putin was unfazed. “Maybe they should just name Israel after you, Donald,” he said witheringly.
The cutting exchange is one of several previously unreported details from The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021, a vivid account of the former president’s norm-shattering tenure written by the husband-and-wife reporting team of Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a staff writer for TheNew Yorker.
The book — an advance copy of which was obtained by Jewish Insider on Wednesday — is published by Doubleday and will come out on Sept. 20.
During the June 2019 meeting in Osaka, Trump’s fawning efforts to develop a warmer relationship with Putin were rebuffed by the Russian president at every turn, according to Baker and Glasser. “For all of Trump’s school-boy crush on Putin, aides could not help noticing that it did not appear reciprocated,” the authors recount. “Where other autocrats like Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kim Jong-un figured out how to stroke Trump’s ego during their meetings, Putin never bothered to try.
“He gave the impression to American aides watching their interactions that he couldn’t care less about winning Trump over,” Baker and Glasser write of Putin. “It was all a one-way street. Trump, they thought, seemed so inexplicably anxious for the Russian leader’s approval, yet never got it.”
Trump has continued to flatter Putin since leaving office, even amid the prospect of an unprovoked war with Ukraine. Before Putin’s invasion in February, Trump praised the Russian dictator’s strategic maneuvering as “genius” and “very savvy.”
But the book also demonstrates that Trump could be equally dismissive of high-ranking officials within his own administration who sought his approval, including his own son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Even if Trump “regularly handed Jared important assignments he did not entrust to outsiders,” Baker and Glasser observe, the former president “did not shy away from undercutting Kushner in meetings when he was not there.”
“Jared, all he cares about is his New York liberal crowd,” Trump complained, according to the book. “They are not my people.”
Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, viewed the former president’s comments as an implicit order to push Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, out of the administration, the authors write, though Trump never said so explicitly.