With Deborah Lipstadt’s nomination to be the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism stalled in the Senate, 23 House Democrats sent a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee leadership on Tuesday urging them to move forward with the Holocaust historian’s nomination.

Republicans have blocked the committee from scheduling a hearing due to concerns about Lipstadt’s past tweets, particularly those about committee members. 

Led by Reps. Kathy Manning (D-NC) and Ted Deutch (D-FL) , the Democrats, all members of the House Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism, urged Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Ranking Member Jim Risch (R-ID) in their letter to schedule a hearing for Lipstadt next week.

The Senate committee has scheduled its next hearing for Biden administration nominees for Dec. 1, but Lipstadt is not set to be considered at that convening.

“We are witnessing a rise in threats against Jewish communities in our country and around the globe. It is more important than ever that the Senate acts quickly to confirm a special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism,” Manning told Jewish Insider. “Dr. Deborah Lipstadt is a leading scholar of antisemitism who was nominated by President Biden nearly four months ago. I co-authored this letter to urge my Senate colleagues to consider Dr. Lipstadt’s nomination next week and to confirm her as Special Envoy with bipartisan support.”

Manning’s spokesperson, Hailey Barringer, told JI that the letter’s authors solicited GOP signatures but no Republicans joined before the signing period closed Monday night. More than 20 major Jewish organizations have voiced their support for a prompt hearing for Lipstadt.

“In a time when antisemitic incidents are on the rise, and when Jewish people feel less and less safe, we need a respected leader and true fighter leading our government’s response to antisemitism,” Deutch told JI. “Dr. Deborah Lipstadt has a proven track record of fighting antisemitism in all its forms, wherever it originates. And she has earned the admiration she has received from the Jewish community and from members of both parties. The Senate must confirm her now and let her get to work.”

The letter’s other signatories include Reps. Brad Schneider (D-IL), Susan Wild (D-PA), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Grace Meng (D-NY), Dina Titus (D-NV), Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Brad Sherman (D-CA), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), David Cicilline (D-RI) Juan Vargas (D-CA), Ritchie Torres (D-NY), Kathleen Rice (D-NY), Haley Stevens (D-MI), Marc Veasey (D-TX), Marilyn Strickland (D-WA), Jackie Speier (D-CA), Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Elaine Luria (D-VA).

Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) announced Monday that he would seek to replace retiring Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT), entering the race as the odds-on favorite to win the seat and likely clearing the Democratic field well ahead of the August 2022 primary. 

A member of the House of Representatives since 2007, Welch has regularly sided with the left flank of the party on both domestic and foreign policy issues — including regarding the Middle East.

The Vermont congressman, who spoke at a 2019 J Street conference, was an original cosponsor of a bill introduced by Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI) in September that would bar Israel from using U.S. aid to support Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank. The bill would also mandate that the U.S. consider all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as occupied territories and rescind the Palestine Liberation Organization’s terrorist designation.

Welch also cosponsored a bill from Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) seeking to add restrictions on U.S. aid to Israel. That bill accuses the Israeli military of a campaign of unlawful detention of Palestinian minors and of discriminating against Palestinians in construction planning. It further calls Israeli settlements in the West Bank “including East Jerusalem” a “flagrant violation under international law.” In 2015, Welch cosponsored a similar McCollum bill focused specifically on the Palestinian minors issue.

The congressman was one of a quarter of House members who did not sign onto a letter earlier this year that opposed conditioning U.S. aid to Israel. 

In June, he led a letter urging the Biden administration to reverse much of the Trump administration’s Israel policy, including withdrawing the Trump administration’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, issuing guidance deeming settlements as contrary to international law, opposing evictions of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and reopening the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem serving Palestinians.

In February 2020, Welch co-authored an op-ed arguing that the Trump administration’s peace plan “threaten[ed] a future where peace could prevail” and showed “disdain for diplomacy and disregard of history.”

Welch led a letter calling on former President Donald Trump to continue U.S. aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) as well as direct aid to the Palestinians, both of which were cut by the administration. He also joined a letter calling for the U.S. to restore aid to Gaza and urge Israel to end its blockade.

In 2015, when former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress to oppose the Obama administration’s Iranian nuclear deal, Welch tweeted, “No single individual has done more to harm the vitally important U.S.-Israeli relationship than Netanyahu,” but he did ultimately attend the speech.

