Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-American congresswoman from Michigan, calls Bernie Sanders “Amo Bernie,” using the Arabic term of endearment for “uncle.”

I learned that Wednesday night watching an hourlong lovefest hosted by the Vermont senator on his YouTube channel for three candidates he has endorsed: Tlaib (who beat a primary opponent in her Detroit district), Cori Bush (who just ousted a longtime pro-Israel congressman in St. Louis) and Jamaal Bowman (who recently toppled the longtime pro-Israel stalwart Eliot Engel in New York).

I got to wondering why she didn’t just use “Uncle,” or the Hebrew “dod” or the Yiddish “feter” or even “saba” or “zayde”  — Sanders is Jewish and spent time as a young man in Israel.

Of course, I learned about more than Sanders’ family-like dynamics with his progressive endorsees. Notably, here were four thorns in the sides of the centrist and right-wing pro-Israel movement, and Israel never came up in their conversation.

What does that mean for progressives and Israel? I dove into that here.

In Other News

Veepstakes: My colleague Gabe Friedman and I review a short list of likely contenders to be Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate — from a Jewish angle.

Backed by Barack: Barack Obama released his list of endorsements for this election year, and while Bowman celebrated the endorsement, Obama’s fuller list indicated that as in 2018, he was more interested in pushing likely winners over the line than he was in embracing any ideological trends. Among the first round of more than 100 endorsements were moderate Jewish Democrats seeking to hold onto districts they took from Republicans: Josh Gottheimer in New Jersey, Susan Wild in Pennsylvania and Elaine Luria in Virginia.

Undiplomatic diplomat: President Donald Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Germany, Douglas Macgregor, is pulling off the rare Trump-era feat of uniting Jews from across the political spectrum in opposition to him. CNN’s K File unearthed a long history of the retired colonel’s attacks on Muslims and immigrants. That earned him rebukes from the Jewish left, with J Street Vice President Dylan Williams decrying his “shameful record of expressing profoundly bigoted views.”

Weighing in from the center was the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, who was appalled by Macgregor’s statement in 2018 on Nazi Germany. “There’s sort of a sick mentality that says that generations after generations must atone for sins of what happened in 13 years of German history,” Macgregor said.

B’nai B’rith International, which tacks to the right on foreign policy, had raised concerns about Macgregor even before the K File story was posted, noting his past propensity to insinuate that “neocons” serving Israel’s interests were controlling U.S. foreign policy. “It is important that American diplomats not question the patriotism of other Americans who hold political views different from their own, especially given that questioning Jewish loyalty to America is an anti-Semitic trope,” B’nai B’rith said.

Gumby on fire! What did we learn from a Biden campaign gabfest on anti-Semitism? Some things about anti-Semitism — but even more about its participants: Rep. Adam Schiff, Sen. Jacky Rosen and “Seinfeld” star Jason Alexander (who still longs for the Gumby toy his menorah set alight).

Worth A Look

At the Daily Beast, Will Sommer analyzes the perplexing dalliance between right-wing provocateur Jacob Wohl and Merritt Corrigan, a conservative Christian who was one of the White House liaisons to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Part of their romancing allegedly included cooking up a false charge that Eliot Engel solicited prostitutes. It gets weirder.

Tweet So Sweet

I wrote this week about Phoenix’s young Jewish mayor, Kate Gallego, who is earning national attention for her calm pushback against efforts led by Republicans to diminish the importance of wearing facemasks.

Gallego became a city planning geek as a kid with the help of the computer game Sim City (her imaginary city models included synagogues). She earned a degree in environmental studies from Harvard and served on the City Council before becoming mayor.

(And no, it didn’t make me feel at all ancient when she asked me if I knew what Sim City was, and I said “yes,” but then muttered a confession that I only knew because my nephew was an enthusiast. She laughed.)

Another inspiration, she told me, was her late grandfather, Michael Widland. Gallego, a single mom, named her son, born in 2016 (and omnipresent in her campaigning) for him. The mayor told me just two weeks ago that she was looking through photographs from her bat mitzvah in Albuquerque — she’s still in touch with her Hebrew school class — and lingered over photos of her grandfather.

“He was very community-minded and always said you are judged by how you take care of the entire community,” she said. “We talked extensively when we were coming up with [her bat mitzvah] speech and trying to understand the Torah portion.”

Gallego said she is proud of the Phoenix Jewish community for taking the lead in working with other communities to help the city endure the pandemic. The city’s JCRC joined a national Jewish public policy initiative to speak out against the flourishing of anti-Asian racism that marked the beginning of the pandemic.

More recently, Gallego’s rabbi, John Linder, has consulted with Gallego about setting up a network of Covid-19 testing centers in houses of worship.

“We’ve learned that you can reach more people if you go to trusted locations and have trusted partners, and for so many, the faith community is that trusted partner,” she said.

Read more about Gallego here.

In Other News

The liability question: The Jewish Federations of North America hosted another informative online session this week on what to look out for in pending economic relief bills.

Not addressed was the liability protections for businesses and nonprofits favored by Republicans, who lead the Senate, and opposed by Democrats, who lead the House. Democrats say it would be malpractice to keep businesses from being accountable for bad decisions, even during the pandemic. Republicans say liability protection is needed to keep businesses and nonprofits from going bankrupt.

That partisan division makes the issue too radioactive to touch for Jewish Federations. The umbrella group’s CEO, Eric Fingerhut, would only say it was controversial and “I do not wish to wager a prediction on this one.”

“I’ll stake my predictive powers on other pieces of the bill,” he said.

There does not appear to be a specific set-aside for nonprofits in either bill. Jewish Federations is leading a push to set aside $60 billion in assistance for nonprofits.

More for Melton-Meaux: Pro-Israel America, a nonprofit political action committee, is saying it “surpassed all expectations” by raising $2 million for its candidates this cycle — its goal when it was launched a year ago and three months before the election.

So how important is it to the PAC, which was founded by former top staffers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to oust Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat who is one of two federal lawmakers to embrace the boycott Israel movement? Of the $2 million, a fifth, $397,000, was raised for her opponent, Antone Melton-Meaux, a pro-Israel progressive.

Picking on Ossoff’s nose: Republican Sen. David Perdue removed a social media ad that appeared to exaggerate the size of the nose of his Jewish opponent, Jon Ossoff. In the ad, which declares “Democrats are trying to buy Georgia!” Ossoff appears alongside the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, also Jewish. The Republican Jewish Coalition has rallied to Perdue’s defense, saying he took down the ad as soon as he learned of the photo manipulation. The RJC is organizing a conference call for Perdue next week and describes him as a leader in championing Israel.

United against Netanyahu: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likes to say he is under constant assault from the left. My colleague Sam Sokol shows that this time around, the flourishing of protests, triggered by the spike of coronavirus cases and Netanyahu’s legal troubles, covers the political spectrum.

Worth A Look

At Tablet, Armin Rosen examines the trajectory of California Rep. Karen Bass, from the radical left to contender for Joe Biden’s running mate. Rosen argues that her Fidel Castro-influenced youth is exactly what propelled her into contention as a moderate endorsed by conservative columnist George Will.

“She wanted to solve problems in the community where she had spent her entire life, and then dedicated the next several decades to doing exactly that,” Rosen wrote.

Tweet So Sweet

On Twitter, President Donald Trump suggested a delay in the Nov. 3 elections because of what he said will be confusion engendered by the coronavirus. Jewish Insider’s Jacob Kornbluh suggested that he look to one of his favorite countries that manages to get elections done, sometimes several times a year.

The Tell is a weekly roundup of the latest Jewish political news from Ron Kampeas, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Washington bureau chief. Connect with him on Twitter at @kampeas or suggest a story to him by emailing thetell@jta.org.

Old-fashioned postcards remain one of the best ways to get out the vote in underserved communities. Who knew?

I picked up this nugget while reporting a story this week about what Jewish groups are doing to get out the vote.

A number of Jewish organizations, preeminent among them the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center and the Anti-Defamation League, have allied with African-American groups for years to protect voting rights. 

There’s added urgency this year because of the pandemic and President Donald Trump’s explicit threats to limit mail-in voting.

Rabbi Jonah Pesner, the director of the Religious Action Center, told me that its partner this year in getting out the vote, the Center for Common Ground, found that postcards are still the most effective method to persuade voters in rural areas and African-American communities to cast their ballots. So the group has been “postcard banking.”

Meanwhile, in Florida, activists with the National Council of Jewish Women are helping former felons determine whether they can vote without getting into trouble. And dozens of groups are lobbying Congress for federal support for mail-in voting.

In Other News

Minimizing Minnesota’s Melton-Meaux: Lots of action in Minnesota’s 5th District this last week: Rep. Ilhan Omar published an internal poll showing her 37 points ahead in her bid to defend against a challenge in the Democratic primary from attorney Antone Melton-Meaux. The primary is Aug. 11.

Publishing internal polling is rare, but one likely reason Omar posted the results was to discourage Melton-Meaux’s eye-popping fundraising: He pulled in $3.2 million last quarter to her less-than-half a million. A big chunk of Melton-Meaux’s income is coming from pro-Israel groups unhappy with Omar, one of two Congress members who back the boycott Israel movement.

Melton-Meaux pushed back on Twitter with a critique of the poll. Left out of his takedown was the obvious question of why he’s not publishing his own internals.

Melton-Meaux said in a campaign FAQ first reported by Jewish Insider that he was attracting pro-Israel support because Omar had wounded the Jewish community with some of her past comments. (She has apologized for some, but not all of her comments suggesting that pro-Israel influence in American politics was somehow untoward.) He also said that the money would not influence how he voted on Israel, and that he would oppose Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to annex parts of the West Bank.

There’s been a lot of talk about the deliberately obscure outfits working for Melton-Meaux; Jacobin reports here. Their low profile is no surprise: Democratic Party leaders have said that they will freeze out anyone who works for a primary challenger. (Speaker Nancy Pelosi has endorsed Omar.)

That’s one reason why Melton-Meaux has not attracted support from Jewish Democratic groups, notwithstanding pressure from the Republican Jewish Coalition. But he is getting support from local Jews — a Minneapolis rabbi explains here why he’s going with Melton-Meaux.

(Late Thursday, Omar came under fire for a campaign mailer that names three donors to Melton-Meaux, all Jewish. See the story here.)

The RJC gives Q an answer: Republicans are not as strict about opposing incumbents. That’s why the RJC was able earlier this year to join the successful bid to oust Steve King of Iowa, who was tainted by white supremacist associations.

This week, the GOP group announced another rare foray into primary politics, endorsing John Cowan against Marjorie Taylor Greene in a runoff for Georgia’s open 14th Congressional District. Greene has been associated with the conspiracist QAnon movement and peddled anti-Semitic tropes. (The RJC hinted to me a month ago that an endorsement was coming.) 

“Greene came to national attention for all the wrong reasons: repeatedly using offensive language in long online video diatribes, promoting bizarre political conspiracy theories, and refusing to admit a mistake after posing for photos smiling side by side with a long-time white supremacist leader,” the RJC said.

The RJC is taking a risk with this endorsement, as Trump has indicated that he backs Greene.

Jewish Republicans have an elephant in the room: The Republican Jewish Coalition convened a town hall over the weekend to trash talk Joe Biden, but was diverted by the question of how to pitch Trump to a community that just doesn’t like him.

Will he make “the Squad” the Squintet? Alex Morse, a gay Jewish progressive millennial trying to unseat an establishment Democrat, Richard Neal, in Massachusetts, has ambitions of becoming the first Jewish member of “the Squad,” the anti-establishment quartet whose most well-known member is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat who upset an establishment Democrat two years ago. Morse also bakes, he told my colleague Josefin Dolsten this week.

Remembering John Lewis: I wrote this week about six moments in the alliance between John Lewis and the Jews. Chabad.org found a seventh: The longtime congressman and civil rights icon was instrumental in 1994 in conferring a Congressional Gold Medal on Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe. And here’s a remembrance by a Black and Jewish former elected official from Georgia who cites Lewis as a mentor.

Worth a Look

At Moment Magazine, Mark Pinsky examines the pandemic-fueled feud between Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and the state’s Jewish agricultural commissioner, Nikki Fried, a Democrat. One sharp area of contention was when DeSantis tried to blame the spread of the virus on Hispanic agriculture workers.

Tweet so Sweet

Dana Schwartz, a TV writer, makes Shakespeare 21st century-relevant by crediting him with creating the worst boyfriend ever.

The Tell is a weekly roundup of the latest Jewish political news from Ron Kampeas, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Washington bureau chief. Connect with him on Twitter at @kampeas or suggest a story to him by emailing thetell@jta.org.

When I spoke to Mike Evans, an evangelical leader who founded a Jerusalem museum celebrating Christian supporters of Israel, earlier this week, he offered a bold prediction — one that doesn’t appear to comport with current events.

“Before the election, I think President Trump’s going to come out and declare sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria, and the Jordan Valley and declare that the Bible is not illegal,” Evans told me.

Really? Amid political pushback and a worsening pandemic, the Trump administration has gone quiet on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s push to annex just parts of the West Bank. But Evans said Trump would go one better and say that the United States would recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the entire West Bank.

I asked him how Trump would know to do this, and he said, “Don’t worry, he’ll read your article.” And in the article, Evans said, the president would learn that evangelicals needed annexation to get them to turn out in the numbers Trump needs to defeat Joe Biden in November.

So here’s a story in which I look at what evangelical Christians are thinking about the proposal that’s dividing the world’s Jews. Spoiler alert: Not all of them agree with Evans. You can read the whole thing here.

In Other News

Platform stability issues: A friend of a buddy of a pal obtained the Israel portion of the Democratic Party platform approved this week, and this friend of a buddy of a pal agreed to call me up and read the notes to me. (The platform is still officially under wraps.)

What I learned: Once again, there’s no condemnation of Israel for occupying the West Bank, despite increasing pressure in recent years for a mention. Not only that, but the $3.8 billion Israel gets annually in defense assistance remains sacrosanct, as does the two-state solution. Read more about the platform in this new story.

Born to run … a Jewish campaign: Dan Pine, of J. The Jewish News of Northern California, profiles San Francisco native Aaron Keyak, who has been steeped since birth in Democratic politics and Jewish communal life and who is now running Joe Biden’s Jewish outreach.

Hello, fodder: George Soros’ foundation, Open Society, is dumping $220 million into Black American groups. The money will go to community activism and education, but that sound you hear is conspiracy theorists eating up even the most innocent association between Soros and the current season of protests.

Omar is counting: Ilhan Omar has raised just $472,000 in the last quarter, compared to $3.2 million the amount an opponent, Antone Melton-Meaux, has raised, a lot of it from pro-Israel donors. But Omar has the endorsement of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

Worth a Look

I first read Anne Applebaum in the 1990s when she was a youthful editor at the British Spectator, then seen as a redoubt for conservative shatterers of taboos. She rapidly rose through the ranks of conservative intellectuals as an expert on the post-Soviet turmoil in Europe and married a Polish politician. She was among the first Never Trumpers, and now wonders whether what she perceived those many years ago as a charming “dilettante conservatism” contained the seeds of something darker, leading to the hypernationalism now preeminent in Europe and the United States. She speaks at length to The Observer’s Nick Cohen.

Tweet so Sweet

After Goya’s CEO lavished praise on President Donald Trump, progressive Hispanics boycotted the bean giant. Ivanka Trump posed with a can of Goya black beans and prompted ethical questions about White House staffers peddling commercial products. Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American activist, offered up a pun.

The Tell is a weekly roundup of the latest Jewish political news from Ron Kampeas, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Washington bureau chief. Connect with him on Twitter at @kampeas or suggest a story to him by emailing thetell@jta.org.

This week, we’re taking a look at an important Senate race in Maine, where 23-year Republican incumbent Susan Collins is facing a serious challenge from Democrat Sara Gideon.

Gideon, who is favored to win the Democratic primary on Tuesday, is drawing support from Maine’s 10,000-15,000 Jews and from national political Jewish organizations — and not just because she is married to a Jewish lawyer.

In a new story, I outline four big reasons why Collins has lost her luster for centrist Jews and why Gideon is getting their support. They range from Collins’ support for President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court picks to Gideon’s uncontroversial views on Israel to the fact that any seat vulnerable to being flipped is getting a full-court press this year.

