Democratic Majority for Israel is backing 29 House and Senate candidates in a new round of general election endorsements, the group’s political arm, DMFI PAC, plans to announce on Friday.
But other candidates are facing stiffer odds in the midterms, when Democrats hope to defend their tenuous majorities in both chambers of Congress. Among the more vulnerable incumbents being supported by DMFI PAC are Reps. Sharice Davids (D-KS), Susie Lee (D-NV), Kim Schrier (D-WA) and Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), all of whom are competing in hotly contested races that could decide control of the House.
Two senators backed by DMFI PAC, Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ), are also viewed as vulnerable in November, according to election forecasters. Both candidates are squaring off against hard-right challengers whose extreme positions have stirred controversy — particularly in Arizona, where Blake Masters, a Trump-backed venture capitalist, has drawn scrutiny for incendiary comments as well as controversial past writings unearthed over the course of his campaign.
In a statement shared with Jewish Insider on Thursday, Mark Mellman, DMFI PAC’s chairman, said he was “confident” that the new slate of candidates “can defeat their extreme MAGA opponents,” adding: “We’re thrilled to support such a diverse and distinguished slate of pro-Israel Democrats.”
Mellman described the new endorsees as “bold” candidates “who are deeply committed to upholding the Constitution, leading with integrity and protecting our cherished Democratic values,” including, he said, “safeguarding and strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
DMFI PAC is also throwing its weight behind some challengers who are listed in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “red to blue” program, indicating possible pick-up opportunities.
Those candidates include Ohio state Rep. Emilia Sykes, Nebraska state Sen. Tony Vargas, Oregon Labor Commissioner Val Hoyle, Francis Conole of Syracuse, N.Y., Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico, former Rep. Max Rose (D-NY), Florida state Sen. Annette Taddeo and Robert Zimmerman, a Democratic National Committee member on Long Island.
Three of them — Rose, Taddeo and Zimmerman — are Jewish. If elected, Taddeo, a Colombian-born state lawmaker in Miami who is challenging freshman Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), has said she will be the first Hispanic Jew in Congress.
“I am honored to have the support of DMFI PAC for this important fight,” Taddeo said in a statement. “Our shared commitment to Democratic values has helped form the bond that America and Israel enjoy. In Congress, I will be an unwavering champion of Israel’s defense and work to grow our special relationship.”
DMFI PAC is also endorsing Reps. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), Sanford Bishop (D-GA), Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), as well as former Hempstead Town Supervisor Lauren Gillen and Broward County Commissioner Jared Moskowitz, who are both running for open House seats.
Rounding out the list is another pair of Senate candidates, including one incumbent, Patty Murray (D-WA), and an outgoing congresswoman, Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), who is challenging Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Recent polling suggests the Florida race could be closer than some experts had expected.
In the statement shared with JI, Demings said she was “proud to be endorsed by DMFI PAC,” adding: “Israel is a beacon of freedom and our shared U.S.-Israeli values, and I will continue to be a pro-Israel champion in the United States Senate.”
DMFI PAC announced its first slate of general election endorsements — including 55 House and Senate candidates — in late July. The new list brings that number to 84 endorsees, many of whom also earned support from the pro-Israel group during the primaries. Rachel Rosen, DMFI PAC’s communications director, told JI on Thursday that additional endorsements are in the pipeline.
The group, which invested heavily in several high-profile races during the primaries, will be spending on behalf of some of the candidates in its new slate, according to Rosen. But she declined to elaborate and said DMFI PAC is currently assessing the races in which it can “make the most impact.”
A Republican-sponsored resolution seeking to force the administration to provide Congress with the still-pending draft text of the Iran deal is headed to a vote in the House Foreign Affairs Committee next week, a spokesperson for the bill’s lead sponsor, Alex Ives, a spokesperson for Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), told Jewish Insider.
The resolution, introduced by Foxx and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) would compel the administration to provide Congress with the text of the draft deal and any related side agreements immediately, even if negotiations are still in progress when the bill is passed. It’s unclear if the resolution will have enough support to pass the committee.