Welch voted in support of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015, cosponsored bills in 2008 and 2013 pursuing diplomatic normalization with Iran and has supported numerous measures opposing military action against Iran, although he also cosponsored four bills between 2007 and 2011 supporting increased sanctions on Iran.

Yoram Samets, a Jewish activist in Vermont, told Jewish Insider on Monday that Welch has a “very positive” relationship with the state’s Jewish community.

“There are times when I’m not in agreement with him, but I think, by and large, he’s been a good friend to the Jews and a good friend to Israel,” Samets said. “I think there are a couple of places where he stands out, primarily [the] Iran [deal] voting a few years back, but I think mostly he’s been a friend.”

Rabbi Amy Small, who lives in Burlington, told JI that the community has a “close connection to Peter Welch and from my observation… he’s really a gift to us.”

“He is a strong friend of Israel and concerned for the Jewish people and for the state of Israel,” Small said.

Samets explained that Vermont’s Jewish community — like many across the nation — is “divided on Israel issues,” but consistent with the state’s progressive leanings, is weighted heavily towards the more liberal end of the party. 

“I think he explores both sides fully,” Samets said, of Welch’s approach to Israel issues. “He’s very engaged, he’s very receptive, he’s easy to get to. We do very well around that with him… He’s reflective of where the Jews of Vermont are and open at the same time to the left and the right.”

Small noted that voters in the Burlington area largely hew strongly progressive.

“One of the reasons why Peter connects with the people in the community here… is because he is on the more progressive end of the Democratic Party, but he’s not far far left,” she said. “Here, he fits right in… The fact that he’s on the more progressive side means that some people [in the Jewish community] are not happy about that. He does have deep support for a lot of other reasons as well.”

She echoed Samets in saying that Welch is “cautious and careful” when it comes to Israel issues and “is not going to alienate people who have a strong position on the other side.

Samets told JI that Welch has been clear in conversations with the Jewish community that he opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, which recently became a flashpoint in Burlington’s city council, and has been outspoken in recent months against antisemitism.

Small told JI that Welch reached out to her regularly in the wake of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh to offer his support

“Peter called me and we spoke regularly during the course of that week,” she said. “I just consider that to have been a tremendous gift… [He] made sure that I knew that if I had any concerns, I could turn to him, which I did.”

“There have been times when I reached out to him when I had concerns about antisemitism and he’s concerned about it and he welcomes that contact,” Small continued.

Matt Dickinson, a professor of political science at Vermont’s Middlebury College, told JI that Welch’s entry into the race will likely “clear the field on the Democratic side.”

“I doubt that anyone will challenge him, at least anyone with any concern about reputation within the Democratic Party,” he said. As for the Republican side: “I’m not trying to say that Republicans have no chance. The reality is, though, this will be an uphill battle for them.”

Vermont voted overwhelmingly for both President Joe Biden and Welch in 2020 (the state has one at-large congressional district), with both Democrats picking up approximately two-thirds of the vote in the state. Both the state’s current Gov. Phil Scott and former Gov. Jim Douglas — who are both popular Republicans with significant crossover appeal — have ruled out running for the Senate seat.

“The Republicans have a very weak bench here in the state, so I think that, the context of this being a predominantly blue state, all of this says that the sound money right now would be on Peter Welch,” Dickinson said.

Although Welch, at 74 years old, is comparatively old for a first-term senator, Dickinson predicted his age would not be an issue for him in this campaign.

“If he wasn’t already well-known and we didn’t already have two octogenarians [in the Senate] I think it might be a concern,” he explained. “His appearance hasn’t changed dramatically, he’s still physically active. I don’t think it’s going to be an issue. Not this term, not for this election.”

One bellwether for the race will be whether the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign wing of the Senate Republican conference, will spend money in the state, according to Dickinson. “If they do, that suggests their internal polling thinks they have a shot at this,” Dickinson said. 

Given that midterm elections are generally weak years for incumbent presidents’ parties and that Vermont is a “cheap state, relatively speaking” to run in, the Republicans could “take a shot at funding a candidate,” he continued.

“I think it’s far-fetched, but you can think of a scenario in which this race becomes more competitive than it looks right now,” he said.

Nearly a century separates the antisemitism of Henry Ford’s newspaper The Dearborn Independent and Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer. But the time and distance between them dissolves this week in a courtroom in Charlottesville, Va., as a verdict is awaited in the civil case against the white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizers of the deadly Unite the Right rally held in the college town in the summer of 2017.