“She had really good votes, we met with her, we had a good relationship with her, she was pro-choice, but after she chose to support those two Supreme Court nominees, to us it was clear that she was no longer in our corner and that she was no longer pro-choice,” a representative of a Midwestern Jewish political action committee told me about Collins.

The progressive J Street PAC is working to spend $300,000 to support Gideon as part of a massive push to elect Democratic senators.

“Without winning those [seats] you’ve really got a hard path to transforming the Senate — which is one of our top electoral priorities besides defeating Donald Trump by electing Joe Biden — transforming the Senate to make sure that we have a pro-Israel, pro-peace majority,” Ilya Braverman, J Street’s national political director, told me.

No one I spoke to could say whether Gideon is involved in Maine’s small Jewish community. But one Jewish colleague from the Maine House told me her outlook reflects that advanced by progressive Jewish activists: “She brings forward liberal progressive ideas and repairing-the-world ideas.”

Read my whole rundown on Maine’s Senate race here.

In Other News

The long Vindman road: Alexander Vindman, the lieutenant colonel who validated House impeachment allegations that Trump was seeking to leverage aid to Ukraine to extract a promise to investigate Biden, is leaving his beloved Army career in part because he sees no future now that Trump has made him a target. During his testimony Vindman, who is Jewish, addressed his father, who in the 1970s fled  the former Soviet Union: “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.”

Two becomes one: Ten years ago, Peter Beinart scripted the debate for many liberal American Jews when he forcefully defended a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. This week, he announced in an essay in Jewish Currents that he has given up on that vision and is ready to embrace the one-state outcome. My colleague Ben Sales interviewed Beinart about what changed his mind, what reservations he has and what he would hope to see in a “Jewish home” that’s not a Jewish state. You can read the whole interview here.

Pro-Israel = pro-talking it out: An array of pro-Israel groups, from AIPAC to J Street, praised Nita Lowey, the New York Democrat who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, for shepherding through tens of millions dollars in funding for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue programs. The Trump administration had slashed funding for the programs to zero. Lowey, who is retiring, is a Jewish pro-Israel stalwart and cajoled Republicans into backing the funding.

No aid for annexation: A minority of progressive Democrats want to reduce or cut altogether defense assistance for Israel if the country goes ahead with annexation of parts of the West Bank. Those in the party’s center and on the right support speaking out against annexation, but do not want to touch funding. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is proposing a middle ground: Leave the amount of funding alone, but ban its use for annexation. AIPAC is opposed, J Street is in favor.

A Jewish doctor in the Kentucky Senate: Meet Karen Berg, a Democrat and doctor who will be the only Jewish member of the state Legislature.

Worth A Look

You may know Bethany Mandel from her May “Grandma Killer” Twitter thread challenging the nationwide shutdown meant to stop the coronavirus from spreading. But she told me she doesn’t relish the fight as much as she appears to: “Everything now has become politicized, every single thing, and it sucks,” she said. Read my new profile of Mandel to understand how the homeschooling mother of four became a rising star in the world of conservative political thought. (Just don’t expect to find out whether her 2016 #NeverTrump position still stands.)

Tweet So Sweet

Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, is publishing her tell-all about the family next week, and excerpts have already appeared. She says her uncle paid someone named Joe Shapiro to take his SATs. Speculation has focused on a classmate of Trump’s at the Wharton School who died in 1999, but his widow, tennis ace Pam Shriver, says no way. Another Joe Shapiro, an investigative reporter at National Public Radio, is having fun with it.

The Tell is a weekly roundup of the latest Jewish political news from Ron Kampeas, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Washington bureau chief. Connect with him on Twitter at @kampeas or suggest a story to him by emailing thetell@jta.org.

One thing we know about elections is that Jewish voters can make a difference. Take Florida: The Sunshine State’s Jewish voters helped deliver its critical electoral votes to Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Problematic ballots in heavily Jewish Broward County may have clinched George W. Bush’s win in 2000.

In years past I have sat among crowds rallied by Jewish campaign surrogates in packed synagogues in Ohio and bingo halls in Florida, and I’ve followed canvassers searching for mezuzahs in neighborhoods known for having large Jewish populations.

Severe limits on in-person campaigning imposed by the coronavirus pandemic means we’re not likely to be bringing you those stories this season. But a very different election year doesn’t mean the Jewish vote in swing states is less important.

This week, I asked people working to get out the Jewish vote — partisan and nonpartisan — where they’re concentrating their efforts, how much they’re planning to spend, what adjustments they’re making because of the pandemic and what is preoccupying them down-ballot. Here’s what they told me.

Democratic Jewish groups have a presence in more states than Republicans

The Republican Jewish Coalition appears to have the most advanced operation in place. With $10 million pledged to reelect Donald Trump and secure GOP control in Congress, that may not be a surprise.

The RJC’s get-out-the-vote operation already has four workers on staff in Florida, according to Matt Brooks, its executive director, and volunteers have made 300,000 phone calls to Jewish voters in swing states — a preliminary round of phone banking where the goal is not persuasion but identification, to see how committed a voter is to reelecting Trump and what issues they are considering ahead of Election Day. This lays the ground for more calls and texts later in the season that are tailored to the individual voter.

But with Trump’s polling in freefall, the group doesn’t have that many states to direct that energy. Brooks told me his swing-state operation was focusing on Florida, Ohio, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

“We’re monitoring and looking at and ready to pivot to see how Michigan and Wisconsin continue to shape up,” he added.

Brooks said the RJC chose those states because the vote there is “competitive.” That’s notable: Trump’s 2016 victory included narrow wins in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona.

Including Georgia and Ohio in the mix indicates the deep trouble Trump is in. In 2016, he won Georgia by 5 points and Ohio by 8.

From Brooks’ map it would appear that the RJC doesn’t think there’s a chance for Trump to win in Michigan or Wisconsin. Polls show Joe Biden leading Trump in both states by double digits.

Meanwhile, the Jewish Democratic Council of America has a much more expansive map. In addition to the five states the RJC is targeting, along with Michigan and Wisconsin, the JDCA says it is ready to target Jewish voters in Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Virginia — a 14-state plan, as director Halie Soifer put it.

Soifer said she hoped to spend over $1 million and as much as $5 million in pushing out the vote.

“They are the states where we think the Jewish vote can make a difference in the presidential and key Senate and House elections,” she said.

JDCA has organized a number of webinars, and has launched phone banking. Soifer told me she hopes to reach “hundreds of thousands, if not over a million” Jewish voters. “First it will be persuasion methods, and then get out the vote,” she said.

The tea on the down-ballot

The political action committee associated with the Democratic Majority for Israel is planning to highlight Biden’s pro-Israel record in a digital campaign. (The RJC already launched a video, titled “Sunrise,” that calls Trump “the most pro-Israel president in history.”)

But the PAC’s emphasis will be down-ballot, Mellman said, because that’s where it makes more sense to spend money; both presidential campaigns have plenty of resources already. The messaging down-ballot will not necessarily be about Israel, he said, but about issues of importance to local voters.

During the primaries, the PAC has already run ads targeting opponents of its favored candidates on themes that have nothing to do with Israel. Its $1.5 million spent to protect veteran N.Y. Rep. Eliot Engel included ads raising the fact that his challenger, Jamaal Bowman, had an unpaid tax bill. (Bowman has declared victory in that race, but Engel is waiting out the counting of the mail-in ballots.)

Mark Mellman, the Democratic Majority for Israel’s president and CEO, has proven to be a prodigious fundraiser and said his group would be spending in the millions of dollars in a broad campaign. (He declined to be more specific on the amount.)

“We will be on TV, we will be in the mail, we will be on the telephone, we will be digital,” he said. “We will be in every form of communication known to human beings.”

When it comes to the Senate, Republicans have 23 seats up for reelection, while the Democrats have only 12. That means Republican Jewish groups must be on the defensive, especially as Trump’s sinking popularity threatens to derail down-ballot Republicans, while Democratic groups can focus on flipping seats.

This week, the Jewish Democratic Council of America added 17 names to its congressional endorsements, bringing the total to 89. Significantly, most of the new batch is challenging Republicans in states that Trump won in 2016, including Ohio, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Alaska, South Carolina and Tennessee. Among the 17 are four Senate candidates — Jon Ossoff in Georgia, James Mackler in Tennessee, Al Gross in Alaska and Jaime Harrison in South Carolina — challenging incumbent Republicans. Ossoff, Mackler and Gross are Jewish.

Here are some Senate races where the partisan PACs will go head to head, according to their endorsements:

Maine: The Republican Jewish Coalition has endorsed Sen. Susan Collins; the Democratic Majority for Israel, J Street and the Jewish Democratic Council of America are backing her challenger, Sara Gideon.

South Carolina: RJC, Sen. Lindsey Graham; JDCA and J Street, Harrison.

Georgia: RJC, Sen. David Perdue; JDCA and J Street, Ossoff.

Colorado: RJC, Sen. Cory Gardner; JDCA, DMFI and J Street, challenger John Hickenlooper.

Michigan: JDCA and DMFI, Sen. Gary Peters; RJC, challenger John James.

Arizona: RJC, Sen. Martha McSally; JDCA and J Street, challenger Mark Kelly.

The sweeping endorsements do not mean that Democratic Jewish groups are banking on their candidates winning, but it does suggest that those candidates have a chance and will force Republicans to spend defensively.

And in one notable effort, five state-level Jewish Democratic organizations are working together to influence down-ballot elections in their states. They are the Florida Democratic Party Caucus of American Jews; Jewish Democratic Women’s Salon Atlanta; Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus; Democratic Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania; and Wisconsin Jewish Democrats.

“There are two Senate races in Georgia —  Pennsylvania as you know has no U.S. Senate race,” said Jill Zipin, the founder of Democratic Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania. “So if they’re doing a phone bank for example for Ossoff, I would encourage our Jewish voters to help and call down there.”

Counting on digital

Door-to-door canvassing is not completely out of the question — hanging flyers on doorknobs is still a thing, even during a plague, as anyone living in a competitive district will tell you. And the partisan Jewish groups are also counting on the old standby, direct mail.

But the pandemic has accelerated what already was a trend of moving toward text message blasts and targeted social media ads.

“In 2008, we would go door to door and look for the mezuzah,” said Soifer, who ran Jewish outreach for Obama’s Florida campaign that year. “Now we can purchase lists of Jewish voters and with a click of a button target hundreds of thousands with digital advertising. So in some ways, the ability to reach voters has become much more efficient.”

Brooks’ RJC has rolled out the highest-profile digital campaign so far, and he said he has money to spend on broadcast and cable ads.

The Jewish Democratic Council of America has just launched two ads on social media platforms. And Mellman said he had available technology that would allow the Democratic Majority for Israel’s PAC to target individual voters depending on their known preferences.

“We have a pretty sophisticated way to figure out who the targets are that are going to be most movable, persuadable, in the House and Senate races,” he said. “We can identify those people, and we can target ads on digital directly to those people, and do the same thing with the mail and with the phones.”

In Other News

A march this week in Washington sought to tie the Black Lives Matter moment to Palestinian fury at Israel for its planned annexation of parts of the West Bank. The marchers chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children, too.” The RJC, wanting to make this Biden’s Charlottesville moment, is calling on the presumptive Democratic candidate to condemn the chanting. But it’s not clear to what degree the organizers of the “Days of Rage” event are connected to the broader Black Lives Matter movement, and the march ended peacefully, while the Charlottesville march was violent and deadly.

Platforming the platform: In 2016, Jewish groups denounced the inclusion in the Movement for Black Lives’ platform of a passage accusing Israel of genocide. We’ve written about how a lot of the same Jewish groups have set aside their criticism in the current moment because of what they see as the urgency of joining with BLM in facing down institutional racism and police brutality. The ‘16 platform did not bind BLM chapters. Next month, The Washington Post reports, the Movement for Black Lives is convening a national conference to revise the platform. What happens to the Israel language will be interesting to watch.

Emulating Nita: Mondaire Jones, Nita Lowey’s likely replacement in Congress, tells my colleague Shira Hanau that he is no AOC, and that he shares the outgoing rep’s love for Israel.

Vouching for vouchers: Orthodox Jewish groups declare a victory in a Supreme Court decision that extends government aid to religious schools. Hanau examines the consequences.

Worth A Look

I followed Elissa Slotkin, the freshman Michigan Democrat, around last year; she’s a pothole politician, hyperfocused on local needs. But she’s also a former CIA analyst and top Pentagon official, and the Democratic leadership is calling on her skills to make sense of why Trump has appeared to be slow to react to an apparent Russian scheme to pay for the killing of American troops. At The New York Times, Emily Cochrane talks to Slotkin about how she “toggles” between her previous and current self.

Tweet So Sweet

Soner Cagaptay, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, resurrects a Soviet- era ethnic “types” sheet to identify suspects. Matthew Zeitlin, a reporter, is among a number of Jewish tweeps who see something strangely familiar about the Jewish “type.”

The Tell is a weekly roundup of the latest Jewish political news from Ron Kampeas, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Washington bureau chief. Connect with him on Twitter at @kampeas or suggest a story to him by emailing thetell@jta.org. Sign up here to receive The Tell in your inbox on Thursday evenings.

Jamaal Bowman, the middle school principal who challenged longtime Rep. Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th District, has declared victory based on his 2-1 lead among voters who headed to the polls for this week’s primary. Mail-in votes are still being counted, so Engel, the Jewish chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has not conceded.

That, however, hasn’t stopped the big picture takes. One is that the traditional pro-Israel views among Democrats are in big trouble, at least in their center-right expression: Keeping differences with Israel on the down low, and on the rare occasion where you feel compelled to speak out, leaving aid to Israel sacrosanct.

Bowman is openly critical of the policies of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has said assistance to Israel should be conditioned on its behavior. Among House Democrats, Engel may be the closest to the pro-Israel center and right.

Here’s a typical take from the National Interest: Will This New York Progressive Be the AOC of Foreign Policy? The reference is to the perception that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who ousted a longstanding moderate in the 14th District, has moved the entire party left. AOC’s district shares the Bronx borough with the 16th as well as the 15th.

The article quotes foreign policy progressives who backed Bowman as saying his election is determinative of the end of “militarism” among Democrats, and Republicans are seizing on the defeat as the death knell for pro-Israelism among Democrats.

“Jewish Republicans have had plenty of disagreements with Rep. Engel during his 32 years in Congress, but his defeat is a blow to the historically bipartisan support for Israel in the US Congress,” the Republican Jewish Coalition said in a release.

In New York magazine, Eric Levitz notes that in the 15th district, the likely winner is Ritchie Torres, who is progressive on domestic issues — and boasts of a past affiliation with Bernie Sanders, who endorsed Bowman and backs leveraging aid to Israel. But Torres, Levitz writes, “has barricaded Israel-Palestine off from the rest of his progressivism.”

Torres had the backing of mainstream pro-Israel PACs, including the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC and Pro-Israel America, as well as NORPAC, which leans right. He forcefully rejects leveraging aid to Israel. Torres, who is gay, hates it when anti-Israel progressives accuse him of “pinkwashing” Israel, and he does not stint on firing back.

“I found it utterly baffling that you had LGBT activists doing the bidding of Hamas, which is a terrorist organization that executes LGBT people,” he told Jewish Insider.

So it’s more complicated than the Engel-Bowman tea leaf readers would have us think.

There’s more to it than the results in the 16th and the 15th, however. Let’s take a look at the fallout from this week.

The aid question

Talk about reducing assistance to Israel has been ongoing for ages, but until the current Congress it was an anomaly for both parties — an attention-getter for folks on the margin. In fact, before 2018, its most prominent advocate was Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky. Donald Trump the candidate flirted with the idea in 2016, on the very day in March he was set to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Virtually the only advocate for aid cuts among Democrats until 2018 was Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., who framed her proposed cuts narrowly, tying them to the number of Palestinian minors in Israeli detention.

In 2018, victories by two Democrats who support the boycott Israel movement — Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and Ilhan Omar in Minnesota — were the most obvious signal that aid to Israel was not sacrosanct. But there were other signs: J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East peace group that endorses more than half of the Democratic caucus, flirted with the notion last year, and leading candidates for the nomination, including Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, were open to it.