Under existing law — the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) — the administration is required to submit any Iran nuclear agreement in full to Congress when it is signed. A source familiar with the Foxx legislation characterized it as an “opening salvo” in efforts to “forc[e]” the administration to comply with INARA. They raised concerns that the administration will seek to duck INARA review or conceal side agreements related to the deal, as Republicans accuse the Obama administration of doing in 2016.
A Democratic staffer familiar with the process described the legislation as procedural “funny business” that would force the administration into a premature version of the INARA review process for an unfinished deal.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said earlier this week that the administration has committed that it will submit any final deal for congressional review.
Foxx’s resolution was introduced under special procedures that would force a full House vote on the legislation in late September unless it is considered by the Foreign Affairs Committee before then. By bringing the legislation to a committee vote next week, on Sept. 14, Democrats will avert this scenario.
The source familiar with the legislation said they were unsure if there are enough votes in the Foreign Affairs Committee to approve the legislation. A Democratic staffer who spoke to JI was confident there are sufficient votes in the committee to block it.
Even if the committee votes in favor of the resolution, Democratic leadership would subsequently control its fate, and would be able to prevent it from receiving any further consideration or a floor vote.
Seven Democratic members of the committee signed onto a letter last week requesting the Biden administration brief Congress on the deal and provide the full text of the agreement when finalized, but stopped short of demanding the draft agreement text.
The Democratic staffer said the Foxx resolution “would break precedent” by interfering with presidential authority to conduct pending international negotiations, such that it would likely be roundly rejected by Democrats. The staffer also noted that Republicans have used the same procedural tool — seen by critics as a mechanism to force committee consideration of and votes on politically sensitive issues — on dozens of occasions during the current congressional session, and have been consistently blocked by Democrats.
The Democratic staffer said they expect some of the 34 Democrats who signed last week’s letter raising concerns about the draft deal will ultimately support an Iran deal if or when it comes before Congress.
Foxx’s resolution has been co-sponsored by Reps. Michael Burgess (R-TX), Bill Johnson (R-OH), Carlos Gimenez (R-FL) and Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA).
A New York state lawmaker is urging the state’s attorney general to probe potential anti-Israel bias in investment firm Morningstar’s environment, social and governance (ESG) ratings system.
Assemblymember Daniel Rosenthal, a Democrat who represents the heavily Jewish Queens neighborhoods of Kew Gardens Hills, Kew Gardens and parts of Forest Hills, sent a letter on Aug. 31 to Attorney General Letitia James, the latest effort to urge state officials to probe the investment firm, which is facing accusations that its subsidiary, Sustainalytics, is biased against Israel. The letter cites New York’s anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions policy, established by a 2016 executive order.
Morningstar has repeatedly denied that it supports the BDS movement, and has agreed to implement reforms proposed in an outside review commissioned by the firm.
Rosenthal wrote that he “remain[s] skeptical” of the conclusions of the outside report, which identified “latent, disproportionate focus on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict which results in biased outcomes” within “one siloed product,” but denied “pervasive [or] systemic bias against Israel in Sustainalytics’ products or services.”
Some of the recent state-level criticism of and action against Morningstar has been driven by Republicanofficials who are broadly critical of ESG investment practices in general. Rosenthal, by contrast, emphasized that he seeks to support ESG investing.
“Beyond the paramount goal of ensuring financial services firms operating in New York remain free from the influence of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, the ESG component of this investigation is critical,” he wrote. “New York State cannot allow the BDS movement to damage the credibility of Israeli-based companies anymore than we can afford to delay private investment in socially conscious companies building a better world.”
New York’s state comptroller, Tom DiNapoli, rather than the attorney general, has been at the forefront of the state’s anti-BDS efforts.
The father of Malki Roth, a victim of the 2001 Sbarro attack in Jerusalem, talks about keeping his daughter’s legacy alive and his fight to get her justice two decades on
Michel Porro/Getty Images
Arnold Roth (L) of the foundation Israeli Families for Peace speaks to the press in front of a wall of pictures displaying Israeli victims in February 22, 2004, in The Hague, The Netherlands.