In their case alleging a conspiracy of hate made possible by the internet, the plaintiffs’ attorneys in Sines v. Kessler aim to bankrupt those, like Anglin, who were behind the rally, during which a counterprotestor, Heather Heyer, was killed, and many others were injured.

The attorneys, in a lawsuit brought by the nonprofit Integrity First for America, are using a Civil War-era conspiracy statute, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, to undergird their arguments. But the libel case that brought Ford’s antisemitic newspaper to its knees in 1927, initiated by a little-known Jewish lawyer named Aaron Sapiro, provides rich historical context for the events playing out in Charlottesville.

In 1925, Sapiro sued Ford — the wealthiest, most famous man in the country — for libeling him in The Dearborn Independent, which claimed he was ruining the agriculture industry. 

Ford took aim at Sapiro, who was organizing California and Canadian farmers into cooperatives to improve their financial security, mocking him as the essence of the so-called “money-grubbing, controlling Jew,” said Victoria Woeste, author of “Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech,” published in 2012 by Stanford University Press. Woeste is an affiliated research professor at the American Bar Foundation.

Under pressure from national Jewish leaders who feared a trial would further spread Ford’s well-known antisemitism, Sapiro was forced to settle. He won significant damages — $135,000, a lot of money at the time but hardly a dent in the coffers of a man as wealthy as the car manufacturer. The settlement also shut down The Dearborn Independent, the newspaper Ford purchased in order to publish articles about what he saw as “the Jewish problem.” The articles centered on Ford’s belief that Jews controlled the economy, the media and started World War I. Titled “The International Jew,” the articles were later collected into a book which is still sold today and was cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf and other Nazi leaders as an influence. In 1938 Ford was awarded Germany’s medal for foreigners sympathetic to Nazism. 

The Dearborn Independent described Sapiro as an “international financier who will enslave American farmers and eventually replace the American state with this international conspiracy,” Woeste told Jewish Insider. As a condition of the settlement, the widely read paper ceased publication in 1927. At the time it had the second highest circulation of any newspaper in the country.

“Ford’s antisemitism got a lot of attention, but if it wasn’t for this single Jewish lawyer who decided to sue Ford for libel, on his own, it never would have stopped,” said Gaylen Ross, a documentary filmmaker currently directing and producing a film titled “Sapiro: The Jew Who Sued Henry Ford.” “It is remarkable that he did this on his own and is unknown.”

“The Charlottesville case is the successor to Sapiro,” Woeste said.

The strategy of using civil litigation to try and shut down antisemites and white supremacists has an impact beyond the defendants in the Charlottesville case, said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America.

“The financial operational consequences create a deterrent to others considering participating in hate like this,” she said at the Anti-Defamation League’s recent “Never is Now” conference. “Some of the defendants have already said that the case has undermined their ability to go about their business, and forced operations to shut down.”

A lawyer for the nine plaintiffs in the case said in closing arguments last Thursday that each should be awarded between $3 and $10 million “for pain and suffering,” in addition to their medical costs. Defendant Richard Spencer, who is representing himself, said during an earlier motion that he has been bankrupted by the lawsuit.

“These cases are extremely effective,” said Heidi Beirich, who co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism last year, after working at the Southern Poverty Law Center for two decades. Defendants “lose their resources and no one wants to associate with them anymore. The organizations collapsed, lost their money [and] no longer functioned as serious entities in the white supremacist world,” she said of past cases. “There is evidence that when extremists have access to property it makes it easier to engage in terror. They can train people. We took that away from them.”

But now, white supremacists’ work  — and collecting judgments against them — has moved online.

“The problem that we have is that this is a movement that has metastasized over the last 10 or 12 years. It is so much bigger than we could have anticipated,” said Beirich. “The internet allows radicalizing recruitment in ways that just weren’t possible with a fax machine and a phone.”

After Sapiro’s legal victory, the strategy of using civil litigation to de-fang white supremacists was used successfully by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) starting in the 1980s. In 1990, the SPLC won a $12.5 million judgment against the White Aryan Nation, whose leaders were convicted of organizing skinheads in Portland, Ore., who murdered Ethiopian student Mulugeta Seraw. In 1998, a South Carolina jury awarded the largest judgment up to that point — $37.8 million — against the Christian Knights of the KKK, its state leader and four other Klansmen for burning down the Macedonia Baptist Church. The judgment forced the sale of the Christian Knights of the KKK’s land and headquarters, requiring that it never be used by a hate group again, and put an end to the white supremacist organization, which had been “one of the most active Klan groups in the nation,” according to the SPLC.