Israel likely was not a factor among voters in the 16th, but that may prove this point: Bowman’s expressed criticism of Israel did not spur Jewish voters — in a district where they are substantial (particularly in its Westchester portion) — to vote against him.

Cutting aid, on the other hand, has hardly become an orthodoxy among progressives. Mondaire Jones is leading the pack in New York’s 17th to replace Nita Lowey. Like Engel, she is a Jewish pro-Israel leader who is in a powerful position as chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee. Jones was the only candidate who had announced before Lowey said she was retiring, and he was setting up a campaign to challenge her from the progressive left — but Israel did not factor.

Jones, like most other Democrats, opposes Netanyahu’s proposal to annex parts of the West Bank, but otherwise he can’t praise Lowey enough when it comes to her Israel policies.

“I’m going to continue in the legacy of Nita Lowey in being a friend to Israel — we have to continue our security assistance,” he said last week at a debate organized by the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

In New York’s 12th District, Suraj Patel is neck and neck with Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the chairwoman of the Oversight Committee who attracted centrist pro-Israel financial backing. Patel challenged the longtime incumbent from the progressive left, but also told Jewish Insider that he emphatically opposes Israel boycotts, and has even before he publicly contemplated a political career — and was able to prove it.

The fundraising question

A narrative emerging from Bowman’s victory is that centrist pro-Israel funding no longer matters: The Democratic Majority for Israel PAC reportedly dumped more than $1.5 million into the district, to little avail.

There is something to this, but it’s less that the impact of pro-Israel money has diminished and more that funding from other interests in the Democratic Party has increased. That’s been the case since 2004, when small online donors helped propel Howard Dean’s candidacy in the pre-primaries season, and MoveOn became a force to be reckoned with. Sanders’ endorsement of Bowman unleashed an army of donors. Outside groups spent more than $1.3 million on the newcomer’s behalf.

But pro-Israel funding still has an impact: See under Torres. See also under Joe Biden, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee who forcefully rejected making aid to Israel contingent, and whose candidacy weathered troubles in part because of his longtime pro-Israel backers.

The committee question

If Engel loses, the influential committee he chairs, the Foreign Affairs Committee, will remain in reliably centrist pro-Israel hands. His likely successors include Brad Sherman of California, Gregory Meeks of New York and Ted Deutch of Florida — all friends of AIPAC. But that’s a short-run prediction. What 2022 and beyond brings in terms of committee chairmanships is susceptible to the broader vicissitudes in the party.

The Black Lives Matter question

Bowman’s campaign seized on a moment of broader American unhappiness with the status of race in America, particularly in policing.

“I’m a Black man who was raised by a single mother in a housing project,” Bowman said in a victory statement. “That story doesn’t usually end in Congress. But today, that 11-year old boy who was beaten by police is about to be your next representative.”

Israel has not featured large in the protests, and as Mari Cohen wrote in Jewish Currents, Jewish groups are setting aside past divides over Israel with the Black Lives Matter movement to join them in solidarity now. The issue in 2016 was over a platform by a group called the Movement for Black Lives (one does that not bind the many diffuse groups that come together under Black Lives Matter). The platform accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid.”

Cohen reports that a new platform is under consideration. That could signal a big shift between BLM and the Jewish community.

In Other News

Don’t call him the next AOC: Dr. Robbie Goldstein, an infectious diseases physician, is running in a Democratic House primary against Stephen Lynch, the incumbent in the 8th District, south of Boston. Goldstein, a progressive, says it doesn’t make sense for a Massachusetts district that voted overwhelmingly against Trump to elect a moderate who votes with Trump 20% of the time.

If that sounds a lot like Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 and Bowman this year, Goldstein told me this week that it shouldn’t. He said the better cognate for his race is Marie Newman, who earlier this year defeated Dan Lipinski, a Democrat who represents a Chicagoland district. Goldstein is not starting a revolution so much as he’s arguing that the likes of Lipinski and Lynch are too far right for the Democratic Party, even in its current establishment iteration.

Lynch calls himself “pro-life,” although he rejects the extremes of the movement, and he has backed some of Trump’s health care initiatives, including keeping non-citizens from receiving health care subsidies.

“I am running against an anti-choice Democrat, I am running against a Democrat who voted against the Affordable Care Act, I am running against someone who is outside the norms of the Democratic Party, and that’s a bit different than what’s happening in New York,” Goldstein told me.

On Israel, Goldstein opposes the boycott Israel movement but warns that annexation could be a game-changer.

“It is a step that would completely change our relationship with Israel in many ways,” he said.

From J Street to CUFI: Sen. Jacky Rosen, the Jewish Democrat from Nevada, accepted J Street’s endorsement in her freshman run in 2018. Next week, she’s the sole Democrat appearing at the annual conference of Christians United for Israel. Rosen worked with CUFI to pass her Holocaust education bill, but the gap between the two groups on Israel policy is fairly stark. CUFI backs Trump’s peace plan; J Street stridently opposes it. Rosen, who has expressed her reservations about the peace plan, will be the first Democrat to grace CUFI’s stage (albeit a virtual one) in several years.

Meanwhile, CUFI founder John Hagee penned an op-ed in Haaretz arguing for the Trump peace plan. It’s an interesting venue for Hagee — the Venn overlap covering Haaretz’s readership and those intrigued by Hagee’s views may be, well, my desk. But the most important signal it sends may be to settlers to Netanyahu’s right who say the plan, as minimal as its concessions to the Palestinians are, gives away too much. Hagee is telling these settlers not to expect evangelical backing for that posture.

Speaking of evangelicals: Trump’s Middle East peace team is meeting this week to consider whether to green-light annexation, and The Associated Press’ Matt Lee says evangelical support in November is likely factoring into Trump’s decision. But evangelicals tell Lee it might not be enough to stem what appears to be diminishing support for Trump among that base. Robert Jeffress, the pastor who blessed the new embassy in Jerusalem, says annexation is too “in the weeds” for evangelical voters to be an issue. Evangelicals love Israel, but Israel and the pro-Israel community (and even Israel-critical groups) have long overstated how that factors into their vote.

Cruz control: There’s the letter from House Democrats opposing annexation, there’s an array of letters and statements from Senate Democrats opposing annexation, and there’s a letter from House Republicans saying they will support annexation. Now there’s a letter from seven Republican senators, spearheaded by Ted Cruz of Texas, nudging Trump to accept annexation as of a piece with his peace plan.

“Netanyahu recently announced that the Israeli government will extend Israeli civil law into some of its territories,” the letter sent this week says. “It is the sovereign decision of our Israeli allies whether or not they do so, but of course their decision takes place against the backdrop of the Vision for Peace and its assurances of American recognition.”

Worth A Look

We’ve covered the Jewish fallout from the war between Trump and his former national security adviser, John Bolton. At The New Yorker, Adam Entous dives deep into a casualty of that war: Fiona Hill, formerly the top Russia staffer on the National Security Council. In congressional impeachment hearings, Hill spoke out against the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that infected some of the defenses of Trump against charges that he was pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden.

Tweet So Sweet

An array of streets in Jerusalem honor non-Jewish Zionists. Among them is Lloyd George, honoring David Lloyd George, the British prime minister who recognized the Jewish longing for a homeland. Noga Tarnopolsky, an Israeli journalist, posted a snapshot of a street sign that was tweaked to recognize the Black longing for equity.

It would seem that most of us agree, left and right, that Black lives matter and that policing reform is long overdue. But there are fissures and fractures under the surface, arguments over the solutions and the candidates most capable of leading us to a better day.

Squeezed in the middle: the political center. At a time of uncertainty and turmoil, the center is battling — flailing even — to hold its place.

Here are some snapshots from that battle.

Eliot Engel’s Bronx campaign is burning

The Democratic primary race between Rep. Eliot Engel, the Jewish 16-term incumbent in New York’s 16th District, and Jamaal Bowman, an African-American educator who is new to politics, is emblematic of the establishment vs. insurgency battle that has preoccupied the party since the 2016 primaries.

The lists of endorsements offer a pretty clear picture of the story: Engel has the likes of Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Jim Clyburn, while Bowman has Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren.

As the dust begins to settle with the election less than a week away, on June 23, Engel appears to be in big trouble following a series of mishaps. This week, a poll by the Bowman campaign showed the neophyte candidate leading Engel 41-31%, with 27% undecided.

The campaign has become testy in ways that underscore the left vs. establishment narrative: Bowman has weaponized Engel’s home in Maryland, and the congressman staying there during much of the coronavirus pandemic. Engel, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has said that as a leader of the caucus, he needed to be near the Capitol for the crises that arise nonstop.

The Democratic Majority for Israel is running ads in the district, which includes the Bronx and parts of suburban Westchester County, showing that Bowman has faced multiple actions for not paying taxes. Bowman, who as a result of the ads paid $2,000 in outstanding levies, responded by calling the attack “ugly.”

“Frankly, we need more members of Congress who know what it’s like to be in debt and struggle to pay bills, especially at a time like this,” Bowman said.

Then there’s the Israel issue (of interest to the folks who read this newsletter, but from what I hear isn’t resonating in the district): Engel has been a pro-Israel stalwart for decades, a regular at AIPAC and, until recently, at organizations to its right as well, including the Zionist Organization of America and Christians United for Israel. Bowman has said that he would consider conditioning aid to Israel on its behavior, but he has also stressed that Israel has a right to security.

All this has happened at a time of national tension over police brutality and racism, and it would be easy to cast Bowman vs. Engel as a sign of the times: an anti-establishment young African-American taking on a denizen of the aging white establishment. But it’s more complicated.

Engel has garnered the endorsements of much of the Congressional Black Caucus, including senior leaders who are now seeking police reforms, among them Clyburn of South Carolina, Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Maxine Waters of California. He also has the endorsements of figures who have been at the forefront of efforts to combat Trump, including Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

In their endorsements, the black lawmakers emphasize Engel’s role in helping to pass civil rights legislation. But this line in Waters’ statement sticks out: “We absolutely need to return his experience and deep commitment to Congress — particularly now as we fight to take back the White House.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who also has endorsed Engel, sees 2018 as a lesson in how to win back the White House: Maintain the center.

Sanders in his endorsement said Bowman would spearhead change for the working class.

“Jamaal understands that low-income families are locked out of opportunity and a decent life due to a system that is rigged to benefit the wealthy,” he said. “In Congress he will lead the fight for investing in our public schools, ending mass incarceration, and addressing the housing crisis.”

The Jewish establishment disagrees on police reform

The Black-Jewish Congressional Caucus held a public meeting last week to address the current moment. It was mostly a friendly affair, but if you stayed the entire 90 minutes, a striking difference in tone emerged over the degree to which policing was responsible for the turmoil — and not between African-Americans and Jews, or even between tyros and establishment figures, but among avatars of the establishment.

Jason Isaacson, the chief policy and political officer of the American Jewish Committee, which convened the caucus last year, was plainly in the “bad apples” camp, which maintains that the entire police establishment should not be indicted by the actions of a few. He decried a “minority” that “stains the honor of the many men and women in blue who serve our country” and described police institutions as “essential.”

Isaacson said the AJC would not support the “whole defunding” of the police.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., a co-chairwoman of the caucus and a former chairwoman of the Democratic Party, depicted a policing problem that runs much deeper than a minority of wrongdoers.

“The systematic brutality that has been part of America’s justice system for hundreds of years must be eliminated,” she said.

The tonal difference is not surprising: The AJC operates in a nonpartisan reality, reconciling donors and activists belonging to both parties. Wasserman Schultz splits her time between Congress’ Democratic caucus and South Florida, with its minority-heavy districts.

Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Mich., another co-chairwoman of the caucus, started the session by saying “This is the time for the Jewish community to stand with Black America, the times have found us.”

How one stands with Black America is not yet clear to the Jewish establishment. Wasserman Schultz and the AJC need to chat.

There’s disagreement on annexation, too

Another emerging difference between the Democratic establishment, including its Jewish leaders, and outside Jewish groups is the stated plans of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex parts of the West Bank.

Four leading Democrats, including two AIPAC stalwarts, Ted Deutch of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois, are seeking co-signers on a letter to Israel’s leaders that would warn against annexation while reaffirming the U.S.-Israel relationship.

The idea was to avoid the divisiveness of a Senate letter that warned of repercussions to the U.S.-Israel relationship. But the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has come out emphatically against the letter, saying it violates traditions of not openly criticizing Israel and does not sufficiently fault the Palestinians.

A two-state outcome has been a sine qua non of Democratic support for Israel for two decades. AIPAC’s posture does not give its best friends in the Democratic caucus much room to maneuver. Schneider and Deutch and AIPAC need to chat.

It’s not just the Democrats who are fighting

The boardwalks may be shuttered, but the Republican establishment, and the Jewish Republicans who are close to it, are busy playing whac-a-mole. Just weeks after the Republican Jewish Coalition joined the party leadership in keeping white supremacist-aligned Rep. Steve King of Iowa from winning a primary, they have to contend with the rise of the right in primaries in Virginia and Georgia.

Rep. Denver Riggleman, a first-termer from Virginia who was emerging as a pro-Israel leader — last year he sought a review of federal funding for Georgetown University because of allegations of anti-Israel bias — lost a primary largely because he would not apologize for officiating at a same-sex wedding.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, meanwhile, finished first by a considerable margin in a congressional district in northwest Georgia. She has dabbled in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, in addition to saying Islam promotes pedophilia and that Muslims should not serve in government, and calling Black people “slaves to the Democratic Party.”

Greene fell short of the 50% needed to avoid a runoff and the party’s leadership is already speaking out against her. The RJC fundraised for Riggleman and, I hear, may soon pronounce on Greene.

In Other News

Lightning Bolton: Trump’s former national security adviser is about to release a book with the thesis that the president runs his foreign policy as a reelection shop, seeking quid pro quos not only from Ukraine but also China. Bolton may have made himself radioactive: Trump is indicating he may prosecute him for the book, and Democrats are furious that he saved the revelations for a $2 million payday and not for testimony during the impeachment.

Bolton once had more friends: In the early 1990s, he spearheaded the effort to have the United Nations trash its “Zionism is Racism” resolution. So in 2006, Jewish organizations came out with rare on-the-record endorsements of Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. It’ll be interesting if any of the same players speak up now.

The Bolton situation has also precipitated the strangest bedfellows moment in a 2020 packed with them: On Thursday, Trump retweeted a slam on Bolton by Max Blumenthal, who has made a career of reviling U.S. foreign policy, including under Trump. He is the son of Sid Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton’s most dogged attack dog, but he also rejects Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. So Trump wasn’t exactly retweeting a friend.

Vindman vindictiveness: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the Jewish officer who testified during the impeachment trial, may not be promoted to colonel because Trump is still furious with him, The Washington Post reports.

China angina: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo uses an AJC forum to give Israel grief over its commercial ties with China.

ICC I see you: The Trump administration warned the International Criminal Court that it will face sanctions for prosecuting Americans or Israelis. Very much on board is Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia, a Jewish Democrat and a Navy veteran. “This is yet another example of the international community’s disproportional attacks on Israel, and I look forward to working with the Administration to end these discriminatory campaigns,” she said.

Worth A Look

That “Zionism is Racism” resolution that Bolton helped nix? It plays a role in a 1975 Supreme Court decision that the Trump administration apparently will cite in its bid to have social media giants like Twitter be more compliant with what Trump sees as ending bias. It’s a little circuitous, but Garrett Epps, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, explains it at The Atlantic.

Tweet So Sweet

A House Judiciary Committee debate on policing and Black lives took an odd turn on Wednesday when Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-Louisiana, was explaining why he dreads an encounter between his son and police. Matthew Gaetz, R-Florida, interjected to say that Republicans have Black children, too — which, OK — but that devolved into Gaetz protesting what he took as Richmond’s attack on Gaetz’s love for his own Black children. Except Gaetz is white, unmarried and childless.

Matthew Gertz, a Jewish writer for the liberal Media Matters watchdog who is often mistaken on Twitter for Gaetz, had enough.

It’s five months to Election Day and America is in the midst of at least two national crises. The unrest reverberating throughout the land from the coronavirus pandemic and the killing of George Floyd is plunging Donald Trump’s polling numbers. The president trails the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, by 14 points, according to a CNN poll that lawyers for the Trump campaign have tried to repress.