On Aug. 9, 2001, in the late afternoon of what had been a typical day in Jerusalem, families gathered for lunch, as they often did, at Sbarro on the corner of Jaffa Road and King George Street. A bustling area, the kosher pizzeria was a particularly popular spot among neighborhood children and members of the area’s religious communities. That Thursday, the restaurant was packed. Fifteen-year-old Malki Roth, a citizen of Israel, Australia and the U.S., was there with her best friend.
At the same time, Malki’s father, Arnold Roth, the head of a drug development company, was taking his lunch break amid an afternoon of nonstop meetings. He had just finished when, around 2 p.m., he answered a call from his wife screaming into the phone. There had been an attack.
Malki, her best friend and 13 others — mostly young mothers and children — were killed when a Hamas terrorist entered the restaurant and detonated a bomb, killing himself in the process. An additional 130 people were injured.
In the 21 years since Malki’s death, Arnold and Frimet Roth have worked tirelessly to preserve her memory and seek justice for their daughter, creating the Malki Foundation (Keren Malki) in her honor. This week, on the most recent episode of Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast,” co-hosts Rich Goldberg and Jarrod Bernstein were joined by Arnold to talk about Malki: her life, her tragic death and the family’s efforts to hold her murderers accountable.
Below are excerpts from the conversation:
Roth: Malki was the youngest of the four children that we brought with us from Australia when we moved to Israel in the summer of 1988, she was just 2 ½ years old. [In] 2001 she had just finished 10th grade, had acquired the leadership of a group of girls through a youth group and had proven herself to be terrifically good at this, and was an advocate for change in her own circle in the school, in the social setting, for children with disabilities. I mentioned that, because the youngest of our children, who lives with us today and who was born 10 years after Malki, is catastrophically disabled. And Malki was somebody who just looked right past that and saw a sibling, a sister whom she adored. That was actually a large part of her personality. She was always smiling and very engaged with other people, just a wonderful human being to be around.
*****
Bernstein: Twenty years ago seems like a long time, but in many ways, it’s like yesterday. So many of us came of age in that time; I remember the Sbarro bombing pretty vividly. Take us back to that day and the days that followed.
Roth: At around 2 o’clock I got back from lunch, my wife was on the phone, and she was shrieking into the phone, something I’m not at all used to, and she said that there had been a “פיגוע” — a terror attack — in the center of Jerusalem. She knew that because she was on the floor with our youngest child watching CNN, and her message was, “I can’t reach the children,” and then she hung up. Naturally, like everybody else in Jerusalem, I reached for my phone and called all of my children one after the other… And I found very quickly that the cell network had gone down…An hour later, I still hadn’t reached Malki and I had spoken to the other children. And from there it was just a movie plot that just got darker and blacker and more awful…
Around 5 o’clock, 5:30 that afternoon, this is the ninth of August 2001, and the downstairs neighbor, [a] lovely lady who’s no longer alive, came up the stairs with an awful look that I’ll never forget on her face, and she said, “Michal is dead.” Michal was our daughter’s best friend and we knew that they were together, and we hadn’t had any status update. Well, the television had provided the first status update, so we knew we were in something that was more worrying, more catastrophic than anything that I think we were prepared for. And so it went until 2 in the morning. Two in the morning, our two oldest sons had been accompanied by a social worker, they went down to the government forensic center in Yaffo near Tel Aviv, and at roughly 2 o’clock they phoned home from there and they said they had found Malki. And that was, as you can imagine, just one of those moments you never forget.
*****
Roth: We didn’t know who the people were behind the label “Hamas” until several weeks later. And then, as has been the case from that day pretty much until today, everything we learned came through the news. So, we learned through the news that a woman had been arrested and charged, and that several men had been arrested and charged, and in the fullness of time they were put on trial. And when the trials happened, we learned about that through the news. We learned about what they said and what the court said and what the verdict was, through the news, and eventually we learned that they’d been sentenced.
In the case of Ahlam Tamimi, the woman who as we now know and certainly did not know at the time, had found the site, sought it out because of the large number of Jewish children in a strictly kosher pizzeria in the center of town on a school holiday. She has been, in effect the poster child, for the redemptive value of murdering Jewish children…She was arrested, charged, convicted and sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment…with a strong recommendation by the panel of three judges, that there be no circumstances under which should ever be released or have a shortened sentence.