Other organizations too are using this approach; The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is representing the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. in a civil lawsuit filed earlier this year against Proud Boys International and its leaders, for attacking the church and its property. The NAACP, on behalf of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and other representatives, has filed a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, his former attorney, Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, for conspiring to incite a violent riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.  

The SPLC sued Anglin, publisher of The Daily Stormer — named after Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Sturmer — in federal court for unleashing a terror campaign against Tanya Gersh, a realtor in Whitefish, Mont., and her young son. In 2019 they won a judgment for Gersh, for infliction of emotional distress and invasion of her privacy, of more than $14 million.

Gersh v. Anglin was “our first foray into the digital realm, where the misconduct was cyber-based,” said Scott McCoy, SPLC’s interim deputy legal director for special litigation, which covers suing hate groups.

The other 21st-century twist to the case, which makes collecting that judgment more difficult than it was to sell the Klan’s real property in the 1980s, is that Anglin’s assets are in the form of cryptocurrency. During his trial, Anglin went underground. His current whereabouts are uncertain. 

High-powered law firms are working to track down those assets. Daniel Kramer, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, is working pro-bono on the case. His connection to hate crimes is personal: His brother-in-law, Jerry Rabinowitz, was one of 11 people murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. “Since Jerry’s death, I’ve made these cases against Nazis and white supremacists a bigger focus of my pro-bono work,” Kramer told JI.

Charlottesville plaintiffs’ attorney Karen Dunn is also a partner at Paul, Weiss.

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists have moved into cryptocurrency because “as we’ve become more and more successful in marginalizing purveyors of hate, they’ve had to stop using the usual banking system and go into more esoteric and underground ways of funding their hateful operations,” explained Kramer. “Different methods of buying and selling crypto change all the time. As we try to marginalize them they come up with new ways of trying to get funding, and we’re hot on their trail.”

Disrupting the flow of money to purveyors of hate is critical, say those involved with the work. “In 2013 our first target was to try to stop them from having PayPal accounts,” said Beirich, who at the time was at the SPLC and working on the Anglin case. “It was the money that enabled them to function. If we could hit them in the bank account we could cripple them over time. PayPal started suspending accounts the week after Charlottesville. That turned the tide.”

Anglin continues to fundraise, asking for donations in cryptocurrency, on websites like 4Chan and 8Chan, Kramer said. “We would like to disrupt his fundraising. It’s as simple as that.”

“When we brought these cases against the Klan in the past, they had property and businesses we could seize. Today it’s in this digital realm. It is virtual, intangible, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be tracked,” said McCoy. “There are on and off ramps to blockchain. Eventually Anglin will try to monetize it, will go to a bitcoin ATM and take out cash,” and he will be tracked down.

“Fortunately the law has pretty good mechanisms for attachment and garnishment, which we can rely on in the cryptocurrency context just as if it were other assets,” McCoy added. 

In the 2021 version of putting an end to The Dearborn Independent, Gersh’s legal representatives have also taken over most of Anglin’s websites, Kramer said, in what is to his knowledge the first time the approach has been used in the execution of a civil judgment. 

“We have taken control of the websites that lead to The Daily Stormer. It is getting harder and harder to find his propaganda online,” said Kramer. A Russian web host still has the last version of the hate-filled website online because “we haven’t been able to shut that one down.” 

“Civil litigation has played a crucial role throughout history in bankrupting and dismantling hate groups,” Spitalnick told JI. “Our lawsuit uniquely holds accountable the white supremacist groups and leaders responsible for the Unite the Right violence. And even before trial, our case has made clear the significant financial, legal and operational consequences for this violent hate.”

With the aftereffects still being felt from the 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in May, Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, joins Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast” to discuss his new book, Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War, in which he argues that the Biden administration’s initial support of the Palestinian Authority election indirectly sparked the conflict.