What are the repercussions for the Jewish community? Let’s examine three already happening, with the qualification that things can change quickly.

The Democratic shift on Israel has accelerated

The moment may boost the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Biden, the flagbearer of the party’s center, has yet to roll out a detailed plan to deal with the systemic racism underlying police treatment of minorities (although he’s beginning to talk about it). The progressives are offering concrete proposals concerning the police, including defunding departments, limiting the powers of their unions and establishing tougher oversight.

In centrist pro-Israel circles, the progressives’ rise is equated with further erosion of support for Israel. Pro-Israel America, a political action committee run by two former top staffers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, released a voter’s guide on Thursday for four New York congressional primaries on June 23 that says pro-Israel incumbents are at risk.

They include Eliot Engel, whose race against Jamaal Bowman is listed as “highly competitive.” Carolyn Maloney and Gregory Meeks are named in contests rated as “competitive,” and Grace Meng’s primary is deemed “potentially competitive.”

Engel’s risk is due in no small part to missteps related to the killing of Floyd, as my colleague Gabe Friedman notes. The 16-term lawmaker’s ouster would be a body blow to pro-Israel Democrats: As chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Representatives, he has been a leader on pro-Israel legislation. Those in line to succeed him — led by Brad Sherman of California, whose center-right posture on Israel is well known — are similarly pro-Israel but lack Engel’s influence and ability to work out compromises that satisfy a fractious caucus. Bowman, meantime, has suggested that he would leverage assistance to Israel to influence its leaders.

It’s not just Engel: For a recent story, I spoke to a congressional aide who says long term, the Democratic leadership is bound to become more critical of Israel. The Israeli government is pushing that along, as speculation swirls over whether or not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will try to annex parts of the West Bank next month. AIPAC normally frowns upon any public criticism of Israel, but the largest pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. is telling lawmakers that it won’t push back if they criticize Israel on annexation.

“The upcoming New York Democratic Primary could be critical for maintaining support for the U.S.-Israel relationship in Congress,” Jeff Mendelsohn, Pro-Israel America’s executive director, said in a release with the voting guide. Mendelsohn said he saw the races as critical before the unrest related to Floyd’s killing.

Jews and cops — it’s complicated

A year ago, I attended the first all-day FBI session on securing multi-faith communities against an attack. The idea was that Jewish, Muslim and Christian officials in charge of securing their faith spaces should exchange ideas on what works best.

There was a lot of good-natured schmoozing and advice on how best to identify possibly hostile strangers and preparing congregants on best practices during a shooting. But there was a striking moment of tension toward the end of the day.

Michael Masters, who heads the Secure Community Network, the Jewish community’s security advisory group, repeated a mantra I’ve heard from him repeatedly: Get to know your local police and establish a relationship, so they know where the synagogue is and how its security works.

Salam Al-Marayati, the president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said that was not viable in his community: Muslims did not feel comfortable liaising with a community that profiles them.

There are whole books on how Jews in America simultaneously occupy — in ways perhaps no other community does — spaces of risk and privilege, and it is especially stark in the way we relate to police. Jewish communities, without ambivalence, seek the protection of an agency that other communities see as a threat.

In a different but somewhat related development, specious claims that Israel trains police to be brutal with citizens have proliferated on social media in the wake of the Floyd killing. This Amnesty International report, published in 2016 but reappearing frequently in recent postings, is especially egregious.

Its logic proceeds something like this: a U.S. police force has exhibited brutality; its members once went on an Israel program; the Israel police exhibit brutality; therefore, Israel trained the U.S. force in brutality. No evidence of such training is given, and omitted is the multiple police exchanges that take place throughout the world. (Check out the flag collage on this page of the International Police Association exchange program.) Also omitted is that when Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League train the police, it is often about improving how they treat minorities and mitigating brutality.

Rising stars dimmed

For a while, Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, and Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, were rising young Jewish Democrats. Garcetti for a time considered a presidential run.

They have diverged: Frey was booed at a rally this week when he would not commit to abolishing his city’s police department. The municipal council said it would dismantle the force as it is currently constituted, and by a veto-proof majority.

Garcetti, a member of Biden’s vice president selection team, has been buffeted by Black Lives Matter activists who want to drastically reduce the police budget and police unions who want no reductions. He has proposed shifting $150 million from the police department to services for minority communities.

One lesser-known Jewish mayor who could gain traction in the crisis? Steve Adler of Austin, Texas, who released a letter this week with concrete proposals on how to reduce police violence.

“The systemic killing of Black Americans must stop,” he said in a tweet attached to the letter.

In Other News

He campaigned his Ossoff: John Ossoff, the young Jewish Democrat who nearly pulled off a surprise victory in a widely watched 2017 race for a House seat, now is eyeing a Senate seat. On Tuesday he won a Democratic primary to challenge incumbent Republican David Perdue — crucially without the need of a runoff, meaning he can devote his efforts and his fundraising entirely to ousting Perdue in what Democrats hope will be a swing state.

Eine kleine Mort tweet: A tweet by Mort Klein about Black Lives Matter has added weight to an effort spearheaded by HIAS to oust the group he leads, the Zionist Organization of America, from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

The porous Mr. Soros: George Soros, the liberal Jewish philanthropist, is seeping into, well, everything, if you go by the right-wing conspiracy theorists whose baseless claims have proliferated as the American unrest grows. The ADL is tracking Soros conspiracy theories. The pervasive Soros-hating has also afflicted sections of the Texas Republican Party.

Ivanka, canceled: Wichita State University Tech uninvited Ivanka Trump from delivering its commencement speech, citing the policies of her father’s administration, where she serves as a senior adviser. The first daughter posted her speech online and decried what she said was “cancel culture.”

Worth a Look

At NBC, Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins tell the story of Klamath Falls, Oregon, which was all set for a Soros-funded invasion by antifa … that never was.

Tweet so Sweet

A Twitter account dedicated to the Sumerian language posts a photo of a cuneiform keyboard. Patrick Kidd, an editor at the Times of London, has the perfect take.

James Mackler, a Jewish veteran who flew Black Hawk helicopters in combat in Iraq, wears his faith on his sleeve in his bid as a Democrat to win the open Senate seat in Tennessee.

Mackler, 47, an attorney who still serves in the National Guard, is a longshot, but his campaign intrigued me: He is just the latest in a proliferation of Jewish veterans transitioning to politics.

Some background: In November 2017, Tzipi Hotovely, then Israel’s deputy foreign minister, precipitated a storm of outrage when she told an interviewer that American Jews are “people that never send their children to fight for their country.”

She clearly didn’t know about the organization called Jewish War Veterans, or about Gen. David Lee Goldfein, who was then and is now the U.S. Air Force chief of staff. Hotovely apologized.

At the time of Hotovely’s claim, the 2018 congressional race was well underway. There was a Jewish veteran in Congress, New York Republican Lee Zeldin. Two veterans running as Democrats, Max Rose of New York and Elaine Luria of Virginia, would go on to win. So would Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat and CIA alum. Jason Kander, a veteran and a Democrat, had nearly ousted Sen. Roy Blunt in ruby red Missouri in 2016. In one of his ads, Kander dismantled and reassembled an assault rifle blindfolded. Jewish veterans had also featured in the 2018 cycle in primary races in Virginia and West Virginia.

Jews in the U.S. military say they constantly have to deal with the misimpression that Jews don’t serve at all or underserve. (Numbers are hard to come by, but estimates suggest that Jews serve in slightly greater proportions than their overall representation in the population.)

I wondered if the Jewish veterans running for office were driven in part by a “we’re here” impulse and the frustration with how the myth of Jewish non-service is so potent that it is embraced even by a prominent Israeli politician.

The first thing you see on Mackler’s campaign page is this declaration: “I am a husband, a father, a man of faith, and a military officer.”

This is what he recently told The Tennessean, the preeminent newspaper in the state, about how he met his wife: “After combat in Iraq I really wanted to reconnect with the faith of my childhood.” His wife, Shana Goldstein, is a rabbi at Nashville’s The Temple.

On Wednesday, I spoke with Mackler and asked him about why he thought he would be able to wrest a Senate seat from the Republicans given the trouncing of a popular former Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen, in 2018, and what it was like being a rabbi’s husband. Here are some excerpts.

On a Democrat winning in Tennessee: Bredesen lost to Marsha Blackburn, a favorite of President Donald Trump, 56 percent to 44 percent. That fact alone would seem daunting enough. A poll in February shows Mackler trailing his likely Republican challenger, Bill Hagerty, 55 percent to 33 percent. Hagerty, until last year the U.S. ambassador to Japan, has Trump’s endorsement. (There are literally dozens of candidates in the race, but the local media are betting it will be a Mackler-Hagerty faceoff after the Aug. 6 primaries.) Mackler has raised a respectable $1.6 million, but well off the $7.1 million brought in by Hagerty.

Mackler, who has Bredesen’s endorsement, says that turnout in a presidential election, as well as the economy and the collapse of health care, will help him make up the margin of Bredesen’s defeat.

“I need six points more in a presidential year when we know that voter turnout is going to be at high tide,” he said. “In fact, few people know this but Super Tuesday, our presidential primary, Democratic turnout was up by 40 percent from the last presidential primary.

“Things are not getting better in Tennessee. We lead the nation in rural hospital closures per person. [Mackler launched his campaign in January 2019 at a closed rural hospital.] We have an opioid epidemic that’s ravaging our communities. There’s no national solution to that. The trade war hurts Tennessee’s economy more than any other state.”

Talking (Jewish) faith is a net positive in Tennessee: “As I travel the state, most Tennesseans want to know about faith. [He hopes to visit all 95 counties, coronavirus notwithstanding.] They want to know that I’m comfortable talking about how my faith guides me. And for the most part, the vast majority of Tennesseeans are open and welcoming, and are very much willing to have discussions about faith and want someone like me who’s a person of faith.”

That echoes what the two Jews who represent Memphis in the U.S. House, Democrat Steve Cohen and Republican David Kustoff, have told me.

He would be happy if other Jews followed in his footsteps: “What I really want to model is service. It’s not a matter of even whether it’s political service or whether it’s military service. … If I can inspire young Jewish leaders, but really people of all faiths to serve, and then introduce legislation to help incentivize that service, I’ll be proud of that accomplishment.”

He is staunchly pro-Israel: I asked Mackler about the Bernie Sanders proposal of withholding aid to Israel to influence policy. Mackler, who skews moderate on a range of issues, including health care reform and gun control, comes down in that column on the Israel issue as well.

“I think we have, the United States has, a multitude of instruments of power to influence our relationships with other countries, but something like the aid that we’ve been providing to Israel is so extraordinarily important,” he said. “There are other ways through our diplomatic channels to influence Israel’s actions and we should use those.”

His military service spurred his reconnection with his faith: Mackler tells a familiar American Jewish story: He lost interest in Judaism after his bar mitzvah. He also tells a familiar American recruitment story: He was spurred to enlist by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In Iraq, he said, “I became a lot more aware of my faith. I felt like the only Jew in the entire country, which wasn’t absolutely true but was close to it. I was really moved by the interests of my brothers and sisters in arms in my faith, and we had some really interesting discussions about that, particularly around the holidays. So the whole experience made me more aware of being Jewish much more than I had been really previously.”

And led him to his current role as a rabbi’s husband: “So when I came back, I decided I was going to go visit the nearest congregation, which turned out to be the Reform congregation down in Nashville. I was stationed at Fort Campbell, about 45 minutes away. I showed up on Simchat Torah. There was a dinner afterward, and so the membership coordinator sat me at the rabbi’s table. Shana Goldstein at the time had been there a couple of years and was wondering how she’s going to meet a nice Jewish boy in Tennessee. And I walked in straight from Iraq and my combat deployment. We went out several times — she thought she was showing the new congregant around town, but I knew we were dating.”

His role as the rabbi’s husband has been elevated by the coronavirus: “I’ve certainly been helping with the virtual services we’ve been doing. But that means mostly keeping the dogs and the kids quiet and enabling her to do services and help the congregation.”

But don’t ask him about Pirkei Avot: “And if there’s one thing I hear all the time, it’s from people telling me ‘Yeah, you seem like a person of integrity, the best of intentions, but Washington is broken and you’re not going to be able to fix it.’ My response has always been the fact that I can’t fix all of it doesn’t free me from the obligation to try.” I tell him he’s just quoted Pirkei Avot. “I probably should know that.”

In Other News

Yo, Yo Yoel: Kellyanne Conway put Trumpers on Twitter’s integrity czar, Yoel Roth, after Twitter started tagging Trump’s tweets with fact checks. On a TV morning show, Conway noted his handle, @yoyoel, and past broadsides targeting Trump. On Thursday, Trump got into the act, calling Roth a “hater.”

Omar’s Saudi setup: Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., tells The Sunday Times that she takes aim at Saudi Arabian influence-peddling in part to make clear she’s not an anti-Semite when she lambasts what she sees as Israeli influence-peddling.

A grave matter: A bipartisan slate of House lawmakers, including the two top appropriators, want to know what’s keeping the Department of Veterans Affairs from removing Nazi symbols from three graves in U.S. military cemeteries. (Since this writing, Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., has also written the VA a letter.)

From slaughtering pigs to defending haredim: Last week I discussed three bids to oust veteran Jewish Democrats in New York, including House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler. That led to a call from Seth Galinsky, the Socialist Workers Party challenger in the 10th District trying to unseat Nadler. Why had I not mentioned his candidacy, Galinsky wondered.

Galinsky and his party are not going to oust Nadler — and he acknowledged as much with a chuckle. Still, a couple of things intrigued me. One was that the Orthodox press, to its own amazement, appreciates Galinsky’s robust condemnation of New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s tirades about Jewish worship during the coronavirus.

Another surprise was the Socialist party’s Israel platform, which is centrist and moderate. It might have been written by an AIPAC staffer, albeit after binge-reading Marx’s “Das Kapital”: “For the recognition of Israel and of a contiguous Palestinian state. For the right of Jews to return to Israel as a refuge in the face of capitalist crisis, Jew-hatred and murderous violence.”

Galinsky, 63, now a full-time candidate, described years spent in the trenches of manual labor, working on the kill floors of pork slaughterhouses in Iowa, on a sewing machine and as a brakeman on a train. He said the point of his outreach was to educate workers on the merits of uniting, and that underscored the statements on anti-Semitism and on Israel. Anti-Semitism, in this view, is a feature of capitalism.

“We start with the standpoint, we’re for whatever helps working people organize and stand together against the capitalist government, it’s true here in the U.S. and it’s true in Israel,” he said. “Working people whatever our religious beliefs can be united and replace governments of capitalists with governments of workers and farmers.”

Worth a look

At NBC’s opinion website, Dina Kraft (a JTA alum) considers whether Israel is exiting quarantine too quickly and what lessons Americans might draw from that country’s reopening.

Tweet so sweet

A Mississippi alligator died at 84 in Moscow. Long story, but there’s an urban myth that the beast once belonged to Hitler. Seth Mandel, the executive editor at the Washington Examiner magazine, knows who’s responsible.

The Tell is a weekly roundup of the latest Jewish political news from Ron Kampeas, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Washington bureau chief. Connect with him on Twitter at @kampeas or suggest a story to him by emailing thetell@jta.org. Sign up here to receive The Tell in your inbox on Thursday evenings.

During the last congressional elections, in 2018, the overarching story was the rise and eventual success of “the resistance,” the Democrats spurred to run for Congress simply because they loathed everything that President Donald Trump stood for. They included some inspired by the Women’s March and anti-bigotry campaigners appalled by Trump’s equivocations over condemning white supremacists.

Uncovering the Jewish subplot to that story was not difficult. And in some cases, a single candidate embodied it. Take, for example, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, who cited joining the Women’s March with her daughter —  as well as her father’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor — in explaining why she ran and eventually won. (Houlahan herself does not identify as Jewish.)

Now the plot appears to be whether the resistance makes it through the next election. And again, there’s a Jewish subplot: How does the Trump factor play into a Jewish candidate’s chances? And with the rise of the Democratic resistance, does a pro-Israel record hurt or help Democrats?

We’ll be taking a look at a number of races countrywide through the Trump-resistance-Jewish lens. Let’s start with three races in New York’s June 23 primary.

