Elbridge Colby, the nominee to be undersecretary of defense for policy, said during a 2012 event that the consequences of attacking Iran to destroy its nuclear program would be worse than Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, in video that has been circulating among members of the Senate Armed Services Committee ahead of his confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

“The only thing worse than the prospect of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be consequences of using force to try to stop them,” Colby, who was an analyst at the Center for a New American Security think tank, said in the resurfaced video clip.

In his kickoff announcement for his bid to be mayor of New York City, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for the city to “be at the forefront” in “leading the fight against the global rise of antisemitism.” 

“New York City should not be tolerating any harassment [or] disparagement of our Jewish brothers and sisters, and certainly not from our elected officials,” Cuomo said in the 17-minute videotaped pitch, which included a photo of an anti-Israel demonstration outside of Fordham University.  

Rep. Craig Goldman (R-TX), the newest Jewish Republican member of the House, told Jewish Insider in a recent interview that he plans to step up for any opportunity that presents itself to support Israel and promote peace in the Middle East.

Goldman was named last week as a new co-chair of the House Abraham Accords Caucus, his first major foray into Middle East policy leadership since taking office in January.

The last few years have been strange ones for writer Dara Horn. Used to creating imaginative Jewish worlds as a fiction writer, she published her first nonfiction book in 2021, expecting it to be a “detour.” Instead, the publication of People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, about the very real and often very depressing world that Jews inhabit, changed the course of her career.

“I became this receptacle for all of these horror stories from Jewish readers,” Horn said. “I was immersed in this dumpster fire that now all of us are living in.” 

The city of Pittsburgh is again facing down an effort by far-left activists to bring an Israel boycott and divestment referendum to the city’s voters, less than a year after the activists’ first attempt to put the issue on the ballot.

A group of activists affiliated with the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and similar groups filed a petition for a similar ballot measure in August, which the group ultimately withdrew after local Jewish groups — led by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh — challenged whether the activists had collected sufficient signatures to be included on the ballot. City Controller Rachael Heisler also filed a separate challenge. 

In returning to the Center for American Progress last week as president and chief executive, Neera Tanden landed just where she had left off when she departed the influential liberal think tank four years ago to join the Biden administration as a top domestic policy advisor.

But while her homecoming was heralded by the center as crucial to developing a new Democratic agenda to help counter President Donald Trump, it also came as a tacit rebuke of Patrick Gaspard, who led the organization in Tanden’s absence and is now serving as a distinguished senior fellow.

There’s a scene in the 2003 British romantic comedy “Love Actually” where the British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, takes a rhetorical pickaxe to the “special relationship” between the U.S. and U.K. while standing next to the American president. “I fear this has become a bad relationship,” Grant’s character states, as the president’s smug grin disappears from his face.

That confrontational tone could not be further from the approach taken by Prime Minister Keir Starmer during his Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump on Thursday, even though Starmer’s Labour Party and Trump’s Republican Party are ideological opposites. 

A series of flawed assumptions that Israel held about Hamas for years prior to its Oct. 7 attack preceded its devastating failure to adequately prepare for and defend against the deadly terror attacks by the Gaza-based terror group in which more than 1,200 people were killed and 251 people were kidnapped, according to the findings of a long-awaited IDF inquiry released on Thursday.

The inquiry, one of four released this week that investigated events leading up to and following Hamas’ attacks, found a “broad failure in intelligence gathering and research, across multiple levels and organizations in the knowledge and understanding of Hamas’ strategy, overarching objectives, capabilities, and operational plans over the years.”