
Amos Ben Gershom/GPO
As President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet shapes up and the final few days of the 116th Congress tick by, national Jewish and pro-Israel groups are planning out their agendas for the next administration and new Congress.
Priorities and approaches, laid out in a series of interviews with Jewish Insider, vary from group to group, but frequent themes for at least three — including J Street, the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Federations of North America — unsurprisingly include diplomacy with Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and tackling domestic antisemitism.

U.S. Congress
The House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee recommended Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) as their candidate to succeed outgoing Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) as chair of the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) on Tuesday evening.
Twenty-nine members of the steering committee voted for Meeks, who has the support of the Congressional Black Caucus. Rep. Joaquín Castro (D-TX) garnered the support of 13 members, while Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) received 10 votes.

Matty Stern/U.S. Embassy Jerusalem
U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman touted the Trump administration’s diplomatic successes in the Middle East on Tuesday, as he appeared to passively acknowledge President Donald Trump’s defeat in last month’s presidential election.
Friedman, who spoke during a Zoom call with Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, said that the Trump administration’s Mideast peace team is committed — “whether inside office or outside of office” — to continue working “to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but not as a gating issue that prevents all other aspects of the region moving forward.”

The UJA-Federation of New York held its annual Wall Street Dinner virtually last night, raising $31 million. Apollo Global Management co-founder Marc Rowan received the Gustave L. Levy Award, while LionTree founder and chairman Aryeh Bourkoff received the Alan C. Greenberg Young Leadership Award. While the event focused heavily on UJA’s efforts in the community, all of the evening’s speakers addressed the rise of antisemitism in the United States.
COVID comparison: Writer Bari Weiss, the event’s keynote speaker, called antisemitism “a virus that travels in the immune system or that travels in the kind of DNA, if you will, of Western civilization. If you put it that way, it sounds really scary. But the good news is that when the immune system of a given society or given culture is strong, just like with a virus, it doesn’t express itself,” Weiss explained. “It’s when the immune system of a society is weakened, and the immune system of America right now is weakened in all kinds of ways, antisemitism begins to express itself. Also, like a virus, antisemitism is always mutating. It’s extremely, extremely resilient, probably more resilient in the end than this current coronavirus.”

Lance Cheung
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee received a closed briefing on Monday evening about the Trump administration’s plan to sell F-35 fighter jets and other weaponry to the United Arab Emirates, as congressional Democrats scramble to slow or block the sale.
Assistant Secretary of State R. Clarke Cooper, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker and Michael Cutrone, who served as Vice President Mike Pence’s top national security aide for South Asia and is now head of the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, testified behind closed doors.

April Brady
It took just over two weeks for Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) to be formally declared the winner in New Jersey’s 7th district election. The Associated Press called the race for Malinowski hours after polls closed, but his sizable lead over State Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean, Jr., shrank from 28,000 votes to just 5,314 — a 1% margin — by November 24. The first-term incumbent, who beat longtime incumbent Rep. Leonard Lance (R-NJ) by more than 16,000 votes in 2018 is, nonetheless, satisfied with the win.
In an interview with Jewish Insider on the eve of Thanksgiving, Malinowski sounded relieved. “I had a tougher challenge than many people,” said Malinowski, one of roughly a dozen Democrats reelected in districts that went for President Donald Trump. “[The Republicans] really put up a strong opponent, spent a lot of money. So I feel like we overcame a lot.”

Iranian Defense Ministry via AP
American and Israeli leaders remained mum over the weekend over the killing of top Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was shot at close range in an ambush on his motorcade in northern Iran on Friday. A U.S. official told The New York Times that Israel was behind the attack.
The European Union condemned the killing, while the U.K. and Germany expressed concern it could lead to an escalation in the Middle East.

AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
A group of nearly 200 rabbis and faith leaders signed a letter defending Rev. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Georgia’s special runoff election, after he came under fire for his past comments, including a 2018 sermon in which the pastor accused Israel of shooting down “unarmed Palestinian sisters and brothers like birds of prey.”
The letter, which was shared exclusively with Jewish Insider ahead of its release on Tuesday, references Republican attack ads against Warnock after video of the sermon began to circulate online. In 2019, as reported last month by JI, Warnock signed his name to a statement likening Israeli control of the West Bank to “previous oppressive regimes” and calling the “heavy militarization of the West Bank, reminiscent of the military occupation of Namibia by apartheid South Africa.”