Will these three New York veterans be replaced by AOC wannabes?

One of the biggest stories of 2018 was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s success in ousting a senior New York Democrat, Joseph Crowley, in her Bronx area’s 14th District. Her victory in the primary was a stunner. A narrative emerged that Crowley’s responsibilities as a House leader made him inattentive to his district, and his centrism was a negative in a deeply blue district where a candidate did not need to court Republicans.

The narrative was powerful enough that it has fueled challenges this cycle from the left to three other New York City-area Democrats, all Jewish and over 70. All three are in nationally visible positions: Eliot Engel is the chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee; Nita Lowey chairs the Appropriations Committee; and Jerry Nadler heads the Judiciary Committee.

Surprises happen, as we saw with Ocasio-Cortez, but lightning never strikes twice in precisely the same way. Crowley’s district is comprised mostly of minority voters and is substantially working class. In retrospect, it seemed anomalous to be represented by an older white male close to the power elites. Of the other three districts, only Engel’s is somewhat comparable (and doesn’t have nearly as many minority voters as Ocasio-Cortez’s) and all are wealthier.

Lowey, 82, announced late last year that she was retiring from representing her 17th District covering mostly suburbs in Rockland County and parts of Westchester. That defused the potency of her would-be AOC, Mondaire Jones, 32, an alumnus of the Obama administration Justice Department. Jones announced before Lowey said she would not run again, but once the longtime incumbent said she was done, she did, there was a rush of other candidates to step in. Most of them are, like Lowey, fairly centrist.

Lohud (which a reader tells me stands for Lower Hudson), the USA Today-affiliated Westchester news site, says Lowey has enough potential successors to form a baseball team — a good analogy because it’s the American sport where Jews most thrive.

Among the Jewish candidates hoping to take her place:

David Buchwald, 41, a state assemblyman who in 1997 interned in Lowey’s office

Adam Schleifer, 38, a former prosecutor who was part of the “Varsity Blues” prosecution of celebrity parents who bribed their kids’ way into top universities. Schleifer has the endorsement of longtime Long Island congressman Steve Israel, who is emphatically moderate and a pro-Israel Democrat

Allison Fine, a longtime pro-choice activist as well as a one-time synagogue president

The challenge to Nadler, 72, from his left in the 10th District, covering parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, is emblematic of how the AOC-Crowley story is no longer a template. Prior to 2018, Democrats were the minority in the House and seemed impotent; picking off the elders seemed to make sense. Once they gained the majority in ‘18, however, the experience of their House veterans was key in battling Trump, most prominently in his impeachment on charges that he tried to muscle Ukraine into doing partisan dirty work for him.

Nadler, in any case, was always more of a progressive than a centrist. Now he can boast to his very liberal district that he helped to lead what likely will be the second most defining moment of the Trump presidency (the first being Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic).

He has two challengers from his left: Jonathan Herzog, who advised Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign (and, at 25, would be the youngest-ever congressman), and Lindsey Boylan, 36, who helped direct economic development for New York state. Boylan told Teen Vogue that she was inspired by Ocasio-Cortez. Her main beef with Nadler when that article was published in August 2019 — that he wasn’t moving fast enough to impeach Trump — is now moot. Boylan also argued that, like Ocasio-Cortez and others, she would bring a woman’s voice to a town where men have been silencing women for decades.

Nadler this week secured the endorsement of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a progressive who drew a good deal of support during her presidential candidacy from women. That neutralizes two of the areas that Nadler’s challengers say he is vulnerable, on progressive and gender politics.

Engel in the 16th, covering parts of the Bronx and Westchester County, faces the greatest challenge of the three — from Jamaal Bowman, an education activist and middle school principal. Bowman, 43, has the endorsement of Justice Democrats, the group that helped propel Ocasio-Cortez to her victory, and has the enthusiastic support of The Intercept, an influential online newspaper on the left. Engel also was hit last week with an Atlantic article wondering why he wasn’t campaigning in New York. The answer: No one campaigns in person during the pandemic, and his chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee keeps him in D.C. Nonetheless, Bowman has started to campaign on Engel’s absence.

On the plus side for Engel, 73, he helped lead the prosecution of Trump, although not with the same profile as Nadler. He’s got plenty of middle-of-the-road Jewish constituents who appreciate his long record of pro-Israel legislation and may fear Bowman’s alliance with some of Israel’s harshest critics in Congress. Plus, Engel has made some late-breaking resistance news: He is taking the lead in seeking to uncover allegations of corruption against Mike Pompeo that surfaced after the secretary of state fired his department’s inspector general last week.

Check out these Jewish Insider profiles of Boylan, Fine, Buchwald, Schleifer, Jones and Herzog.

In other news

Dethroning King: The Republican Jewish Coalition runs through the playbook of how to take down an undesirable member of one’s own party — in this case Steve King of Iowa, who has dallied in the past with white nationalists.

Biden and Israel: The former vice president’s Jewish campaign is gearing up, with at least three virtual conferences this week focusing only on his Jewish campaign, one featuring Biden himself. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee made news when he said explicitly that he would reverse some of Trump’s Israel policies and advised Israel not to annex territory in the West Bank. His adviser, Tony Blinken, offered a pronounced contrast with Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, and said Biden would keep disputes with Israel behind closed doors.

Hell no, not the MFO: Top congressional Republicans and Democrats warn Defense Secretary Mark Esper against removing U.S. troops from the Sinai, where they have helped maintain peace between Israel and Egypt for nearly four decades.

Don’t Juneau not to Nazi? An Alaska lawmaker is the latest Republican to liken quarantine regulations to the Nazis and then apologize. Aren’t Alaskans supposed to be into wide open spaces?

Worth a look

At The Bulwark, the home of conservatives who revile Trump, Mona Charen sees the erosion of conservative values in Trump’s retweeting Michelle Malkin, a one-time establishment conservative who now associates with Holocaust deniers.

Tweet so sweet

Johnny Kunza, the news director at the Forward, was there at the launch of the New Jersey-St. Louis bagel wars. And it was good.

Here’s my completely beside-the-point thought on the latest political developments: Are we living through a weighty HBO political drama? Or a raunchy satirical take on Showtime?

That guy from Season 1 of “The Trump Years” — the one with the striking martial demeanor who, last we saw, was all but perp-walked out of the White House? He’s back just before the Season 4 wrap claiming victory.

Under Attorney General William Barr’s direction, the Department of Justice has directed prosecutors to drop the prosecution of Michael Flynn, the tough-talking general who was President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser. Flynn had sought to withdraw his guilty plea about lying to the FBI concerning conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador during the transition to the Trump presidency.

There’s plenty of noise about what happens next. Trump and his supporters are crying vindication, while the president’s detractors see Barr as corrupt and manipulating justice to favor Trump’s political fortunes. They note that Barr’s directive to drop charges was unprecedented in a case involving a guilty plea.

And in true last five minutes of the penultimate episode fashion, there was a twist: The judge in the case, Emmett Sullivan, is not ready to accept Barr’s recommendation on its face and wants to hear from those who see the move as political.

On Wednesday, Sullivan extraordinarily asked a former judge, John Gleeson, to essentially prosecute Flynn again. Earlier in the week, Gleeson had slammed Barr’s bid to exonerate Flynn as an abuse of power.

So as we head to November, and wonder whether the network will renew “The Trump Years” for another four seasons, it’s 2017 all over again. That first season was packed with subplots having plenty of Jewish and Middle East content, and those are likely to resurface. Here’s a review of some of the threads.

That U.N. resolution

Flynn lied to the FBI about two conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak during the transition in late 2016. One was to seek reassurances that the Russians would not counter with their own penalties against the Obama administration sanctions on Russia for interference in the 2016 election. The other was a plea to veto a U.N. resolution condemning Israel for its settlement expansion.

Flynn batted .500 here — yea on the sanctions request, nay on the veto, as the Security Council resolution went through because the Obama administration would not exercise its own veto. (U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power abstained, bringing the relationship between the Obama and Netanyahu governments to a sour end.)

The relitigation of Flynn’s case will surely return the Israel conversation to the forefront and what if anything Flynn offered Kislyak in exchange for the veto. Republicans already are casting Flynn’s outreach as laudable and pro-Israel.

“Keep in mind Obama admin was furious Gen Michael Flynn was making calls to world leaders helping to block UN Sec Council Res 2334 in Dec 16, which was an anti-Israel effort that should’ve been vetoed by the US, not fast tracked,” U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Jewish Republican from New York, said Thursday on Twitter. “Gen Flynn was doing exactly what needed to be done.”

Unmasking the unmaskers

Flynn also had an array of mysterious Middle East involvements, including one that could bring into the spotlight Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. It’s a complex story, so stick with me.

This week Richard Grenell, the acting director of National Intelligence who is close to Trump, declassified a list of names of Obama administration officials who during the transition sought to “unmask” other officials talking with foreign nationals. That kind of info is tracked by the National Security Agency. “Unmasking” is an involved process requiring multiple levels of approval designed to protect U.S. citizens who converse with foreign nationals and might be targeted for eavesdropping.

Grenell’s declassifications related only to unmaskings that led to Flynn.

Why would Grenell unmask the unmaskings? The narrative among Trump supporters is that Obama officials leaked Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak to the media to sabotage Trump’s presidency. (Notably, Grenell delivered the information to Republican senators, not to their Democratic counterparts.)

But the declassified unmaskings likely had nothing to do with Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak. (Grenell has not declassified the underlying documents, just the requests.) Marcy Wheeler, a veteran spywatcher, points out that a number of the unmaskings predated the Kislyak conversations, and that in any case, a close reading of testimony shows that the FBI did not get its information about the Flynn-Kislyak conversations from the NSA but on its own.

So who was Flynn speaking to that would have merited an NSA tap? Wheeler notes that the timing of one of the unmaskings appears to be related to a secretive meeting during the transition of Flynn, Kushner and Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. The meeting was secretive because, as Mother Jones’ Dan Friedman reports, the UAE ignored protocol and did not notify the Obama administration that it was taking place.

What was the meeting about? In 2017, Kushner said in congressional testimony that the Emiratis wanted to express their pleasure that Trump was signaling that he would be considerably tougher on Iran. Bin Zayed “was hopeful that strong American leadership in the Middle East would hopefully reverse what he saw as very detrimental to the Middle East — the last administration where a lot of our allies felt like America pulled back and lran was strengthened,” Kushner said.

Bin Zayed’s efforts in subsequent years to increase the UAE’s influence in Washington have engendered a number of scandals, including distributing millions to think tanks to garner influence.

Flynn also was lobbying for Turkey’s Erdogan government while he was campaigning for Trump, and allegedly contemplated kidnapping a U.S.-based enemy of the Turkish strongman. (Flynn denies the kidnapping plot.) Recep Tayyip Erdogan is notably not a friend of Israel, at times backing its deadly enemy in the Gaza Strip, Hamas, and pushing back against Israeli attempts to mine for gas in the Mediterranean Sea.

Why this matters leading to November

The reemergence of the Flynn case and the unmaskings will likely provide fodder for both parties ahead of the elections, and particularly in their Jewish campaigns. Republicans already are seeking to depict Flynn’s actions as favoring a pro-Israel agenda and contrast them with Obama’s record. Democrats will use the revelations to label Flynn and others high up in the Trump team — especially Kushner — as compromised through their association with shady regimes and characters. Kushner came across throughout the Russia investigation as hapless and naive, not a branding he wants as he leads efforts to guide America out of quarantine.

In Other News

Flipping California: Republicans have flipped a district in California for the first time in decades. It’s the 15th, where Mike Garcia, a former fighter pilot, bested Christy Smith, a state assemblywoman. Republicans are saying the win augurs good news for November, noting Garcia’s double-digit lead while Democrats are saying it’s a nothingburger — the Los Angeles-area seat was long Republican until 2018, when Democrat Katie Hill, who later resigned in a scandal, flipped it. (Roll Call considers what the race might or might not mean.) The Republican Jewish Coalition helped get out the vote for the special election.

“Not only did our PAC and supporters fundraise for him, but we used peer-to-peer texting to encourage Jewish Republican voters in the district to return their ballots,” Alex Siegel, the RJC’s deputy executive director and California regional director, tells me. “With mail-in ballots figuring to be much more prevalent in this November’s election, our use of this political technology will be a key outreach tool for us.”

King crowning himself: The RJC is spending money to oust U.S. Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who has a long history of identification with white nationalist figures and themes. One recent RJC victory has been its role in the successful effort to have House Republicans declare King a pariah — he currently has no committee assignments.

But King is telling folks in his home state that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California is ready to “exonerate” him and put him back on committees. Not so fast, say folks close to the process. Rep. Steve Stivers of Ohio is on the GOP House Steering Committee, which decides committee placements, and he said on Twitter that King is still persona non grata. What I hear is that King may be spinning the normal process as exoneration: He and every other Republican will be up for committee placement when Congress reconvenes. That doesn’t mean he will be selected.

What did Jared say? Jared Kushner spoke to Time magazine and was asked about whether the federal elections on Nov. 3 might be moved because of the coronavirus pandemic. His answer, essentially, was that the decision was above his pay grade.

“It’s not my decision to make, so I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other,” Kushner said. “But right now, [Nov. 3 is] the plan, and again, hopefully, by the time we get to September, October, November, we’ve done enough work with testing and with all the different things we’re trying to do to prevent a future outbreak of the magnitude that would make us shut down again.”

That answer somehow was spun into headlines suggesting that the Trump administration was open to postponing the election. Kushner’s reply was inartful — he might have noted, as others have, that no single branch of government can postpone the election. But he was not suggesting a postponement. Reason magazine has a thorough takedown of the episode.

Blue Kumbaya: The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations wants you to know that all the nastiness surrounding its selection of a new chairperson, Dianne Lob, formally of HIAS, is a thing of the past.

“We commit ourselves, our organizations, and our community to working together with all of our fellow Americans, based on our shared commitment to democracy and our devotion to our country’s prosperity, to sustain each other in these troubled times as we banish bigotry from our midst,” said a statement this week signed by virtually every Presidents Conference member.

Maybe. Mort Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America, which signed the togetherness statement, was still litigating his case against Lob last week. Klein told the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles that Lob is too liberal for the job.

Worth a look

Where’s Eliot Engel? Not in his New York district, where for the first time in years he faces a credible primary challenge from the left. The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere tracks the Jewish chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to his Washington-area home, where Engel says the coronavirus has been keeping him close to the Capitol, making campaigning in his district a virtual affair.

Tweet so sweet

Elad Strohmayer, the spokesperson for Israel’s D.C. embassy, marks International Hummus Day (yes, it’s a thing) by inveighing against some of the recent “innovations” for the classic Middle Eastern dish. This may be the issue, more than any other, that unites Israel with its neighbors.

Joe Biden’s vision is expanding, literally: The page on his website labeled “Joe’s Vision” has about doubled in the last week or so, to 35 categories.

The most recent is “Joe Biden’s Agenda for the Jewish Community.” We’ve discussed here how central one of Biden’s appeals to the Jewish community is, to combat the rise in anti-Semitism on the right, to his entire campaign, and sure enough, his Jewish agenda page gets to it straight away.

But on foreign policy, Biden’s through-line is distinguishing himself from Trump and returning to a sense of coherence. Biden has repeatedly blasted Trump’s policies as muddled above all.

On Iran, Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations a year ago, Trump has “no viable plan.” On North Korea, Biden said, “diplomacy requires a strategy, a process, and competent leadership to deliver.” On Afghanistan, “President Trump has systematically undercut his negotiators.” And so on.

“The most important thing” for the next president “is to clear up the raft of confusion over American policy objectives in the region,” Tamara Cofman Wittes, an Obama administration Middle East policy alum who now is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. (Wittes is not on Biden’s campaign team.)

So how coherent is Biden’s Middle East policy? Personal relationships are key to the former vice president, and you can map out a policy by pinning it to his relationships with three people: Golda Meir, Menachem Begin and Barack Obama.

Golda: Securing Israel

Biden’s affection for Golda Meir has become something of an internet meme. But it is the timing of his 1973 encounter with the former Israeli leader that underscores how seminal the visit was in shaping his views. It was in the lead-up to the Yom Kippur War, and the 30-year-old freshman senator was genuinely spooked by Israel’s vulnerability.

