Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) is hopeful that members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the next Congress will hear from a wider array of voices on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said in a J Street webcast on Monday.

Castro — who is one of several lawmakers vying for the chairmanship of the powerful committee following current chair Rep. Eliot Engel’s primary loss — also joined a forum hosted by the Democratic Majority for Israel on Monday. In both webcasts, Castro focused on his desire to bring Palestinian voices before the committee to try to facilitate progress toward a two-state solution.

As in-person convenings across the country have been rendered impossible due to the coronavirus pandemic, organizations have taken to the internet to connect with supporters and expand their reach. Since the start of the pandemic, Jewish Insider has compiled statistics, released weekly, on the webinars and online events being held across the community.

Week of Sept. 25-Oct. 1:

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended New York’s entertainment sector, indefinitely dimming Broadway’s lights and putting thousands — actors, ushers, stagehands and more — out of work. Adam Kantor, who was starring in the off-Broadway musical “Darling Grenadine” until the pandemic forced the show to close, has taken on a new career of sorts in recent months: celebrity guest in the world of Jewish communal webcasts.

Kantor was one of the creators of “Saturday Night Seder,” an online event that drew tens of thousands of live viewers and raised more than $3 million for the CDC Foundation’s Emergency Response Fund. It was particularly fitting for Kantor, who had been diagnosed with COVID weeks earlier, and spent the lead-up to the event recovering in his childhood bedroom.

Following the success of “Saturday Night Seder,” Kantor said, “a bunch of organizations reached out and said, ‘Hey, can you do something like that for us?’ And so it’s been a really great way to continue the spirit of tikkun olam and helping the world, helping organizations that are doing really beautiful work, while also staying somewhat employed, and being able to collaborate with people I love.”

During Tuesday’s Jewish Insider webcast conversation with United Arab Emirates Ambassador to the U.S. Yousef Al Otaiba, Israeli-American businessman Haim Saban, and former White House deputy national security advisor Dina Powell McCormick, live viewers were treated to some bonus content in Zoom’s comments section. Al Otaiba pulled an impressive feat of multitasking as he generously engaged with attendees and their questions while fully participating in the panel conversation. 

Below are some of the highlights from Al Otaiba’s brief responses to JI readers’ questions during the live event. (The questions and responses have been lightly edited for clarity.)

A bipartisan group of legislators from the Senate and the House have introduced a resolution honoring former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ahead of the 25th anniversary of his assassination on Nov. 4.

The resolution is being led by Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Rob Portman (R-OH) in the Senate and Reps. Dean Phillips (D-MN) and Tom Reed (R-NY) in the House. 

Jewish Biden supporters forcefully condemned President Donald Trump’s reluctance to denounce white supremacists at Tuesday’s presidential debate, during a campaign Zoom call last night. The Biden presidential campaign hosted the call with speakers Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), DNC spokesperson Lily Adams, DNC Jewish outreach director Matt Nosanchuk and Biden’s Jewish engagement director Aaron Keyak. 

GOTV pitch: Wasserman Schultz remarked that “given the chance to denounce white supremacists, a very simple thing that universally most good human beings would do, Trump instead embraced and emboldened these hate mongers,” she said. “They got it. They knew what they were hearing — they heard a rallying cry.” Wasserman-Schultz told participants that early in Trump’s presidency she visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington with her then-teenaged daughter, “and when she saw in the beginning of that museum walkthrough what Hitler did in the lead up to the atrocity, she turned to me and said, ‘Mom, that is exactly what it seems like is happening right now in our country.’” The Florida congresswoman added: “God forbid that we have another [Trump] term and we see what comes next. Essentially, we have an opportunity to stop him in his tracks.”

Guy Raz has interviewed hundreds of founders and CEOs as the host of “How I Built This,” the immensely popular NPR podcast launched in 2016. But in a new book, he admits that business was a vocation he once regarded with disdain.

“In high school and college, I used to think that ‘business’ was a dirty word,” Raz writes in the introduction to How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs. “To me, it was the realm of hucksters and pitchmen selling cheap consumer products on late-night infomercials.”

Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart argued that the moderate Democratic center of the Jewish community is collapsing, a move that will ultimately shift the future of pro-Israel advocacy.

Beinart spoke on Wednesday during a virtual panel event hosted by the Arab Center Washington DC — alongside Foundation for Middle East Peace President Lara Friedman, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi and Carnegie Endowment fellow Zaha Hassan — about shifting demographic and political dynamics within the U.S. on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.