Early start: “My view is that the war was probably put in motion a month before the conflict erupted. And that stemmed from a decision — an ill-fated decision — by the Biden administration when they first came in to accept the decision of the Palestinians to hold elections in April… Hamas was slated to take part in those elections. It would have undoubtedly led to a disastrous consequence had Hamas actually been able to take part because it would have meant that Hamas was going to hold seats in the parliament and take part in whatever the next government would look like. And that would trigger laws that would defund the Palestinian Authority here in the United States, in fact, set in motion by a guy named Senator Joe Biden… In April, the U.S. prevailed upon the Palestinians to cancel the elections. But that left Hamas feeling pretty raw, left out of the political arena, and looking for a way to make themselves relevant again. And there is no better way for Hamas to make itself relevant than by waging war against Israel.”

Indirect result: “I’m not saying that they caused it directly, what I would say is that they made a disastrous decision. And I actually remember talking to a relatively senior Biden administration official when they made the call that they were going to move forward with these elections initially. And I asked, I said, ‘You know, don’t you think that it’s a bad idea that Hamas is taking part, given that Hamas is a designated terrorist organization here in the United States?’ And the response that I got was, ‘Well, far be it from us, after the disastrous events of January 6, for us to tell anyone who can take part in an election, what democracy should look like, how it should operate.’”

The chameleon: “Hamas is many things to many people or many regimes. It is one of Iran’s most important proxies based in the Gaza Strip. It is also a proxy of Turkey. It’s a proxy of Qatar. It’s even maybe, to some extent, a proxy of Malaysia, which gets very little attention. But I would argue that the group has really benefited over the last several decades from the largesse of Iran, and it has become a tool of Iran, even as its leaders maintain some semblance of independence from its paymasters in Tehran.”

No excuse necessary: “Hamas doesn’t really need an excuse to launch a war. In fact, there are many times where Hamas fires rockets into Israel, and Israel just simply absorbs them, choosing not to respond. I mean, this has been Israel’s [modus operandi] for most of the rockets that have been fired at Israel, over the course of several decades now. The Israelis wait for the time and place of their choosing. Now Hamas can provoke a conflict more directly by firing into the Tel Aviv area or into Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, if they start to do that, or if they attack, let’s just call it key infrastructure, whether it’s a direct attack on the military or kidnapping of a soldier, that will also provoke a war.”

Reporting tips: Schanzer suggested reporters from the Associated Press bureau in Gaza must have known they worked in the same office building as Hamas fighters before an Israeli bombing. “If they are good reporters and they’re curious about the area that they work in, they might have wanted to take a look at some of the questionable people that were coming in and out of the al-Jaala tower. Look, it’s not like Hamas was going to put its name in the lobby and say, ‘Fifth floor is the Hamas Iron Dome-jamming facility,’ which is, of course, what was there. But I think that we can learn a lot from the previous reports of people like Matti Friedman, who used to work for AP, who has reported in the past that AP kept quiet when Hamas fired rockets from near their facilities and they were deliberately omitting some of this kind of activity from reporting in the past. This has been confirmed by one of Friedman’s former colleagues.”

Lightning round: Favorite Yiddish phrase? “It’s a phrase that I heard from my grandparents when they were mad at at people they would say ‘Gay kaken ofn yahm!’ Go take a crap in the ocean. One of my all time favorites.” Favorite Arabic word? “I probably shouldn’t say this on your podcast, but I had an Egyptian friend that taught me five different words for fart. Which I have to say was really shocking to me.” Most memorable Middle Eastern dish? “It’s an Iraqi fish called masgouf. I think it comes out of the Euphrates River. It’s like a carp. And it’s a freshwater fish, very light, very flaky and when it is served with the rest of the Iraqi trappings, it’s tremendous. I had it, actually, in the town of Hilah, in central Iraq, in 2004. And it was incredibly memorable and then just had it again very recently, in Riyadh, and it lived up to expectations.”

Amid delays to her confirmation as the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt said Sunday that she does not approach her work combating antisemitism from a partisan perspective.

Lipstadt was speaking at a virtual event organized by the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a Holocaust memorial museum in Lower Manhattan, alongside Ira Forman, who served as the special envoy during the Obama administration., Her confirmation process for the special envoy post is being slow-tracked by Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee concerned about her past tweets, particularly those about members of the committee.

Some Republicans have accused Lipstadt of political bias. While she did not address the Republican accusations, Lipstadt pushed back on the notion that her work is motivated by politics.

“Someone once asked me, ‘Do you fight antisemitism on the right or the left?’ I said, ‘I am like an umpire. I am like what Chief Justice John Roberts believes Supreme Court justices should be,’” Lipstadt explained. “I call balls and strikes as I see them. Then I throw up my umpire’s uniform and I become a fighter. I’m on the offensive when people are acting in a certain way and I’m going to defend those who are being attacked.”