“I remember driving from Cairo all the way out to the Suez,” Biden told an Israel Independence Day celebration in Washington in 2015, referring to the Egyptian leg of that trip. “And you could see these great plumes of dust and sand. But none [of] it seemed isolated. It turns out it was maneuvers taking place in the desert. And I was really worried. And we went through, and [Golda Meir] painted a bleak, bleak picture — scared the hell out of me, quite frankly, about the odds.”

It’s not just talk about the need to protect Israel. We can see the effect it still has on him today. While Biden is making a point of reaching out to his party’s left, accepting the endorsement of J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group, and of Bernie Sanders, his main rival for the nomination, he’s still a staunch defender of the Jewish state.

He departs dramatically from the left’s calls to leverage aid to Israel to pressure it to make concessions. He said last November after the J Street conference that it would be a “gigantic mistake” and “absolutely outrageous” to leverage aid.

Biden’s campaign staff, answering a series of my questions on the Middle East, pointed me to his recent statements, and securing Israel was paramount.

“Palestinian leaders should end the incitement and glorification of violence, and they must begin to level with their people about the legitimacy and permanence of Israel as a Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people,” was Biden’s response to the Council on Foreign Relations when he was asked about the two-state solution.

Menachem Begin: Keeping it real

Republicans seeking fodder to attack Biden have already pointed to a closed 1982 meeting that then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had with Democratic senators. Biden and Begin yelled at each other, is the essence of the story, and Begin said Israel would abjure U.S. aid rather than give in to U.S. demands. (Biden in the meeting had raised Israel’s settlement expansion — just give me a second here to contemplate that “settlement expansion” has been an issue since I was 22 years old — and other senators were critical of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.)

The twist is, if you read accounts of the encounter, Biden was being descriptive, not prescriptive: He was telling Begin what was likely to happen — there would be pressure to cut aid to Israel — not that he would recommend it.

That’s been the template of his contentions with Israel: The U.S. has your back, but don’t be your worst enemy. “Israel could get into a fistfight with this country, and we’d still defend you,” Biden told Michael Oren in 2010, then the Israeli ambassador to the United States, when the U.S.-Israel relationship was at a low over (you guessed it) settlement expansion, according to Oren’s autobiography, “Ally.”

And that was the tenor of the statement he sent to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week, warning Israel’s leaders against scuttling the two-state solution — which he sees as critical to Israel’s survival — by annexing parts of the West Bank.

“A priority now for the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace should be resuming our dialogue with the Palestinians and pressing Israel not to take actions that make a two-state solution impossible,” Biden said. “I will reopen the U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem, find a way to reopen the PLO’s diplomatic mission in Washington, and resume the decades-long economic and security assistance efforts to the Palestinians that the Trump Administration stopped.”

Biden is ready to reverse every Trump policy that he sees as inhibiting two states: He will restore aid to the Palestinians, re-recognize the claim they have to Jerusalem and engage with them through diplomatic channels. Notably, however, he will not reverse Trump’s decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem.

Barack Obama: A deal with Iran, with tweaks

A lot of Biden sentences begin with “my friend Barack,” and his closeness to Obama extends to his pledge to revive Obama’s Middle East policies, particularly as they relate to the Iran nuclear deal.

“President Trump abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — a deal that blocked Iran’s paths to nuclear weapons, as repeatedly verified by international inspectors — with no viable plan to produce a better one,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations.

Read between the lines, however, and Biden is — without explicitly criticizing Obama — making it clear he wants a more robust deal in place. In the same statement, Biden calls the deal a “starting point” and that he would work to “extend” its nuclear constraints. A key Israeli criticism of the deal was that its restrictions would sunset too early.

“If Iran moves back into compliance with its nuclear obligations, I would reenter the JCPOA as a starting point to work alongside our allies in Europe and other world powers to extend the deal’s nuclear constraints,” he said.

One foreign policy area where Trump has been consistent with Obama has been in retreating from investing U.S. diplomatic and military capital in Syria, a trend that has alarmed Israel as Iran entrenches itself in the country in the wake of the victory of its ally, the Assad regime, in quelling the civil war.

But Biden also told The Washington Post last year that it is “imperative to remain engaged” in Syria to prevent the return of the Islamic State, one of the Assad regime’s antagonists in the war. Trump’s moves in the country “limit our ability to deescalate the war and shape a durable political settlement,” Biden said.

IN OTHER NEWS

Friedman’s folly: Two Obama national security council alums, Philip Gordon and Robert Malley, took to Foreign Policy magazine last month to call on Biden to pressure Israel not to annex parts of the West Bank. David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel and an author of the Trump peace plan that would allow Israel to go ahead with annexation, took to the New York Post to lambast them. (For a rebuttal to Friedman’s rebuttal, see the Israel Policy Forum’s Evan Gottesman.) There’s one surprising line in Friedman’s Post piece: “Publicly seeking to frustrate the foreign policy of our duly elected president is downright obnoxious,” Friedman said. It’s a curious position for Friedman. “Publicly frustrating” the executive’s foreign policy is basically the job description of an array of lobbyists populating this town (hello AIPAC and the 2015 Iran deal), and also has been of … David Friedman, who took to Israel’s Arutz Sheva news site multiple times during the Obama administration to lambast Obama’s policies.

The next bailout: Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and Senate minority leader, told Orthodox Jews that the next round of payroll protection in a pandemic relief bill would include coverage for nonprofits employing more than 500 people.That would be a boon to national Orthodox Jewish groups and the larger schools and yeshivas. He also said it was likely that a $300 cap on tax-deductible charitable contributions would be lifted.

A higher authority: Missouri’s Republican governor does not want to loosen requirements for mail-in voting, despite the dangers of in-person voting during a pandemic. An array of Missouri rabbis of all streams gave Jews sanction to vote by mail, citing religious law.

Philo-Semitism: Elan Carr, the top U.S. official monitoring anti-Semitism, says he wants to encourage other countries to be more affectionate with their Jews.

Worth a look

In The New York Times, Heather Hurlburt, who directs Models of Policy Change at the New America foundation, says the pandemic may signal an end to isolationism: You can’t fight a virus on your own.

Tweet so sweet

Blake Hounshell, a Politico editor, marvels that once upon a time, Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases mandarin who has become the pandemic’s hero, was the model for a sex god in a 1990s potboiler by Washington society doyenne Sally Quinn. What’s more, the Washingtonian reports, she made him into a married Orthodox Jewish sex god.

Last week we scanned Joe Biden’s Jewish campaign for trends and themes. Now it’s Donald Trump’s turn.

Our reviews are impressionistic, not comprehensive — left out of last week’s accounting were prominent Jewish Biden supporters including former ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, former Obama Jewish liaisons Sarah Bard and Matt Nosanchuk, former deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken and Texas fundraiser Marc Stanley.

If a name is missing from my Trump roundup below, drop me a line and I’ll likely get to it. It’s a long way to November.

What’s in a Jewish Heritage Month proclamation?

The White House released a statement on Wednesday proclaiming May Jewish American Heritage Month indicating that the president, or his team, understands the dimensions of the threat posed by Biden in key states where Jewish voters can make a difference, primarily Florida, but also Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan.

The presidential proclamations, since the holiday was established in 2006, usually celebrate Jewish resilience and list the Jewish contributions to American society. Under Trump’s predecessors, they also included a nod to the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Most of Trump’s proclamation this year focuses on the threat facing American Jews from white supremacists. (I just did a deep dive into my emails: Trump has never mentioned Israel in his Jewish Heritage Month proclamations, while Barack Obama routinely did.)

“Our country has wept too many times in the aftermaths of horrific attacks, including last April when a murderer opened fire in a synagogue in Poway, California, taking innocent life and shattering families in a cowardly display of evil,” this year’s proclamation said. “Such unconscionable acts are an abomination to all decent and compassionate people. Hatred is intolerable and has no place in our hearts or in our society.”

Trump’s past equivocations in rejecting support from white supremacists have been the prime driver of Jewish unhappiness with his administration. Biden has made Trump’s associations with white supremacists central to his overall campaign — more than any other candidate in the primaries.

Jewish policymakers

The Jewish Heritage Month proclamation notwithstanding, Trump’s principal area of activism purportedly favoring Jewish community interests is in his Israel and Middle East policy.

In his Jewish Heritage Month proclamation, Trump mentions his executive order last year combating anti-Semitism, which is based on Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Not mentioned is that complaints citing the order have so far focused on allegations that pro-Palestinian activism on campuses crosses into anti-Semitism. Key figures in the effort to identify anti-Zionism as an expression of anti-Semitism are Kenneth Marcus, the top civil rights official at the Education Department and Elan Carr, the State Department’s anti-Semitism monitor. Both men come out of the center-right pro-Israel community — Marcus as the founder of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights, and Carr as a president of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity.

The radical changes in Israel policy under Trump include moving the U.S, Embassy to Jerusalem, slashing aid to the Palestinians to almost nothing, quitting the Iran nuclear deal, recognizing Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights and a peace plan released this year that winks and nods at Israel’s annexation of parts of the West Bank.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, officially handles the Israel portfolio, but the folks in the field handling the nuts and bolts are probably more influential, chief among them Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. Trump’s former bankruptcy lawyer, a one-time prominent backer of the settlement movement, is the principal mover and shaker on the Israel-specific components. Friedman is among a handful of non-family Trump officials who span Trump’s entire first term.

Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser, like Friedman, is another non-family member who has survived the entire term and whose influence on immigration policy is ever expanding. Most recently, reports have emerged that he is seizing on the coronavirus pandemic to entrench immigration restrictions.

The donors

There are three classes of Jewish Trump donors: The FFBs (friends from the beginning), the Johnny-come-latelies and the discarded.

FFBs: Trump’s evident grief over the coronavirus death last month of Stanley Chera, a leader of New York’s Syrian Jewish community, highlighted how far back and deep his ties are with the city’s Jews — particularly those who jostled with him in the real estate sector. Another longstanding backer from that sector is Jason Meister, who in 2017 penned an op-ed titled “Question to My Fellow Jews: How Can You Still Vote Democrat?”

JOHNNIES: Many GOP establishment figures were wary of Trump the first time around because of his bullying affect and his fraught dealings with other minorities, particularly Hispanics and Muslims, and his history of allegations of sexual impropriety. The Republican Jewish Coalition had a tense relationship with Trump for much of its 2016 campaign; its chairman, Norm Coleman, famously said he would “never vote” for “a bigot, a misogynist, a fraud and a bully” like Trump. Last year he recited a version of “Dayenu” thanking Trump. The RJC last year pledged to spend $10 million to elect Trump.

A turning point for Trump and the GOP establishment, and particularly its Jewish establishment, was Sheldon Adelson’s endorsement in May of ‘16. Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate and pro-Israel donor who is one of the richest men in the world, and his physician wife, Miriam Adelson, had favored Trump’s GOP rivals. In 2018, Trump conferred the Medal of Freedom on Miriam Adelson. This time, Adelson has pledged $100 million to elect Trump and Republicans.

Another wary and Jewish GOP influencer was Fred Zeidman, who could not be persuaded by Adelson to back Trump and stayed out of the general election contest. The Houston businessman and chairman emeritus of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council has since done a 180, telling Politico last year that he tore up a T-shirt naming George W. Bush as the most pro-Israel president.

Paul Singer, the billionaire investment counselor and major GOP donor, also was notably wary of Trump in 2016: He funded opposition research against the president that helped fuel the Mueller report into allegations that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia. He’s still not quite on board yet with giving money directly to Trump’s campaign, but he is providing major bucks to Republicans running for Congress, which pleases Trump.

THE DISCARDED: A notable Johnny-come-lately was Gordon Sondland, the Washington state hotelier who inveighed against Trump during the campaign and then donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. That got Sondland an ambassadorship to the European Union — but his testimony affirming that Trump sought to pressure Ukraine into launching a criminal investigation into Biden helped impeach Trump and got him booted from his post.

Then there are the Jewish advisers who were with Trump from the beginning of his campaign, or before, and now have disappeared because of scandals. Among them are Elliott Broidy, the Los Angeles investor who allegedly took $2.7 million from the United Arab Emirates to influence Trump (and who like Trump had Playboy model issues), and Michael Cohen, the one-time Trump lawyer who is set to be released from jail for his role in paying off women who accused Trump of marital infidelity.

Mishpocha

Remember the chatter that Trump wanted Kushner and Ivanka Trump to decamp to New York and stay out of trouble? Nah. Kushner is now running the pandemic response, and as he had done with his Middle East peace plan, deriding old Washington hands as dinosaurs unequipped for the change America needs. Kushner’s love of strategic disruption aligns exactly with his father-in-law: He’s not going anywhere soon. And Ivanka is very much along for the ride.

IN OTHER NEWS

Joe Biden may have a Jewish women problem: Tara Reade’s allegation that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 is not going away, and some Jewish women want answers. No one who walks away from Biden over the Reade allegations is likely to cross over to Trump, who has faced multiple allegations of sexual assault. But the Reade allegations could depress turnout and generate a pox-on-both-their-houses feeling, which helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in ‘16.

And a woman shall lead them, but next year: A compromise spurred by a right-wing pressure campaign elected former HIAS chairwoman Dianne Lob as chairwoman-elect of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to take over in ‘21. Lob, the third woman to be tapped for the position in the Presidents Conference’s 64-year history, does not assume the -elect position until June 1 (the date she was supposed to start as official chairwoman). Does that make her chairwoman-elect-elect?

Garcetti gets a star: On Thursday, Biden named his vice presidential selection committee co-chairs. He has said he will name a woman as his running mate, and reportedly favors an African-American. Among the lead candidates are Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; Stacey Abrams, who almost nabbed the Georgia governor spot in 2018; and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottom. The committee has four co-chairs — two women and two men — including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, a rising Democrat who is both a Mexican American and Jewish.

Biden out of the box for the Jews: It’s a pandemic, and that sucks the air out of everything else. But Biden is already advancing a three-point plan, which he released exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, to protect Jews and other targets of hate crimes. It includes increased funding for nonprofits, prioritizing hate crimes prosecutions and a holistic approach to stemming violence, including taking steps on gun ownership reforms and mental health reforms. He also said he will not move the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem.

Worth A Look

In Vogue, Sarah Wildman writes about how she deals with pandemic confinement “with one enormously immunocompromised kid and another one bored out of her mind”: Ryan Heffington’s “Sweat Fest,” “an Instagram live dance party for the masses.” Wildman says it delivers intimacy “that, in a lonely moment of global and personal crisis, may be the biggest gift of all.”

Tweet So Sweet

https://twitter.com/RealLyndaCarter/status/1255604392142745609

Gal Gadot, the current Wonder Woman, sings for her fans to keep them calm during the pandemic. Lynda Carter, the original Wonder Woman, has different ideas about best pandemic behavior.

The Tell is a weekly roundup of the latest Jewish political news from Ron Kampeas, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Washington bureau chief. Connect with him on Twitter at @kampeas or suggest a story to him by emailing thetell@jta.org. Sign up here to receive The Tell in your inbox on Thursday evenings.

Tweet So Tweet

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., posted a quarantine video, as have many others, of his favorite isolation meal: A tuna salad sandwich, microwaved. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., says he needs to get in touch, stat.

The $2 trillion-plus stimulus bill has passed and the relief for nonprofits sought by Jewish and other groups are in.

The big news is that nonprofits are eligible to tap into the $349 billion in payroll protection loans for small businesses administered by the Small Business Administration, as well as some other opportunities for relief. Applications for the SBA loans open Friday.

“[Apply] soon,” Eric Fingerhut, the Jewish Federations of North America CEO who helped lead an alliance of more than 100 nonprofits lobbying for the funds, told me. “The total pool of funds for organizations of 500 employees and under, $350 billion — it’s almost ridiculous to say that isn’t a large amount of money, but there are 30 million small businesses in the country and 1.5 million nonprofits.”

The harder news is that what’s available to nonprofits reeling from the coronavirus crisis forces them to gamble on an existential question: Some kinds of relief in the stimulus are predicated on the belief that the pandemic may be over in a matter of months if not weeks, others on the assumption that the pandemic has changed life as we know it forever. Organizations can’t apply for both.

