During a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Monday, U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power offered assurances that emergency aid to Palestinians in Gaza in response to the recent Israel-Hamas conflict would not end up benefiting terrorism or violate U.S. law.

“[Vetting is] incredibly important. We have to be faithful to the taxpayer above all and we need to prevent these resources from falling into the wrong hands. Everything in that region is vetted in accordance with the Taylor Force Act, in order to prevent anything from being diverted to Hamas,” Power said, referencing the 2018 law prohibiting the U.S. from transferring economic aid to the Palestinian Authority until it ceases payments to the families of individuals killed while conducting terror attacks against Israelis.

Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, introduced a resolution on Thursday condemning global antisemitism, stressing incidents of antisemitism outside the United States and accusing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and anti-Israel activists of fueling antisemitism around the world. 

“While anti-Semitism is on a rise across the world, the recent violence between Israel and Hamas has led to an increase in attacks against Jewish communities,” Risch said in a statement. “This violence is further fueled by support here in the United States for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), a global Palestinian-led effort to promote boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel. The BDS movement is dangerous and contributes to the rise of anti-Semitism.”

A bipartisan group of House members, led by Reps. Ted Deutch (D-FL), Grace Meng (D-NY), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Chris Smith (R-NJ), is expected to send a letter to President Joe Biden on Friday urging him to take swift action to combat rising antisemitism and antisemitic hate crimes, Jewish Insider has learned.

The letter, which had 55 signatories as of late Thursday evening, calls on Biden to rapidly implement provisions to improve hate crime education and reporting procedures for local law enforcement, which was signed into law last week as part of a hate crimes legislation package. It also urges the administration to develop a strategy to combat antisemitic hate crimes and encourages the president to nominate an ambassador to monitor and combat antisemitism.

The day before Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Edward-Isaac Dovere published a POLITICO Magazine article with a grim conclusion for Democrats. He called them a “decimated party,” working on a “not-so-certain revival strategy” after having “their brains scrambled by Trump’s win.” No one in the party could believe what was happening.

The article prompted a book contract, with Dovere pledging to write a reported account of the 2020 campaign. His project could have gone in dramatically different directions — would the Democrats, after a divisive primary with a historic 26 candidates, be able to eke out a victory? Or would they lose again to the historically unpopular Trump? 

Rapper Nissim Black is the ultimate crossover artist, blending the urban hip hop and yeshivish worlds in his own personal biography. Now he has overseen the creation of a crossover Israel-born whiskey brand, Hava. 

I have to concede that I ordered it more out of curiosity than need — there are a lot of good whiskeys and at $90 a bottle, Hava isn’t cheap. But it’s good, and holds up well against other better-known scotch whiskeys. First, here’s what Nissim says about how his whiskey is made: 

State legislators in New York are divided over the necessity of a proposed bill directing New York’s education commissioner to conduct a thorough study that would help verify whether public school teachers are educating students about the Holocaust.

The unusual dispute culminated on Monday in a virtual meeting of the State Assembly’s education committee, a recording of which was obtained by Jewish Insider, when chairman Michael Benedetto tried to block the seemingly uncontroversial bill from advancing to the floor. 

Managing partners from 17 prominent global law firms issued a letter on Thursday denouncing antisemitism “in all its forms.” The letter, originally published in The American Lawyer, comes amid a sharp rise in antisemitic violence and rhetoric stemming from recent violence in Israel and Gaza.

The letter cites a recent opinion piece written by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, titled “Anti-Zionism Isn’t Anti-Semitism? Someone Didn’t Get the Memo,” in which he criticized elements of the progressive left for distinguishing anti-Zionism from antisemitism. In the piece, Stephens pointed to the increased use of antisemitic dogwhistles and recent incidents in which pro-Palestinian demonstrators used overtly antisemitic language — including chanting “Death to Jews.”

Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and James Lankford (R-OK) are set to introduce a bipartisan resolution condemning the recent uptick in antisemitic violence and urging President Joe Biden to take steps to combat it, Jewish Insider has learned. This would mark the first bipartisan legislation in response to the recent surge, and follows a resolution introduced Tuesday by more than a dozen Republicans.

The resolution enumerates multiple recent incidents of antisemitism in the United Kingdom, Germany, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona and Illinois, as well as antisemitic comments from Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which came in the wake of the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. It also lays out findings that antisemitism, antisemitic hate crimes and threats to synagogues are increasing in the United States and around the world.