Lipstadt also said that she generally avoids assuming someone’s intent, preferring to focus on the content of what they are saying. 

“I don’t know what’s in someone’s heart. That’s between them and their cardiologist… But I don’t care. If a person acts in an antisemitic fashion, I’m going to call that out. I rarely call someone an anti-Semite — I have — but I rarely do,” she said. “Very frequently, I’ll say that person expressed antisemitism or engaged in antisemitism.”

Also during the event, Forman addressed the nine members of the House who voted against $1 billion in supplemental aid for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system. Republican lawmakers have accused the left-wing Democrats who voted against the funding of antisemitism, and Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan said that those who voted against it are “either ignorant or antisemitic.”

 Forman argued that people should be careful about “overuse” of the term — “it can be problematic, it can be patently false, it can be very disturbing, and still not necessarily antisemitism.” 

Addressing the Iron Dome vote specifically, he said, “I think the vote against it was stupid, I think it was unknowing, it was a false premise, it was a double standard. And it can be criticized on other terms. So I think we have to be careful not to overuse it.”

Forman contrasted the Iron Dome vote with a statement from the Barnard College chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace this week, which accused Israel of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide.

“In the case of genocide — clearly antisemitic — but they also said settler Zionism has resulted in millions of Palestinians being killed. Now this is patently false,” he said. “When you’re charging [Jewish] people with killing millions, this is literally the blood libel. Whether you intended it or not, this is antisemitic.”

He also warned about the ways that antisemitism can quickly grow and shift, pointing to the United Kingdom’s Labour Party as an example. The U.K.’s human rights watchdog found the party was responsible for “unlawful” acts of antisemitic harassment and discrimination under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. 

He said that, in the early 2000s, South Asian communities in the UK were the country’s largest source of antisemitism, but the U.K. was “one of the least problematic countries” in the European Union at the time.

“Starting in 2015 with the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn to the head of the Labour Party, left-wing, almost Stalinist, antisemitism became the major form in the U.K.,” Forman said. “So it can shift actually very quickly.”

“Corbyn thought of himself, I think, as fundamentally an antiracist. ‘I’m an antiracist, I can’t be an antisemite’: he would say stuff like that and his followers would [too],” he continued. “But as [former British Prime Minister] Tony Blair said, Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite, he just doesn’t know it yet.”

Looking back on his time in the State Department, Forman said that the department and its allies and NGO partners “never have enough resources to deal with this… so we have to triage” with a primary focus on violence against Jewish communities as well as government-sponsored antisemitism.

He also recounted that he found that teachers were reluctant to teach about the Holocaust in a satisfactory way.

“Time after time, I talked to people particularly in Western Europe, teachers who were intimidated by bringing up the issues of [the] Holocaust in their classroom — sometimes because they had kids from the Middle East whose parents had emigrated to that country, sometimes for other reasons, it was taught often as dry history,” he said.

A group of Republican attorneys general and staffers from 11 states met in Washington, D.C., in early November to discuss strategies for keeping pressure on Iran, if the Biden administration reenters in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or eases sanctions against the Islamic regime.

A panel of experts — Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (who also co-hosts Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast”); Jonathan Missner, a partner at the law firm of Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner and board chair of Pro-Israel America; and Avi Jorisch, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council — addressed a group organized by the Republican Attorneys General Association with suggestions for steps that the state officials can take to counter Iran. The gathering took place on the sidelines of a Federalist Society conference.

Goldberg emphasized to JI that the 2015 negotiations around the deal, which Iranian negotiators insisted include language requiring the president to mitigate state laws on sanctions, showed that Iran is aware of the influence that individual states can have in this arena.

“The Iranians know that the states do have the ability to influence private sector decisions. We’ve seen that happen in the [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] arena, quite often,” Goldberg said. “They have the potential to really create a lot of market deterrence.”

Goldberg said he laid out a number of ways that states and state AGs can deter in-state businesses from doing business with Iran in his speech. He proposed modernizing state pension laws to block investment in any business with ties to a number of Iranian financial, energy and construction sectors, in line with current U.S. sanctions. Current state pension laws addressing Iran are largely outdated, he explained.