What’s available

The JFNA is focusing on the payroll protection provided by the Small Business Administration.

The pluses: It covers payroll, mortgage or rent, and utilities for eight weeks, and is forgiven if the employer keeps on or quickly rehires staff and maintains salary levels. Even if the employer does not meet those marks, the terms are generous: Interest is only 0.5 percent, no collateral is needed, the loan matures in two years and payment is deferred for six months. Here’s the agency’s guide for applying.

Jewish groups credited an array of senators for the inclusion of nonprofits, chief among them Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who chairs the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, and Ben Cardin, D-Md., the committee’s senior Democrat.

“From the start, I have been committed to ensuring nonprofits and religious institutions have access to the critical funding they need to support our local communities during the coronavirus pandemic,” Rubio said in an email.

In an interview, Cardin told me: “We’re doing the same for nonprofits as for small businesses. We’re saying, ‘Keep your payroll, be there because we’re going to need you, the services you provide are so essential.’”

Two leading Orthodox organizations, the Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel of America, praised senators for ensuring that private schools will be eligible to apply for stimulus money from the $50 billion in educational stabilization funds.

Cardin, who is Jewish, said that was a no-brainer.

“This is a disaster, and when you have a disaster — if a flood comes though the community and a parochial school is damaged by that flood — they should be able to get help,” he said. “We’re all in this together.”

One area that Jewish groups are not thrilled about is health care: Organizations that rely on Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, are not eligible for the loans. Services for the elderly in particular rely on the program.

What’s at stake

The full wreckage of the coronavirus on how we live remains to be seen, an unsettling apprehension that seeded my conversations with a dozen Jewish officials and politicians, a JFNA webinar on the bill and an array of documents.

There are so many services that so many Jewish Americans have come to take for granted, fulfilling the needs of the community from infancy to old age, from preschools to kosher Meals on Wheels, with gyms, culture and education in between. About 150 Jewish community centers across the country employ 38,000 people and reach 1.5 million clients, 1 million Jews among them.

Doron Krakow, the CEO of the JCC Association of North America, told me that JCCs were ill-equipped to survive a long hiatus in a business that relies 80 percent on service fees like tuitions and membership. My colleague Ben Sales writes about the impact of the closure of just one JCC in the Philadelphia area.

“There isn’t a lot of cash in reserve because JCCs are break-even businesses. No one imagined revenue would dry up overnight,” Krakow said. “All of our JCCs irrespective of how robust they were before the crisis will be affected.”

What’s definitely going to change

Changes post-pandemic in early childhood education were inevitable, Krakow said. Teachers — notoriously underpaid in any case — are drifting away from the work they love to higher-salaried professions during the social distancing break, and families post-pandemic will be less able to pay the tuitions.

“We will have to revisit the entire business model in early childhood education,” Krakow said.

Smaller Jewish day schools likely will not survive the pandemic, according to an internal Jewish Federations document obtained by Sales.

“It is worth noting that there are a significant number of small day schools that have been teetering before this crisis and will likely fail during the current situation,” it said.

Adam Lehman, the Hillel International CEO, said his organization was bracing for a mental health crisis among university students following the pandemic. Students cooped up in isolation already were hard hit, he said.

“This generation of students was already incredibly challenged by issues of mental health and wellness, and the crisis has already pushed many students into issues of anxiety and depression,” Lehman said. “We’re finding pastoral needs are incredibly high among students and families.”

The big existential question

Most nonprofits, Jewish or not, self-insure for unemployment insurance rather than pay into state funds, as other businesses do. With mass layoffs, making those payouts may be hard or even impossible for nonprofits. Details must still be worked out with the states, but the stimulus promises up to 50 percent funding for paying out the claims through the end of the year.

The small business loans and the unemployment insurance relief are mutually exclusive, Krakow said — you can’t apply for both. And the loan fix from the Small Business Administration is only good through June 30. The Trump administration and Congress may extend the relief, but there is much uncertainty about how long the pandemic will last and what that means for the economy.

So Jewish nonprofits must make a tough choice: Which type of aid to apply for?

Will the nonprofits see the light of day after eight weeks? If not, will the government continue payroll protection? Or should employers guarantee their laid-off employees a degree of income through the end of the year?

“Those are local judgments that are being made in real time,” Krakow said.

In some cities, local philanthropists are stepping up to encourage their JCCs to keep open. In others, the wealthy are not as generous. And some JCCs are in communities too small to rely on emergency assistance from major philanthropists.

Another challenge for nonprofits is that the Small Business Administration defines a small business as having 500 employees or fewer. JCCs and summer camps can easily exceed that amount because of seasonal employees. The agency’s guidelines suggest a degree of flexibility; in fact, flexibility suffuses a lot of thinking behind the stimulus. The best practice is to apply first and worry about details later.

“We have to have certain standards for these programs, but the SBA has certain authorities and has discretion,” Cardin told me.

Many nonprofits may not be used to applying for government loans, and some eligible institutions, particularly smaller synagogues, may not even have formal nonprofit status. The loans will be available through some lending institutions but not others (Jewish Federations is keeping a running list of SBA-approved lenders).

Formally, the policy is first-come, first-serve. But practically, officials caution, a bank’s reflex might be to favor an existing client over a new one.

“Your best pathway to this loan is with the bank that values you as a customer,” Jewish Federations told constituent groups.

Nathan Diament, the Washington director of the Orthodox Union, said his group is playing matchmaker for some of its constituents.

“In the case there is a synagogue or a school that does not have a bank that they work with, we’re trying to help find banks that are available in the community,” he said.

Abba Cohen, Aguda’s Washington director, said the organization’s offices have been flooded with requests for information. “Our offices around the country have become command centers for the community,” he said.

In Other News

Ayatollah dreams of genies: Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, thinks that Jinn — the genies of Islamic lore — are in cahoots with the CIA and devastating his country with the coronavirus. We explain why this is less a sitcom premise and more the potential for further chaos.

Mad at Massie: The Republican Jewish Coalition’s political action committee rarely targets Republicans, but for Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, they’re making an exception and endorsing his primary opponent, Todd McMurtry. The final straw: Massie’s insistence that the House convene an in-person majority to vote on the coronavirus stimulus after most of the lawmakers had gone home — bringing together Democrats and Republicans in a rare moment of shared fury. Massie already was on the RJC’s you-know-what list for opposing the Never Again Holocaust Education Act. He’s a libertarian who ascribes his convention bucking to principle.

Sweating it out: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal trainer, whom we profiled last year, says she’s hitting the Supreme Court gym twice a week during the pandemic. Ginsburg just turned 87.

Hawaii Uh-Oh: Gov. David Ige, a Democrat, is being criticized in the state for a too-little, too-late reaction to the pandemic. But his Jewish lieutenant governor, Josh Green, also a Democrat and an ER physician, is getting high marks for his early warnings that Hawaii should be prepared. Now, reports the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the governor and his lieutenant are broygez, an island term meaning “on the outs.”

Worth A Look

Sheldon Adelson is paying his employees — including tips — for two months during the pandemic. In a New York Post op-ed, the Jewish billionaire businessman exhorts other business owners to do the same, citing memories of his father stuffing money in the family pushke, even when they were facing hard times. What he does not mention is that all his businesses have been hard hit by the coronavirus: Adelson is the biggest casino owner in Macau, a Chinese city across from Hong Kong. He has donated hundreds of thousands of masks to residents there.

Tweet So Sweet

In eight words, Randy Rainbow, the Jewish musical comedy satirist, encapsulates the agonizing paradox of self-isolation in what just weeks ago was the city of close encounters.

Ben Chouake is an emergency physician with a side gig: He leads NORPAC, a leading pro-Israel political action committee.

I check in occasionally with Chouake to see how the New Jersey-based PAC is doing, what’s on its agenda. It’s a right-leaning pro-Israel group, taking its cues from AIPAC and groups to that lobby’s right. NORPAC can directly deliver only a legal maximum of $10,000 per candidate, but it has outsize influence because its endorsees are a guide for donors in the mainstream pro-Israel community.

This week, when I asked about NORPAC, Chouake wanted to talk about the coronavirus pandemic. It was a pivot typical of calls I made to other lobbyists.

The urgency that routinely attaches to political messaging in the pro-Israel sector had receded and the overwhelming tone was of deference to a legislative system that is grappling with a historic crisis. Lobbyists are holding back — in part due to the fact that much of what they do involves face-to-face meeting.

“The double challenge is no one is pressing the flesh, you don’t want to meet in groups,” Chouake said, adding that NORPAC had canceled 11 meet-and-greets due to the pandemic. “And the stock market went from 29,000 to 18,000, and a lot of people are out of work.”

NORPAC’s salons throughout the tri-state region of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut attract some of the pro-Israel realm’s most dedicated givers and allows them to schmooze with candidates, to pin them down on their views and to write checks. Recent honorees include Mikie Sherrill, the moderate New Jersey Democrat who flipped a Republican district in 2018, and Max Rose, the Jewish Staten Island Democrat who did the same, along with GOP Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

Chouake is unfailingly charming and cheery, and loves to talk about Israel, legislation and congressional races. Now the charm was laced with a grimness. I had noticed that NORPAC had canceled its annual Washington lobbying day, even though it was scheduled for May 19. Chouake was not optimistic that systems would be back to normal in two months, and his explanation stemmed more from his experience as a physician rather than as a lobbyist.

“What eventually happens is hospitals get inundated in taking care of people on respirators,” he said.

AIPAC and J Street chill out

AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman told me that deference must be paid first to the overriding crisis of the coronavirus.

“All of our actions go forward with that in mind,” he said.

Dylan Williams, J Street’s vice president for governmental affairs, said the liberal Jewish Middle East lobby also was holding back.

“Right now our chief rule is lawmakers work to protect and provide for their constituents, and that comes first,” he said.

AIPAC did send out an action alert this week urging lawmakers to sign a letter to the Trump administration asking it to press the U.N. Security Council to reauthorize its embargo on Iran. But Wittmann pointed out that the issue is time-sensitive — the embargo lapses in October.

“We recognize our issues continue to be important as evidenced by Iranian-backed militia attacks [on U.S. targets in Iraq] this year,” Wittmann said. “At the same time, we have to seek a balance in how we approach members of Congress right now.”

A top Democratic official in the U.S. House of Representatives told me that he had noticed the broader pullback by AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups.

“This is the time of year that they usually try to finalize the items of policy conference,” the Democratic official said, referring to the annual AIPAC conference that was held this year at the beginning of March. “And not a single person has reached out to push and pull, which I appreciate. The only AIPAC person who called reached out just to see how I was doing, which I thought was really thoughtful.”

This official had seen the action alert on the Iran arms embargo, which he thought was appropriate because of the time-sensitivity, but said foreign policy simply was not on the horizon.

“We are 99 percent coronavirus right now and it is absolutely impossible to have a conversation about foreign policy when you’re literally trying to save people’s cars, houses, families, and I think these groups appreciate that,” he said.

Williams, the J Street lobbyist, said his group has pivoted to assisting congressional offices in constituent services.

“There are a number of offices that have constituents with kids overseas, on study abroad, that are working to try and get those folks home,” he said. “Sometimes offices are looking for help to connect to the right desk officer at State or at an embassy, and we’re happy to be helpful. We want to be a resource, not a nudge.”

The congressional official recalled with amazement how lobbyists not affiliated with Jewish groups continued to press for issues in the first days of the retreat by congressional staffers to their home offices two weeks ago.

“We’re setting up telework, computers, making sure staff is safe and making sure districts get what they need,” the official said. “Now is not the time to talk about data privacy.”

Lobbying online

The “meet the expert” events that lobbies have in congressional meeting rooms on the Hill are geared to educate congressional staffers and exchange contact information. For AIPAC and J Street, those have moved online. AIPAC last week launched teleconference briefings with a call on the current constitutional crisis afflicting efforts in Israel to set up a government.

Chouake said he was looking into getting the meet-and-greets online.

“We have to find a way to get them back, even if it’s on Zoom,” he said.

Still, one method of influence continues unabated, Chouake said.

“We have a very tried-and-true committed group of people who realize it’s important, so they write the checks,” he said.

In Other News

Keeping up with Brenda Jones: I wrote last year about how pro-Israel political types in Detroit were considering backing a primary challenger to Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-American freshman congresswoman who rejects Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and backs the boycott Israel movement. The likeliest candidate was Brenda Jones, a city councilor who was a congresswoman for five weeks following a special election in 2018 before narrowly losing to Tlaib in the primary for the general. The district is majority African-American and there was talk that backing a black candidate was the best way to make Tlaib a one-termer. Jones announced this week, saying a goal was “uniting the district” — perhaps an allusion to the Tlaib controversies. But Aiden Pink at the Forward has uncovered statements by Jones supportive of Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam movement.

Two trillion little things: Jewish groups are scouring the $2 trillion stimulus passed late Wednesday by the Senate for money that could help them survive the pandemic, and also for assistance to the neediest.

Non-Zionist upset at Zionist Congress: The World Zionist Congress elections swung the U.S. contingent to the parliament of the Jewish people to the right, with Orthodox parties doubling their representation and diminishing the influence of non-Orthodox and progressive lists. What happened? A haredi Orthodox list, Eretz Hakodesh, ran for the first time, in part to stem the influence of the non-Orthodox. Its voters overcame reluctance in their community to sign onto the Jerusalem Program, which makes Zionism central to Judaism — a hard pill to swallow in a community that has assimilated culturally and politically into Israel, but still rejects religious Zionism, as Jeremy Sharon reports at The Jerusalem Post.

Hate in a time of coronavirus: A white supremacist in Missouri who planned to attack a hospital as a means of weaponizing the response to the coronavirus was killed this week in a shootout with the FBI. Yahoo News last week reported other ways (saliva and a spray bottle) that white supremacists have discussed weaponizing the virus. The Anti-Defamation League lists the ways in which the spread of the virus has spurred racist and anti-Semitic tropes.

Worth A Look

Bernie Sanders was on his way to becoming the first Jewish president. And then he wasn’t. At The New York Times, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin break down the breakdown of the Sanders campaign. The fault, they suggest, lies not in the stars but ultimately with a candidate who was committed to his democratic socialist principles above compromise.

Tweet So Sweet

A group of quarantined Israelis gets into it on Twitter about which was Lin-Manuel Miranda’s best score — “Hamilton,” “In The Heights” or “Moana” — and composed himself interrupts with “Hey, hey, hey, what’s going on here?” In Hebrew. Check out the truly joyous replies.

The Tell is a weekly roundup of the latest Jewish political news from Ron Kampeas, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Washington bureau chief. Connect with him on Twitter at @kampeas or suggest a story to him by emailing thetell@jta.org. Sign up here to receive The Tell in your inbox on Thursday evenings.

Politics goes on in a time of fear and quarantine, and each shapes the other.

In my world, the coronavirus outbreak has led to at least three interesting developments over the past couple of weeks:

1. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is drawing sharp criticism from political foes for what they say is his using the pandemic to preserve his hold on power, resorting to means that are undercutting his nation’s democratic institutions.

2. The crisis has accelerated what already was likely a sure thing: Bernie Sanders’ exit from the Democratic presidential stakes.

3. It also has upended expectations of how the presidential election will play out, with the focus shifting from corruption to competence, as well as the debate over President Donald Trump’s use of the phrase “Chinese virus.” His critics claim such rhetoric stigmatizes Asian Americans.

Here’s a deeper dive into those developments.

Israeli democracy takes a hit

Netanyahu has been given high marks for the breadth of his handling of the coronavirus in Israel. Shuttering the country to outside visitors early in the crisis and setting up clear quarantine protocols may stem its spread.

But now, his critics say, Netanyahu is leveraging the goodwill he has accrued in a three-pronged attack on Israel’s democratic institutions — one that veteran journalist Noga Tarnopolsky described in the Daily Beast as “a power grab unprecedented in Israeli history.”

Amir Ohana, Netanyahu’s justice minister, put the courts in a state of emergency mode, as my colleague Marcy Oster has reported. The immediate effect is a two-month postponement of what was to have been the March 17 start date of the prime minister’s corruption trial.