Of course, that’s not the way it played out. In 2011, with the euphoria around the release of [kidnapped IDF soldier] Gilad Shalit and a government deal between Israel and Hamas, she walked free against our deeply, deeply bitter opposition to her being released. But it was useless, no one was interested, no one listened, and we were really talking, in addition to talking to the international media, we were talking to the wall. She went back to Jordan, which is where she came from — she was a Jordanian citizen born and bred, her father served in the Jordanian army — and she arrived back in Jordan as a genuine, certifiable VIP. She was very quickly caught up in public appearances all over the kingdom, and then later throughout the Arab world. And starting in February 2012, so we’re talking now, three months, three or four months after she was given back her life through the Shalit deal, she began a TV career as a presenter of her own program.
*****
Bernstein: What is the Jordanian position, given the [1995 U.S.-Jordan extradition] treaty given that the facts here really aren’t in dispute in any way, shape or form?
Roth: The Jordanian position was articulated six days after the charges were unsealed in March 2017, so that on the 20th of March, the highest court for this purpose…in Jordan, pretty much out of the blue from the point of view of the American Embassy and me, handed down a ruling that the 1995 extradition treaties entered into between Jordan and the United States, or more particularly King Hussein, the father of today’s King [Abdullah II], and the Clinton administration, was invalid…
To jump to the bottom line, it’s been so infuriating to us [to] not get support and the shoulder-to-shoulder that I was talking about before, that we actually litigated. We filed an application under the Freedom of Information Act in the United States asking the State Department to hand over the documents that related to that extradition treaty of 1995, which, by the way, the United States continues to regard as being valid, and we were ignored. We filed papers a second time, and we were ignored. And then we decided we’re going to sue the U.S. government. And we did, and we got a settlement almost immediately, almost as if they were waiting for us to do this, but by this time it had taken us several years, and then we got the documents…And the most key of the key documents is a document of ratification of the treaty signed in the personal hand of King Hussein, who talks about God ensuring that no one will ever come to undermine the treaty in the future…
The bottom line of all of this is that Jordan is telling whoppers when they say they don’t have to hand her over. But the much more worrying thing, because in the end I don’t really care what the Jordanians say, is that the United States government seems to be perfectly OK with saying in a very quiet voice, “We’re asking for the extradition to happen and that’s the law,” and in a much larger voice saying, “Hey, the Jordanians, they are our buddies in the Middle East.” President Biden, and he’s not the only one in this story whom I’m going to invoke as president of the United States. I could say the same about Obama and about Trump, almost word for word, but President Biden has now taken several opportunities to say, “King Abdullah is a loyal friend in a tough neighborhood.” And I’m sorry, but I’m fed up to the back teeth with that kind of empty throwing around of slogans. Talk about tough friends when they’ve handed over the people they’re obliged to hand over under bilateral treaties. That’s not what’s happened.
*****
Roth: This has not, a) weakened in the smallest way, my devotion or that of my wife and our family to Zionism. We know why we’re living in Israel…we came here to raise our children in Israel, and we love what’s happened, we are happy, and we have children and grandchildren living here…So, it has not changed our connection to Israel in the smallest way. But it has sharpened, I would use the word contempt, the contempt that I personally feel towards politicians in multiple places and multiple levels of seniority.
*****
Bonus — Malki’s favorite things: “Malki loved music. She was terrifically talented, she played in the Jerusalem Youth Orchestra briefly. She was a classical flutist, and after she was already gone, and in the shiva house when we were sitting in our home with many guests coming to comfort us, we learned that she had written a song. That song is on the website of the Malki Foundation…
“The most meaningful way that we have found for, a) dealing with the profound pain of losing Malki and, b) forcing people to remember her life, has been by creating a charity in her name, which is really very active today…
“Malki loved music. She had this wonderful song which has now gone to every part of the world and has different versions of it, but the musical spirit that she carried with her is something that really sustains us…I want people to know about the happy side of Malki’s life. She wasn’t an unhappy person, she left behind unhappy people, her parents, but that she was really an uplifting, inspiring kind of person, and the Malki Foundation really carries on the spirit of inspiration, the wonderful things that she did for children with disabilities.”
