Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin are meeting with a bipartisan group of senators on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to advocate for the release of the remaining eight American hostages in Gaza — including their son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin — five of whom are believed to still be alive.

Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was in Washington this week for a White House event focused on sexual violence in wartime, helped to arrange the bipartisan convening, an individual with knowledge of the meeting told JI. Among those attending are Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman.

Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan vowed to be a champion for the Jewish community if elected to the Senate in a letter this week to the more than 70 Maryland rabbis who wrote to Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) earlier this year to warn that the Democrat’s harsh criticism of Israel was alienating Jewish Marylanders.

A group of more than 70 local rabbis penned a memo to Van Hollen in March urging him to reconsider what they characterized as his anti-Israel posture in the months since Oct. 7. The letter accused Maryland’s soon-to-be senior senator of spreading falsehoods about Israel and “divisions” and “isolat[ing]” the Jewish community, despite representing a state with one of the largest Jewish constituencies in the country.

The House of Representatives on Friday approved its version of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, the annual defense and national security policy bill. The Senate Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, approved its own version of the bill on Friday.

Though the NDAA was widely bipartisan when it passed the House Armed Services Committee, amendments incorporated on the House floor on hot-button cultural issues largely led Democrats to oppose the bill. Only six Democrats — Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Don Davis (D-NC), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), Jared Golden (D-ME), Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) and Mary Peltola (D-AK) voted for the NDAA. Conservative isolationist Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Matt Rosendale (R-MT) voted against the bill.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers on Monday called on the administration to “expeditiously implement” stringent new Iran sanctions targeting the country’s oil exports to China that were passed into law earlier this year.

The Stop Harboring Iranian Petroleum (SHIP) Act and Iran-China Energy Sanctions Act were both included in the supplemental national security funding bill that passed Congress and was signed into law in April with bipartisan support. Lawmakers critical of the administration’s Iran policy have long accused the White House of deliberately failing to fully enforce existing sanctions law and pursue sanctions evasion.

Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking at a White House event on Monday, emphasized the need for continued attention to the plight of victims of sexual violence by Hamas on and since Oct. 7, including those still being held hostage.

“These testimonies, I fear, will only increase as more hostages are released,” Harris said. “We cannot look away and we will not be silent. My heart breaks for all these survivors and their families, and for all the pain and suffering from the past eight months in Israel and Gaza.”

Administrators at the University of Michigan and the City of University of New York failed to adequately investigate students’ reports of antisemitism and Islamophobia, the U.S. Department of Education announced on Monday. 

The department’s Office for Civil Rights, known as OCR, released the findings of its investigations into how both Michigan and CUNY handled antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents dating back to 2020, culminating in resolutions reached with both universities to end the investigations in exchange for the administrations promising to do more to take students’ complaints seriously. 

A resolution that calls for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, initially scheduled to be introduced at a New York City Council legislative meeting on Thursday, was tabled this week due to internal and external pushback, multiple sources familiar with the council’s schedule told Jewish Insider. 

The cease-fire resolution calls for “release of hostages and uses Hamas’ casualty numbers,” a source close to the council who saw a copy of the draft told JI. “It also equivocates antisemitism the same as Islamophobia even though there’s a significant increase of antisemitism. It does not say that Hamas is responsible for Oct. 7… it did condemn the murder of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7,” the source said, adding that “a lot of people were behind the pushback.” 

As the Biden administration pressures Hamas to accept a hostage and cease-fire deal, Vice President Kamala Harris will host an event on Monday spotlighting conflict-related sexual violence, including war crimes committed by the Palestinian terrorist group on Oct. 7 and in the months since. 

Harris will deliver remarks at the event, which will also feature a partial screening of “Screams Before Silence,” Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary about Hamas’ “horrific” sexual violence, according to a White House official. Harris plans to argue that “more must be done by the international community to promote justice and accountability,” the official told Jewish Insider. The plans for the event were first reported by CNN.