Goldberg also recommended that AGs warn financial institutions in their states against any association with banks that transact with Iran’s financial sector. Jorisch offered a similar suggestion, a source familiar with the meeting told JI, as well as proposed that states take regulatory action to make in-state banks certify that they do not have links to foreign banks that have ties to Iranian financial institutions involved with terrorism.

Missner told JI that he focused on the role that AGs can play in supporting victims of Iranian terrorism who are suing the regime under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) — an issue with which his law firm has long been involved. 

Missner said he offered to help connect AGs with Gold Star families who have been the victims of Iranian terrorism, and urged the AGs in attendance to “[push] back hard” against any attempts to rescind the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ designation as a terrorist organization, which he said could make JASTA suits more difficult.

Goldberg argued that state action could “send important messages” to both the Biden administration and Iran.

Missner described the AGs’ and their staffers’ responses as “positive, overwhelmingly.”

“This is an audience of people who are interested in these kinds of issues and didn’t know that they could have a real impact in this arena,” he continued.

Goldberg also described the response as “very, very encouraging,” saying that audience members were “very interested.”

“I think there’s going to be a lot of follow-up conversations and discussion and coordination with attorneys general across the country,” he said. “This is a big opportunity for attorneys general to send a message to President Biden that Republican attorneys general will do everything within their power to prevent Iran from gaining access to the banking sector and to resources that can fund terrorism, no matter what Biden does on the nuclear agreement.”

Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Democrat who prevailed by just five votes in South Florida’s recent special congressional primary, emphasized her continued support for Israel in an interview with Jewish Insider as she prepares to assume office this January. 

The 41-year-old healthcare executive said she had met with AIPAC on Thursday during a short visit to Washington, D.C. “We were able to have a long conversation, break down everything, understand what policies are there, and where everything is right now,” she told JI, noting that funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system was one major topic of discussion. “We talked about that.” (AIPAC declined to comment.)

The defense funding was a high-profile issue in Cherfilus-McCormick’s race, where 11 candidates vied to succeed the late Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), a staunch pro-Israel advocate who died in April. Only one candidate, state Rep. Omari Hardy, opposed the recent legislation that would give Israel $1 billion in supplemental aid for the Iron Dome system. 

Cherfilus-McCormick, for her part, was aligned with Hardy on a number of domestic issues such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. But she made clear — as did most other candidates in the race — that she would have voted in favor of the funding. 

Cherfilus-McCormick suggested that she would continue to speak up in support of the U.S.-Israel relationship, even as her Middle East foreign policy views put her at odds with some otherwise like-minded progressive lawmakers in the House.

“I don’t think there should be tension because I think that we can have commonality in certain positions and policies but not have to be identical, and that’s necessary, especially, when you look at my district and who I represent,” she told JI. “I represent the people, and not necessarily someone else’s ideas. Do you get what I mean? So we have to have that conversation and be able to work with each other. I hope there’s no tension. But the good thing about our democracy is that we’re not intended to be unified. We’re intended to have conversations and really represent our constituents properly.”

Cherfilus-McCormick is all but assured a seat in Congress after the Jan. 11 general election in Florida’s heavily Democratic 20th Congressional District, which includes West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. The CEO of Trinity Home Healthcare poured millions of dollars of her own money into the race, which was her third bid for the seat in three years.

She will be the first Haitian-American Democrat in Congress if she is elected.

“From the beginning, I always said that I believe that the Jewish community and the Black community are intimately tied,” she told JI, “and part of us moving forward is having our alliances.”

Cherfilus-McCormick said she plans to visit Israel in February on a delegation of freshman Democratic House members sponsored by the AIPAC-affiliated American Israel Education Foundation.

Growing up in an outdoorsy New England family, Noah Swartz didn’t have a choice when it came to hiking. The family business was Timberland, the footwear company known for its iconic brown boots, that his father sold for $2 billion a decade ago. But that didn’t mean the young Swartz was always excited to take part in family treks. 

“Every 100 feet or so, [my mom] would give us another jelly bean to keep us going and kind of initiate us into the outdoors,” Swartz recalled of childhood hikes. The bribe worked; this week, Swartz launched his own footwear company, Erem, a sustainability-focused brand selling hiking boots for use in the desert. Erem’s initial investors include Jeffrey and Sidney Swartz, Noah’s father and grandfather who have each helmed Timberland. 

