
U.S. Army Sgt. James K. McCann
With Democrats officially retaking control of the Senate Wednesday afternoon, they will now take leadership of the Senate’s committees, powerful positions that grant significant control over Senate activity. Here’s a guide to who is now set to lead each committee:
Agriculture: Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) reclaims the Agriculture gavel, which she previously held from 2011 to 2015.

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Robert Malley, who served as a national security official in the Obama administration, is being considered for a position in the Biden administration as special envoy on Iran, sources with knowledge of the plans inform Jewish Insider.
Malley was critical of the targeted killing of top Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh last November, saying that the attack would “make it all the more difficult for [Trump’s] successor to resume diplomacy with Iran.”
After leaving the White House, Malley, who served as special assistant to the president and White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region, served as president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based International Crisis Group.

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Joshua Karp, a 32-year-old Democratic strategist, has worked in campaign politics for about the past decade, having engaged in what he describes as a long and painstaking project to flip southern states. “They’re right on the cusp of turning blue and need that extra little shove,” said Karp, a native of Hampton Roads, Va., who now lives in suburban Maryland. The effort, however, has often left him feeling deflated. The biggest blow came in 2018, after Karp joined Andrew Gillum’s Florida gubernatorial run as a deputy campaign manager — only to see him lose by a fraction of a percentage point.
Not one to lick his wounds, Karp sensed a new challenge when, two summers ago, he got word that Jon Ossoff was mulling a Senate bid in Georgia. Though Ossoff’s 2017 congressional campaign, among the most expensive in history, had ended in defeat, Karp suspected the Peach State was ready to elect a Democratic senator. “The opportunity this cycle felt like it was in Georgia,” Karp, one of the first to join Ossoff’s campaign as a senior advisor in August 2019, told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. Karp’s intuition was correct. Earlier this month, Ossoff beat out Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) in a political upset that — along with Rev. Raphael Warnock’s victory over Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) — helped give Democrats a slim majority in the Senate.

U.S. Embassy
Antony Blinken, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for secretary of state, said that diplomatic progress on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and other provocations or on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are likely long-term goals unlikely to see significant progress in the near future during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing Tuesday afternoon.
Blinken reiterated the Biden team’s commitment to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and said that if Iran returns to full compliance with the JCPOA, the Biden administration would do so as well — potentially indicating that the U.S. will not unilaterally roll back the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions without initial steps from the Iranian government.

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Alejandro Mayorkas, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for secretary of Homeland Security, discussed his family’s history with antisemitism during his confirmation hearing at the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Tuesday.
“I am profoundly aware of the threat and existence of antisemitism in our country and the world,” Mayorkas said in response to a question from Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) about his approach to antisemitism. “My mother lost her paternal grandparents and seven uncles by reason of their Jewish faith in the Holocaust. My mother fled her home with her parents because of the Holocaust. I have dedicated a considerable amount of my personal and professional energy to battling antisemitism and discrimination of all forms.”

Staff Sgt. Chris Hubenthal/U.S. Air Force
All eyes will be on Tony Blinken this afternoon when President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state will testify in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Jewish Insider asked a handful of readers and experts: “What is one question you would ask Tony Blinken at his confirmation hearing?”
Aaron David Miller, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “As part of an effort to facilitate normalization between Israel and the Arab states, the Trump administration made certain commitments to [the United Arab Emirates], Sudan and Morocco. Will the Biden administration abide by those commitments, especially U.S. recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara even though it contradicts established U.S. policy?”

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There were moments amid his research when Gershom Gorenberg wanted to whoop for joy inside the hushed, staid rooms of the British National Archives.
“It would not have been well thought of,” joked Gorenberg of his suppressed instinct. But it was still hard to contain his excitement each time he uncovered a key detail to piecing together his latest book, War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, which hits shelves today.

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Of the many names included in President Donald Trump’s executive order on Monday expanding on a previous mandate to establish a statue park called the “National Garden of American Heroes,” one that stands out as particularly unexpected is Hannah Arendt, the German-born Jewish political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled in the United States, where she became an American citizen in 1951.
For those even passingly familiar with Arendt’s oeuvre, including her best-known work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Trump’s announcement no doubt came as a surprise — and a jarring one at that. Over the past four years, Arendt’s writings — including her famous coinage, “the banality of evil,” a phrase she invented after witnessing Nazi war-criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem — were repeatedly invoked as opinion columnists, professors and other pundits endeavored to make sense of the president’s apparent flirtation with autocracy, so often that it has become something of a journalistic cliché.