“Is it possible,” asks Yosef Yerushalmi, a scholar of Jewish history, “that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering,’ but ‘justice?’”
This is the question that drives Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, a new book from journalist Linda Kinstler that explores how society remembers and honors the victims of the Holocaust — and warns that the power of survivor testimony is under threat today from the forces of nationalism and authoritarianism.
“The whole book is very much rooted in a desire to see through this vision of Jewish justice, this idea that the survivors gave their testimonies and they gave them for all time, and they expected them to last through various transitions, through upheavals,” Kinstler told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. “Now, it seems like just at the precise moment when they’re dying, [the testimonies] are starting to collapse.”
Kinstler explores these themes primarily through the story of Herberts Cukurs, a famed aviator known as the “Latvian Lindbergh” who later served in a Nazi killing brigade responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of Jews. In 1965, he was killed in Uruguay by Mossad agents who, just a few years earlier, had captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial.
Cukurs came on Kinstler’s radar because of an unusual criminal investigation: Seventy years after the Holocaust, a Latvian prosecutor “reopened” Cukurs’ case to try to prove his innocence and make him something of a martyr for the Latvian nation.
“I discovered this criminal investigation in Riga,” Kinstler recalled. “I had already been studying all these approaches to historical memory and justice, and then I found myself really in one of them, by virtue of my unfortunate personal connection to the story.”
Kinstler is referring to her grandfather Boris Kinstler, one of Cukurs’ comrades in a notorious killing unit called the Arajs Kommando. Boris vanished mysteriously in the late 1940s after he was believed to have become a KGB agent, but despite her years of research, Kinstler cannot fully verify his story. Boris never even met his son — Kinstler’s father — but his ghost looms large in the family’s memory. Kinstler’s summers were spent visiting a family home in Latvia with her grandmother, who never spoke of her husband. Kinstler’s mother, also from Latvia, is Jewish.
The book is not meant to be redemptive. “I’m not looking for truth about my family primarily. I would say I really felt an obligation because in Jewish tradition, you’re taught ‘Justice, justice, you shall pursue,’” Kinstler explained. “I thought, ‘OK, here is something interesting, and it looks like injustice to me. Can I follow it and understand what’s going on?’”
In the book, Kinstler, a University of California, Berkeley doctoral student who writes often about historical memory in Eastern Europe, charts the many efforts to seek justice for victims of the Holocaust over the years. In the wake of such an incomparable atrocity, prosecutors at Nuremberg, then in Germany and ultimately in Israel, had to create their own definition of justice: What crimes should Nazis be charged with? What about a high-level official who personally killed no one but set policy that led the murder of millions? What was the burden of proof? And most importantly, how would prosecutors even begin to collect the testimony of survivors who were so scarred by what they saw — and by the doubt they heard when they first began telling their stories — that they preferred to stay silent?
Since the Nuremberg Trials, which began just months after World War II ended, “we have placed — and rightfully so — so much emphasis on guarding survivor testimonies and using them in court,” Kinstler noted. “Not only that, but it turned into the courts as a place where we shore up all of these historical truths that we have fought for, such as, What actually happened during the Holocaust? Who were the perpetrators? Who was killed, and where? Because these things are very critical to our understanding of that period.”
“My goal,” Kinstler added, “is to call attention to what I think is a unique phenomenon to our current moment in which all of those things are at risk of being undermined, erased, eroded.”
Even while they were happening, the trials were imperfect; “international law” hardly existed in practice, and ordinary criminal charges seemed almost laughable compared to the horrible scope of the Holocaust. Sometimes, men who were known to have committed atrocities were given sentences that appeared much too short; often, the accused war criminals lied to the courts. But the exercise in justice was important, Kinstler argues.
The accused “have been given the kind of trial which they, in the days of their pomp and power, never gave to any man,” Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, said in his closing statement. “The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute of our strength.”
As Kinstler follows the course of Latvian history, and the country’s attempt to reinvent itself after the fall of communism, she examines how the Baltic nation has sought to remember the Holocaust. Like other European nations in the post-Communist era, Latvia began to publicly examine its history, and reckon with the country’s strong faction of Nazi collaborators.