“It always struck me as odd when I’d be in the Southwest or in Israel, and you’d see people wearing the same products and brands that you would see in New Hampshire or Vermont,” said Swartz, 28, who grew up in Newton, Mass. “Very different places, very different performance challenges. And yet, same brands, same products.”

Erem intends to offer a solution for a population that Swartz believes is underserved by the outdoors industry: the 1 to 2 billion people who live in the planet’s deserts and drylands. 

Noah Swartz (Courtesy)

“We are fundamentally first and foremost focused on desert landscapes and desert people,” Swartz told Jewish Insider in an interview from Los Angeles on Wednesday. The name Erem comes from Eremos, the Greek word for desert, and it’s also an acronym, for “exceptional, responsible, enduring and motivated.”

The company is headquartered in Henderson, Nev., a Las Vegas suburb, although its all-remote five-person team is spread around the country. Erem has partnered with the Arizona Trail, an 800-mile hiking trail that traverses the entire length of Arizona from Mexico to Utah, by committing 1% of profits to the nonprofit that oversees the trail. The company is also currently selling its shoes in two family-owned hiking stores in the Copper State, but most of its business will be direct-to-consumer.

“It’s one of the most rugged and extreme terrains on Earth,” Swartz said. “Arizona has got a population of 8 million people. Israel’s got the same population. So you start to throw in California and Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, lots of Colorado, lots of Montana, lots of Idaho, you actually kind of get to the point where, in fact, deserts are home for a ton of outdoor recreation.”

Right now, Erem offers two different boots, one for trail hiking and one for off-trail expeditions. Both are “biocircular,” a proprietary term used by Erem to describe the company’s sustainability ethos. 

“Biocircular means two things: ‘bio,’ made only from materials and constructions that have a 100% proven path back to nature, and then ‘circular,’ which means they can be re-streamed into responsible next lives, including new Erem footwear,” said Swartz. This is different from calling them “biodegradable,” and it also doesn’t mean that they are entirely without plastic — but Swartz said they use high-quality materials and try to limit the use of plastic. 

“Greenwashing is rampant in the outdoor industry,” Swartz said, referring to companies who claim to be more sustainable or eco-friendly than they are. “We are trying to raise the sustainability bar for the entire industry.”

This focus on sustainability is what Swartz says sets Erem apart, but it’s also the emphasis on creating shoes that are built for the surroundings where they are actually being used. 

“The outdoor industry is really focused on cold and wet, which is really not what you want in the desert, at least most of the months of the year, where you really would want to be focused on hot and dry,” he explained. A waterproof hiking boot would work well for visitors to, for instance, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles North Carolina and Tennessee, the most-visited national park last year. But hikers in Utah’s Zion National Park, which had 3.6 million visitors in 2020, might want something more breathable — or at least that’s what Erem hopes. 

An insulated, waterproof boot “is going to make your feet sweat and feel hot and feel gross” when hiking in hot and arid conditions, explained Swartz, who said it was an uncomfortable, blister-filled hiking trip in Utah that led him to think about desert-specific footwear. 

At this point, Erem is limiting sales to the United States, although international markets factor heavily into the company’s future plans. “If you are recreating in North Africa, if you’re recreating in Morocco, you are recreating in the desert,” said Swartz. Some of Erem’s product testing occurred in Israel, where Swartz spent much of the pandemic with family who live there. “The search-and-rescue folks out of Beersheva are like, ‘Wow, yes, finally, somebody speaking our language.’”

As Swartz sees it, there’s something special about starting a company that also offers a value proposition. “For-profit businesses really can be the most efficient drivers of social environmental change,” Swartz argued, and Erem combines that belief with “this deep, forever passion for the outdoors and this decade-old obsession with the desert.”

Swartz now lives much closer to desert landscapes than he did growing up in Boston. He recently moved to Los Angeles with his wife after departing Cambridge, Mass., one semester shy of a Harvard MBA. “Harvard MBA dropout starts desert gear company,” he joked, offering a potential tagline for his business. 

“I really fell in love with the desert, maybe just the contrast of coming from the very wet Northeast to going to a very different landscape like that,” said Swartz. “There’s really something about the desert that kind of makes my soul rest a little bit differently. I think, for me, it’s a combination of the vastness and the extremes of the desert combined with the fact of, I think in some ways, really unparalleled beauty.” 

He ties the company’s mission to that trick his mom used to get him to hike as a child: “I guess I carry that jelly bean sweetness with me now still in the outdoors.”