For Fox News host Dana Perino, supporting Israel has been a given since the early days of her career, when she visited the Jewish state multiple times with President George W. Bush as his press secretary. Perino, who first arrived at the White House while the nation was reeling from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, worked alongside Bush, initially as his deputy press secretary, throughout the early years of the war on terror. 

Two decades later, as co-anchor of Fox’s “America’s Newsroom,” Perino finds herself frequently drawing on those experiences, especially in the past year and a half as she’s reported on the aftermath of another crisis — Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel, the ensuing war in Gaza and record-breaking levels of antisemitism in the U.S.   

Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) has asked the State Department and intelligence community officials for a status update on the condition and whereabouts of Israeli American hostage Edan Alexander after Hamas claimed it had lost contact with his captors inside Gaza, the senator told Jewish Insider. 

Alexander, a Tenafly, N.J., native, is the only American hostage in Gaza believed to be alive. Hamas released a video of Alexander earlier this month in which the terror group said he had been held captive for 551 days, implying the video was filmed on April 9 or 10, 2025. 

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) offered a message of hope that peace in the Middle East is “as close as we have ever been,” in remarks before more than 2,000 people from 60 countries gathered in Midtown Manhattan on Monday for the second day of the American Jewish Committee Global Forum. 

Torres, who was honored with the group’s inaugural Nita M. Lowey Congressional Leadership Award, said that the “future of the Middle East does not belong to the Islamic Republic and its empire of terror.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s firebrand national security minister, was in Washington on Monday to promote President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza — and, in particular, to try to garner support for moving Arabs out of the embattled enclave. But while Ben-Gvir has branded himself a loyal soldier for Trump’s message, the far-right politician has yet to receive an invitation to discuss the matter with anyone in the Trump administration.

“We did not meet with anybody from the Trump administration. That wasn’t the main goal,” Ben-Gvir told Jewish Insider in an interview on Monday on Capitol Hill. He spoke through his translator and advisor, Yishai Fleisher, the English-language spokesperson for the West Bank Jewish community of Hebron, where Ben-Gvir lives. 

Israel will not accept a Hamas-proposed five-year ceasefire and hostage-release deal, because it does not require the terrorist organization to disarm, a senior Israeli official said in a briefing to journalists on Monday.

A Hamas official said on Saturday the group would release at one time all of the remaining hostages in Gaza — 59 total, including at least 21 living — in exchange for a five-year ceasefire.

New Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa discussed last week his conditions for normalizing relations with Israel with Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN), who was one of the first American lawmakers to visit the country since the overthrow of the Assad regime.

Al-Sharaa’s apparent openness to normalization is a striking step given his history as a fighter and leader in Al-Qaida and ISIS, and the campaign of Israeli military strikes against Syria, motivated by concerns about al-Sharaa and other new Syrian leaders’ jihadist pasts, among other issues.

Arab and Israeli leaders are insisting that any U.S. deal with Iran also include provisions to address Iran’s other malign activities in the region, including support for terrorist proxies, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told Jewish Insider following a trip earlier this month to meet with Israeli and Arab leaders in the Middle East.

Wasserman Schultz traveled with Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) to the Middle East for the third time since Oct. 7, 2023, visiting Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan.

It’s an unlikely origin story for a comic-book superhero: standing at the front of a boardroom in a snazzy blazer, delivering an important presentation until it’s derailed by … a hot flash. That’s when she begins to discover her superpower.

Meet Mina, the star of Holy Menopause: Adventures of a Middle-Aged Superheroine, a new comic book published by Bunny Gonopolskaya, the pen name of Elana Broitman, a former Jewish communal executive. The comic book tells the story of Mina, “an ordinary executive,” a “mom in her 50s,” who was confidently climbing the career ladder until she hit that third rail of women’s health — menopause — and became invisible at work and to her family.