Yuli Edelstein, Netanyahu’s Likud colleague and the Knesset speaker, suspended convening the new parliament until Monday, saying that he wants to give the parties time to put together an emergency national unity government to tackle the virus. Edelstein said it would be unhealthy to pack so many people into the chamber. His move prevents the 61 Knesset members who favor Netanyahu’s rival Benny Gantz as prime minister from convening. (Gantz has a long way to go, but since the March election he is closer to forming a coalition, thanks to the support of the mostly Arab parties, than he had been in the wake of balloting in April and September.)

Netanyahu’s government has also authorized police to track the cellphones of those infected with the coronavirus without needing warrants. It’s a means of containing the spread, but it also sets a Big Brother-like precedent that has spooked civil libertarians.

Netanyahu casts the measures as temporary and aimed at containing the pandemic, but together they have spurred alarm in some circles. Hundreds of protesters on Thursday attached black flags to their cars and attempted to enter the city to protest the measures.

“For now – and the clock is ticking – Israeli democracy has been shut down,” Anshel Pfeffer, Netanyahu’s definitive biographer, said in Haaretz.

The criticism isn’t only coming from the left. President Reuven Rivlin, in an extraordinary move, called Edelstein and urged him to open the parliament — and, also extraordinarily, distributed his remarks to the media. “A Knesset that is out of action harms the ability of the State of Israel to function well and responsibly in an emergency,” Rivlin said. “We must not let this crisis, as serious as it is, to harm our democratic system.”

Will COVID-19 drive out Bernie?

Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination likely will not survive the drubbing it took this week in the Florida, Arizona and Illinois primaries. Joe Biden’s delegate lead went from big to enormous.

Still, under non-pandemic circumstances, Sanders may have stayed in — as he did in 2016 — to leverage his withdrawal in an effort to influence party policy. This cycle, though, The Washington Post reports, Sanders may be ready to pull out sooner rather than later so he can help his rival Biden address the legislative demands of the pandemic.

In a profane and charged exchange Wednesday with a CNN reporter, Sanders made clear that the coronavirus and the health care crisis it has triggered, and not his presidential prospects, are foremost in his thinking.

Accusations of bigotry

Trump’s impeachment trial feels like years ago. Now the president’s initial flailing response to the coronavirus has become the thrust of Democratic attacks as the election rhetoric shifts focus.

On Wednesday, Biden on Twitter quoted a poll showing a majority of Americans do not trust Trump’s handling of the pandemic and said: “I give you my word as a Biden: When I’m president, I will lead with science, listen to the experts and heed their advice, and always tell you the truth.”

Democrats also are targeting Republicans and Trump for calling the pandemic the “Chinese virus,” which Asian Americans say stigmatizes them.

“Stop the xenophobic fear-mongering,” Biden told Trump on Twitter.

Jewish groups are hitting this message home. Trump “must condemn this virulent racism coming from his White House, and he has to stop repeatedly using racist terms himself when referring to coronavirus,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said on Twitter. An American Jewish Committee assistant director outlined in a JTA op-ed how many Jewish organizations have expressed solidarity with the Asian community.

The White House and Trump’s campaign have pushed back, casting Biden as a tool of the Chinese regime. Biden is “siding with the Chinese and attacking the presidential candidate China fears most: Donald Trump,” Trump’s campaign said in a release Wednesday.

Trump defenders say the president’s language is aimed at the Chinese government, not Asian Americans. Some pro-Trump pundits have pointed out that earlier on in the crisis, an array of media outlets used similar language to describe the coronavirus.

In Other News

When “present” means “gone”: Yehiel Kalish, the only rabbi to serve in Illinois’s state legislature, lost a Democratic primary election on Tuesday, mainly because of his “present” vote on a key abortion rights bill that he said went against his Orthodox Jewish values.

Abortion trumps Israel: Jewish Insider reports on how Jewish Republicans slammed pro-Israel Democrats for not rallying to defend Dan Lipinski, a conservative Democrat whose Israel voting aligned with AIPAC and who lost his primary to his J Street-backed challenger Marie Newman. Mark Mellman, who runs the centrist Democratic Majority for Israel, told JI that Lipinski’s domestic policies, opposing abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, were a bridge too far to merit support. “Like most Democrats, we do not believe the incumbent represents the values of the Democratic Party,” Mellman said.

Pushing against earth movers: More than 60 House Democrats have signed a letter to the Trump administration pressing it to assess whether Israel is using U.S. equipment to demolish the homes of Palestinians.

The Jewish case for … My colleague Laura Adkins rounded up three op-eds recommending the Jewish case for Trump, Biden and Sanders.

Worth A Look

Anna Russell at the New Yorker speaks to hate crime trackers, including the ADL’s Oren Segal, about the rise in attacks related to the pandemic.

Tweet So Sweet

At a time of social distancing, a photo by Jewish Insider’s Jacob Kornbluh captures in a Williamsburg minyan the longing for community.

Bernie Sanders lost big for the second set of Democratic primaries in a row, including in Michigan, where his 2016 win made him a viable candidate. At a news conference Wednesday, he all but conceded the presidential nomination contest to Joe Biden.

So is it bye-bye Bernie? Probably sooner rather than later. But the Vermont senator’s ideas, including his sharp criticisms of decades of U.S. Israel policy, are not about to leave the Democratic arena.

“While our campaign has won the ideological debate, we are losing the debate over electability,” Sanders said at the news conference. He said he keeps hearing from folks who like his ideas but will vote for Biden because they believe he’s the best bet to beat Trump. (We heard the same when we spoke to Jewish Democratic Michiganders on the eve of the primary.)

“Needless to say, I strongly disagree with that assertion,” Sanders said. “But that is what millions of Democrats and Independents today believe.”

“My friend Joe”

Sanders seems more ready to work with Biden than he was with Hillary Clinton in 2016. On Wednesday night, he told Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” that he thought the former vice president could defeat Trump — a case he didn’t make for Clinton until late in the summer of that election.

If Sanders is staying in it for now, it’s to make the case to “my friend Joe Biden” for his ideas, starting on Sunday when the two candidates meet in Washington, D.C., for a debate that was moved from Phoenix. At the news conference, the self-described democratic socialist outlined nine areas in which he would nudge the veteran centrist, including universal health care, criminal justice reform and the income gap.

All were domestic issues, but that doesn’t mean foreign policy will be ignored in the coming months.

Keeping Israel on the agenda: Platform battle, the sequel

That was clear on Wednesday when IfNotNow, the Jewish anti-occupation group, coordinated the release of its endorsement of the Vermont senator with the Sanders campaign.

“Peace means security not only for every Israeli, but also for every Palestinian,” Sanders said in a tweet pitching IfNotNow’s four-minute video, which was principally about Sanders’ support for the two-state solution, the end of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the end of the blockade of the Gaza Strip. “I’m proud to have the support of @IfNotNowOrg.”

That means we can likely expect a repeat of the 2016 battle over the Democratic Party’s official platform, when Sanders named three prominent Israel critics to the platform committee who endeavored to get into the platform language that explicitly criticized Israel’s occupation. They failed, but the wounds from the charged exchanges on the committee lasted: Cornel West, one of the people Sanders named to the committee, was so disgusted with the process that he said he could not vote for Clinton.

Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina legislator who is now a CNN commentator and is close to the centrist pro-Israel community, tried last week to reassure activists at the AIPAC policy conference that the platform would remain the same.

“I’m back on the platform committee again this year, and I anticipate a very pro-Israel platform again, I have nothing that shows me otherwise,” he said.

“We will take great solace in the fact that — and look for your leadership on that committee,” said AIPAC’s political director, Rob Bassin.

Their optimism might not be well-founded: In addition to the IfNotNow video, there are other signals that the issue is not going away. Opponents of Israel’s West Bank policies sense greater urgency this election cycle than in 2016, in part because the Trump administration, in its just-released “peace vision,” gave Israel a green light to annex parts of the West Bank.

This cycle, J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group that remained on the sidelines last time, has signed onto changing the platform to include calls to end the occupation, and it has aggressively recruited the like-minded. Its college affiliate, J Street U, has signed up multiple campus Democratic Party chapters to endorse the changes, and an array of more than 230 rabbis of all religious streams have also signed on.

Matt Duss, in 2016 a think-tanker focused almost exclusively on advancing the two-state solution and ending the occupation, argued then as a guest witness for including the anti-occupation language in the platform. This time Duss is very much on the inside as Sanders’ top foreign policy adviser, and will likely be on the platform committee.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., one of Sanders’ top congressional endorsers, told me that he expects the anti-occupation language to make the platform.

“It’s very important that the issues of Palestinian rights and human rights and the shared security of Israel and Palestine be part of a Democratic platform,” he said in an interview. “We should be opposed to new settlements and make sure that there is a recognition of halting any expansion into areas that would make peace much harder to achieve.”

Going for the Jews

Sanders, who is Jewish, has posted three videos on his Twitter feed over the last week aimed squarely at young Jewish voters.

In addition to the IfNotNow video, he posted a 4-minute video by Jews for Bernie, which includes his call to condition aid to Israel, and a 2-minute video by comedian Sarah Silverman, who begins, “Bernie is my kind of Jew, you know?”

In Other News

Trump in the time of coronavirus: President Donald Trump was going to speak to a Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas that would have packed 3,000 people into a casino ballroom as the coronavirus spreads in leaps and bounds — until at the last minute he was not. After Trump canceled his appearance, the RJC canceled the entire conference.

Berning bridges: The Sanders campaign takes on as an adviser a man who called Zionism “racist” and denounces a Sanders rally speaker who has in the past lumped ISIS and Israel together as allies.

What’s in a name: In its latest human rights report released Wednesday, the State Department calls Palestinians in Jerusalem “Arab residents” or “non-Israelis,” which appears to be of a piece with the administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But the report does not stint on some criticisms of Israel, including allegations by NGOs of torture of Palestinians. It also described as “credible” building permit discrimination against Palestinians in Jerusalem and reports of Israel denying Palestinian juveniles legal counsel.

Biden gets Giffords: Gabrielle Giffords, the Jewish Democratic congresswoman who an assailant shot in 2011 and who founded a gun control group, this week endorsed Joe Biden for president. “After I was shot, Joe was there for me,” she said in a tweet. “And he’s always been there for the gun safety movement.”

Giving Rosenwald his due: A bill authored by House Democratic Reps. Steve Cohen of Tennessee and Danny Davis of Illinois would establish a national park to honor Julius Rosenwald, the philanthropist who established schools throughout the South to remedy the afflictions of segregation. This week the Natural Resources Committee advanced the bill. “Julius Rosenwald was a visionary philanthropist whose altruism and philosophy of giving embodied the Jewish concept of tzedakah — social justice and charity,” Cohen said. “He partnered with African American communities across the South to help build schools for children with limited access to good public education.”

Worth a Look

Hannah Brown at the Jerusalem Post examines the eerie parallels between the 2013 dystopian movie “World War Z” and how Israel is handling the coronavirus in real time. She also lists contagion movies you can watch while you’re in self-quarantine, which to me is kind of like watching “Titanic” on, well, the Titanic.

Tweet so Sweet

Noah Pollak, a conservative writer, finds a Twitter-specific way to make the coming dystopia seem even more … dystopian.

Bernie Sanders was the bogeyman at the AIPAC conference earlier this week for skipping the event, which he called a platform for bigotry. Multiple speakers called out Sanders by name and referred to him as the leader in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“[Y]ou have Bernie Sanders, who calls people who support this movement bigots and is critical!” GOP strategist Alice Stewart said.

And this from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of those who cited Sanders’ frontrunner status: “Not only did Senator Sanders skip the conference, he bashed it publicly. He said you all provide a platform for bigotry. And he called Israel’s democratically elected prime minister a ‘reactionary racist.’”

What a difference a day and a half makes.

By Tuesday night, after the AIPAC activists had headed home, Sanders was no longer the frontrunner. That was Joe Biden with a sweep of 10 of the 14 states that went to the polls on Super Tuesday.

With the moderate former VP now heading the pack, the anxiety of the AIPAC crowd (the center-right, firmly pro-Israel demographic) all goes away, right? Not quite. Despite GOP eagerness to make Sanders the face of the Democratic Party’s Israel policy, Republicans at the conference also broke out anti-Biden talking points.

“Joe Biden doesn’t get a pass either,” Stewart quickly added after having predicted a Trump-Sanders matchup. “He doesn’t have a tremendous record when it comes to this issue.”

“I know the former vice president addressed you by video, though not in person,” chided McConnell, forgetting or ignoring that all but one of the 2012 Republican candidates delivered their addresses by video for the same reason as Biden: They were campaigning on Super Tuesday.

So what does the Jewish campaign look like if Biden is the nominee?

The Obama factor

In AIPAC land, Obama is not popular. (Although, notably, AIPAC CEO Howard Kohr in his opening speech counted Obama among the presidents who “understood that America’s commitment to Israel’s safety must be consistent. It must be unequivocal. And it must be dependable.”)

Count on the Republican Jewish campaign to hitch Biden to Obama’s Israel record, particularly tensions over the Iran deal and Obama’s decision in the last days of his administration not to stop a U.N. Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements.

The likelihood, however, is that invoking Obama’s Israel record won’t resonate with most Jewish Democrats or hurt Biden much within the party: Obama remained overwhelmingly popular with Jewish voters, the vast majority of whom function outside the AIPAC bubble.

In addition, within the AIPAC world, Biden is seen as the most Israel-friendly member of Obama’s administration. He was Israel’s go-to assuager of frayed nerves whenever things got tense between Jerusalem and Washington, which happened frequently during that tenure.

Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador, in a scathing critique of the Obama administration, once credited Biden for telling him “we must have no daylight between us.”

“This reaffirmation of our alliance’s central pillar heartened me,” Oren wrote.

Uncle Joe at AIPAC: Tough love and applause

It’s a balance Biden handily navigated in his video speech to AIPAC, which drew repeated applause.

“Palestinians need to eradicate incitement on the West Bank — eradicate it. They need to end the rocket attacks from Gaza — stop it,” he said. “They need to accept once and for all the reality and the right of a secure democratic and Jewish state of Israel in the Middle East.

“And Israel I think has to stop the threats of annexation and settlement activity like the recent announcement to build thousands of settlements in E1,” he continued, referring to a patch of land between Jerusalem’s eastern border and the settlement of Maale Adumim that the Palestinians say is critical to contiguity in any future state. “That’s going to choke off any hope for peace, and to be frank those moves are taking Israel further from its democratic values.”

There were no boos, and Biden’s reference to the two-state outcome was applauded. Biden had effectively undercut Sanders’ implied argument that a critique of Israeli policies would not play at AIPAC.

Biden’s mishpocha

Those endless references to Donald Trump’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner meant to establish the president’s Jewish cred? Biden multiplies it by three: All of his adult children have married Jews. He has boasted about the piles of yarmulkes he possesses.

“I’m probably one of the few Christian members of the Congress who can say the motzi,” he said in 2011 at Detroit’s Yeshiva Beth Yehuda anniversary dinner. “I’ve attended more Jewish dinners than some of you have. I’ve raised more money from AIPAC than some of you have. I have spent more money raising money for the Federation than some of you have. You think I’m kidding, don’t you. I’m not.”

Biden also has longstanding ties with the pro-Israel community. Michael Adler, who is involved with an array of Jewish groups, was the finance chairman of his 2008 presidential campaign.

In Other News

Absent enemies: President Donald Trump joined Sanders in dominating the proceedings at this year’s AIPAC conference, despite their absences. The lobby is lurching between a Democratic left that doesn’t want it and a Republican right that no longer needs it.

Save those selfies: The tireless Elizabeth Warren’s campaign petered out, leaving many Jewish progressives wondering which candidate to back. It won’t be Mike Bloomberg: The Jewish former mayor of New York packed it in a day earlier.

Cell-block sellout: Alan Gross slammed Sanders for praising the regime that imprisoned him — while he was visiting Gross in jail.

Why I vote: Readers tell us about their Jewish political evolutions.

Worth a Look

At Vital Interests, Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies examines the peace deal between the Trump administration and the Taliban, and says it’s worse than no deal at all.

“It was a bilateral withdrawal agreement — a desperate attempt to wash America’s hands of Afghanistan before the 2020 presidential election,” Joscelyn says.

Tweet so Sweet

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, delivers humorous coronavirus instructions to her constituents.