“In theory, the sudden embrace of the past inaugurated an era of acknowledgment, awareness, education and repentance,” she writes. “In practice, it meant that the performance of penitence became a proxy for Europeanness.” Any European might come across a “stumbling stone” marking a place where a victim of the Nazis once lived; an unsuspecting tourist to Budapest will discover the “Shoes on the Danube Bank,” the monument honoring the Jews who were shot at the water’s edge. Holocaust memorials are everywhere, and it appeared that Latvia was headed in the same direction.
But a “revisionist renaissance” was soon underway. Kinstler writes about a play, often greeted with standing ovations, where the actor who played Cukurs asked: “Am I a hero or a victim?” An art exhibition in the city of Liepāja hinted at similar themes.
“The pattern that we see is that figures who were well-known during the interwar period — like Cukurs, who was famous and was everywhere, and people were very familiar with him — they want to see him restored. They don’t want to see him maligned, and so he gets kind of appropriated and made into this national symbol,” said Kinstler. “It’s a desire to erase a whiff of collaborationism.”
She writes about Latvia, her ancestral homeland, but the phenomenon is “more pronounced elsewhere in the region, undoubtedly,” Kinstler said. “That’s what I was trying to call attention to, because it’s not like any of these things are going to go away. It’s not like denialism is all of a sudden going to stop and [people] are going to stop trying to erase the whiff of collaborationism from national stories.”
When asked whether justice has been served for victims of the Holocaust, Kinstler paused. “I don’t know,” she said. “Justice can always be undone, which is part of the thing that I wanted to illustrate. You can’t just say, ‘OK, it was achieved, now we can move on.’”
In other words: Kinstler has written an ode to the mantra “Never forget.”
52% of applicants received funding; $447 million in funds were requested in total, with a budget of $250 million
Justin Merriman/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
Police vehicles remain posted in front of the Tree of Life Synagogue on Monday, October 29, 2018, where 11 people were killed in a mass shooting on Saturday morning.
Just over half of the applications submitted for Nonprofit Security Grant Program funding in 2022 were approved, according to new data for the 2022 application cycle — a slight improvement from the prior year, even as funding shortfalls for the program continued.
The program, which provides federal funding for nonprofits and houses of worship to improve their security, received 3,470 applications and granted 1,821, according to a source familiar with the data, for an overall acceptance rate of 52%. The applications totaled slightly over $447 million in funding requests, well outstripping the $250 million available for the program; 5% of that $250 million was also set aside for the states that play a role in distributing the funding.
Funding was increased to $250 million in 2022 from $180 million in 2021, leading to a slight increase in the proportion of applications accepted, even as the volume of applications and the total funding requested also increased. In 2021, 46% of the 3,361 applications submitted — totaling nearly $400 million — were funded.
Congressional leaders and Jewish community groups are pursuing $360 million in funding for the program in 2023 — which has been the Jewish community’s funding target for multiple years. For the first time, leaders in the House and Senate Appropriations committees, as well as the White House, are supporting that funding level.
But the $360 million target would likely still leave many applications unfunded — even if application volume does not continue to increase.
Lawmakers and advocates for the program emphasized that this year’s data highlights the need for the 2022 funding increase and the importance of efforts to increase funding to $360 million for 2023. But some also signaled openness to upping their funding goals in future years.
“While I’m proud of our work to raise the Nonprofit Security Grant Program funding to a historic level last year, I also understand that it still isn’t enough to meet the growing need for this program,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) told JI. “I will continue working to increase our investment in this program for the next fiscal year so we can help save lives and keep communities safe.”
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ), a major proponent of the program in the House, emphasized that the application volume “bears out that we were right to pursue greater funding for the program” and emphasized that this year’s funding target “builds even more on this record funding.”
“We will fight for $360 million this year and going forward will constantly monitor growing need,” Pascrell continued. “If more support from Congress is needed, we will lead efforts to win it expeditiously.”
Nathan Diament, the Orthodox Union’s executive director for public policy, noted that even with record-high funding, “demand outstripped” supply, which “points the need for increasing the funding at least to the $360 million level that we’ve been advocating for.”
Diament said that he’s prioritizing hitting the $360 million mark for 2023, which has been “in the range” of the necessary funding in past years.
“It’s the kind of thing that could potentially go up and down depending on circumstances so I think if we get to $360 [million], we’ll be much closer to meeting demand on a consistent basis,” he said.
“We need a program that increases in scale at the same rate as the increase in threats and awareness of the program,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told JI. “We need to keep scaling efforts to address the threat and to protect communities.”
Elana Broitman, senior vice president for public affairs at The Jewish Federations of North America, said that the data “reflects the same thing we’re hearing in our communities, that there is a great need for support to stay safe in the face of unprecedented levels of antisemitic incidents.”
This, Broitman continued, is “why we’re so grateful that after intense engagement on the issue, both the House and Senate appropriators have proposed increasing funding for the program to $360 million in the coming fiscal year.”
In advance of the 2022 application cycle, the Department of Homeland Security, which administers the program, made efforts to reach out to “underserved” communities. It also provided significant application advantages to first-time applicants and institutions in disadvantaged communities.
Within the funding block allocated to urban areas — half of the total NSGP funding allocation — 70% of grant recipients were first-time applicants, and more than half were religious institutions, according to data analyses by OU and JFNA.
“Those are actually very good numbers and that’s showing that the money that’s available is getting around more and is going where it’s needed,” Diament said.
The House members signed onto the latest letter from Rep. Josh Gottheimer voicing concerns about the looming Iran nuclear agreement
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Caucus Chair Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and Rep. Josh Gottheimer, (D-NJ), walk together between votes on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, July 20, 2022, in Washington, D.C.
Nearly 30 House Democrats have signed onto a draft letter expressing fresh concerns about the Iran nuclear deal, which appears to be moving toward a conclusion following months of stalled negotiations.
The letter is being circulated by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), who previously marshaled the support of 18 House Democrats to publicly express varying degrees of concern about the negotiations. Twenty House Democrats have publicly expressed concerns about the looming agreement, with others who opposed the original 2015 deal staying silent pending finalized text.
The most recent letter, addressed to President Joe Biden, has picked up more than 40 signatories, a majority of them Democrats, an individual familiar with the letter told Jewish Insider. The letter began circulating on Sunday and will close for signatures on Wednesday, the individual said.
JI has learned that the letter expresses concerns about specific alleged provisions of the proposed agreement text that have been publicly reported. The lawmakers are set to argue that, given recent Iranian attempts to attack U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, any reduction or loosening of U.S. sanctions would be inappropriate. Without any sanctions relief — a key element of the 2015 nuclear deal — Iran would be unlikely to agree to a new deal.
The letter voices specific objections to reported provisions modifying U.S. sanctions targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and lifting sanctions on Iran’s central bank, national development fund and national oil company.
The lawmakers further contend that Russia should not be allowed to serve as the repository of Iran’s enriched nuclear material, nor be allowed to engage in any nuclear projects with Iran — including a $10 billion civilian nuclear project for which the administration has reportedly agreed to waive sanctions.
The letter requests that the administration not sign any deal before releasing the complete agreement to Congress, briefing lawmakers and seeking input from other stakeholders.
A combination of political calculus and an understanding of the reality of the scope of the negotiations took hold last year
Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
Secretary of State Tony Blinken speaks during a meeting with Philippine President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. at Malacanang Palace on August 6, 2022, in Manila, Philippines.
Not long after Joe Biden clinched the Democratic nomination in 2020, he and his team of foreign policy advisors began to use a new phrase to describe their vision for a renewed nuclear deal with Iran.
“I’ll work with our allies to make it longer and stronger,” Biden said at a 2020 fundraiser, one of dozens of public instances in which top administration officials — on the campaign trail and then in the White House — would call for a “longer and stronger” deal to last longer than the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and curb not just Iran’s nuclear program but also its malign regional activities, such as its support for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Now, as Washington awaits a response from Iran on America’s comments on a draft nuclear agreement negotiated by the European Union, top U.S. officials are no longer calling for a “longer and stronger” deal. In the early months of the Biden administration, everyone from the president to Secretary of State Tony Blinken to Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary, had used the phrase. And for a presidential administration that strictly sticks to fine-tuned, top-down language on controversial policy issues, it was clear that “longer and stronger” was administration policy for a time. When those same officials ceased using the term, it suggested something had shifted.
A review of statements from the White House and the State Department shows that Biden administration officials stopped using the phrase in June 2021, amid an Iranian election campaign that would result in the election of a president whose foreign minister said in September that the country would not sign onto a “longer and stronger” agreement.
But the Biden administration never explained publicly what changed for them.“A mutual return to full implementation of the JCPOA must be and can be the starting point for renewed diplomacy – not the end point,” a State Department spokesperson told Jewish Insider in an email on Wednesday. “From that basis, we would be in a better position to pursue other diplomatic objectives but also to deter, contain, or confront other dangerous or destabilizing Iranian policies.” The spokesperson declined to comment on whether the Biden administration has changed its policy toward Iran.
“Campaigning is about telling people what they want to hear. Governing is usually a much messier process, determining what exactly you’re going to get,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has served in Democratic and Republican administrations. “I think that when ‘longer and stronger’ was enunciated, I think there wasn’t much conviction that in fact it could be achieved.”
That doesn’t mean, Miller said, “that it was a cynical manipulation of Congress or the Israelis. But I think it quickly became apparent that ‘longer and stronger’ was going to run into … It’s Mike Tyson,” Miller added, referring to the heavyweight boxing champion. “You have a plan until you get punched in the mouth, and then the plan changes.”
Moderate Democrats in Congress who had been critical of the 2015 deal welcomed Biden’s argument that the U.S. negotiating team would seek a “longer and stronger” deal, with many, such as freshman Rep. Shontel Brown (D-OH), adopting identical language in their own positions.
At a June 2021 Senate hearing, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) asked Blinken about Biden’s pledge to negotiate a “longer and stronger” agreement. Blinken questioned “whether there are areas where we can get even stronger commitments from Iran” and noted that any such commitments would require concessions to Iran, which may not be favorable to Washington.
“Longer and stronger would have meant concessions to Iran on the part of the United States, perhaps even the end of primary sanctions,” said Miller, who believes the U.S. should reenter the JCPOA. “It would have required Iran to fundamentally alter its whole ethos, which in my judgment would mean not using the United States and Israel as a foil, in order to validate their revolutionary ideology.” That’s something Iran has shown no willingness to do.
In May, 16 Democratic senators voted in favor of a Republican-led nonbinding resolution stating that a nuclear deal with Iran must address the country’s support for terrorism in the region. “We want a longer and stronger deal,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Politico at the time.
Congressional critics have hammered Biden administration foreign policy officials about their commitment to a “longer and stronger.” In a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing this May, ranking member Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) asked chief Iran negotiator Rob Malley, “Why should we believe you in any way, shape or form when you don’t keep the commitments that were made before, the longer and stronger deal that was promised?”
Malley responded by referring to an administration policy that had largely gone unmentioned in the previous year. “What President Biden said, what Secretary Blinken said, what all members of the Administration have said is let’s get back into the deal and use that as a platform to get a longer and stronger deal, in large part because it’s much safer to negotiate a longer, stronger deal when we know that their nuclear program is in check, rather than to negotiate with the looming threat of a threshold state before us,” said Malley.
Joel Rubin, a vocal supporter of the Iran deal who served in the Obama State Department, argued that the administration is trying to navigate the thorny politics of the issue, and that Biden is getting flack not just from moderate Democrats and Republicans but from progressives. “This cuts in all directions,” Rubin told JI. “Like, what about people on the progressive side who are frustrated that Biden didn’t get in right away and just rejoin?”
He also noted one aspect of the negotiations that does go beyond the nuclear issue: Biden held firm to his condition that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps not be removed from Washington’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, which Rubin argued fits in the “stronger” category.
In recent weeks, as nuclear negotiations appear to be reaching a conclusion, Biden administration officials have remained tight-lipped about what they hope to see from Iran. Instead of “longer and stronger,” one phrase has been a constant: “We’re not going to negotiate in public.”
This post was updated at 8:40 p.m. on 8/31/22 to add comment from the State Department as well as testimony by Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley at a May Senate hearing.