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Good Monday morning.

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we preview this week’s Capitol Hill hearing on campus antisemitism, and talk to experts about the possibility of a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement. We interview Rep. Greg Landsman about the recent U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, and report on Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin’s outreach to Jewish groups following his comments earlier in the week regarding Zohran Mamdani’s defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Amb. Charles Kushner, Sen. Joni Ernst and Elmo.

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School may be out of session for the summer, but officials from Georgetown University, the University of California, Berkeley and the City University of New York will be in the hot seat this week when they testify on Tuesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee.

This is not the first time that university officials have appeared in front of Congress to account for the situations on their campuses, but this week’s hearing aims to focus on more than just the anti-Israel activism that has permeated many campuses since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza to focus on root issues, including foreign funding in higher education as well as faculty anti-Israel organizing efforts.

With that as the backdrop, Georgetown’s interim president, Robert Groves, is likely to face hard-hitting questioning about the school’s donations from authoritarian regimes. 

Nearly a decade ago, Georgetown took a $10 million donation from an organization connected to Beijing’s ruling Chinese Communist Party — more specifically, according to The Washington Post, to “the specific CCP organizations that manage overseas influence operations” — to establish the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues.

But that $10 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money Qatar is alleged to have sent to Georgetown. According to a study by the right-wing NGO ISGAP, Qatar has donated more than $1 billion dollars to the Jesuit school in recent decades. In addition, Qatar has long had a partnership with Georgetown that includes an outpost of the school in Doha. Earlier this year, the school extended its contract with Doha for another decade.

There’s a saying that has floated around many a conference, Jewish organizational board meeting and Shabbat dinner table in recent years: Jews endow buildings, their enemies endow what happens inside of them. Tomorrow’s hearing will see just how deeply those efforts have permeated.

Read the rest of 'What You Should Know' here.

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One of the original drivers of the 2020 Abraham Accords was Israel’s vocal, public stance against Iran’s nuclear program and regional aggression. That stance also brought Israel and Saudi Arabia closer, a relationship that developed to the point that in the summer of 2023, it seemed like normalization was just around the corner. By extension, it might make sense for the Abraham Accords and a Saudi-Israel rapprochement to be back in the headlines after Israel took the ultimate stand against Iran’s nuclear program last month, bombing it with assistance from the U.S. Yet there has been almost no serious talk about Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords in recent weeks, experts told Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov.

Saudi two-step: Riyadh has also been publicly signaling that its relationship with Tehran is still on track since China brokered a deal between the two countries in 2023. Saudi Arabia, like other Gulf States, spoke out last month against the Israeli and American airstrikes on Iran. Last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah. “There’s all this public condemnation of the attacks on Iran,” Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, told JI, “but when the U.S. pulled its forces from the Air Force base in Qatar [due to Iran’s retaliation], they moved their planes to a Saudi base. So they condemned the U.S. for attacking Iran, but they also gave the U.S. protection.”

Read the full story here.

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Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH) has stood apart in recent weeks as one of a small number of congressional Democrats who’ve been supportive of the Trump administration’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. Landsman told JI he thinks that his Democratic colleagues’ responses to the strikes are motivated by the current political environment, fears about a broader war and concerns about the future of diplomatic talks and the safety of people in the region.

Looking ahead: Landsman argued in an interview with JI last week and in a recent op-ed that the Israeli and American show of force, alongside the undermining of Iran’s proxies across the region, could be the key to weakening the Iranian regime to a point where it will agree to a fundamental change of course going forward, unlocking opportunities for regional peace and prosperity. “[The Middle East] should be Europe, [if not] for Iran,” he said. “It hasn’t been able to break out that way because Iran has been the primary obstacle.”

Read the full story here.

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Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, spent Friday calling Jewish leaders, seeking to reassure them that he does not condone the phrase “globalize the intifada,” two sources with knowledge of the meetings told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch. Among the leaders he called were senior officials at the Anti-Defamation League and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 

Harmful rhetoric: Earlier in the week, a “PBS NewsHour” clip of Martin discussing New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani went viral. In the Friday phone calls, two sources confirmed, Martin faced criticism from Jewish leaders over Martin not specifically addressing the “globalize the intifada” language during his PBS interview. But a DNC senior advisor told JI that Martin made clear he stood with them against the harmful rhetoric. “By the end of it there was an understanding that Ken does understand and is aligned with the community and that frankly people want full-throated leadership,” the advisor said. “This language isn't about Democrats. This is just not acceptable, period, and as a party it's not acceptable.”

Read the full story here.

Bonus: Jewish Insider’s Emily Jacobs talks to Jewish Democrats and organizations that represent them about Martin’s handling of the Wednesday “PBS NewsHour” interview and fallout from it.

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The Senate Armed Services Committee’s draft of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, passed out of committee this week, includes provisions aimed at furthering coordinated air and missile defense efforts in the Middle East, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Pushing ahead: The amendment, led by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), a co-chair of the Abraham Accords Caucus, instructs the Defense Department to submit to Congress a new report on implementing integrated air and missile defense infrastructure in the Middle East, including an assessment of threats; a summary of U.S. priorities and capabilities; and lessons learned from the Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Israel and the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

Read the full story here.

Bonus: The House Armed Services Committee released its first draft of the 2026 NDAA on Friday. The bill would create an emerging technology cooperation program with Israel, extend the U.S. weapons stockpile in Israel and cooperative counter-tunneling programs through 2028, and expand counter-drone and missile cooperative programs and authorize increased funding. It would also expand U.S. support for the Lebanese Armed Forces and require a Pentagon briefing on Iran’s use of Western technologies in its drones.

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The American Jewish Committee called for a “swift political response” following the placement of plaques at the Jedwabne memorial site in Poland that falsely accuse Jews of being responsible for killing Poles during the pogrom that occurred there 84 years ago last week, Jewish Insider’s Haley Cohen reports. 

Background: At least 340 Jews were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in the massacre at Jedwabne on July 10, 1941. Marking the anniversary of the attack last Thursday, right-wing activist Wojciech Sumliński and his supporters illegally placed plaques in English and Polish several yards from the memorial, offering a revisionist account of what happened at the site. One of the plaques reads, “After the Soviets took over eastern Poland, Jews assumed administrative roles and, knowing the local realities, denounced Polish patriots who were then deported and murdered by the Soviets. Only the German attack on the Soviet Union halted these repressions. Then the Germans began killing Jews just as they had previously killed Poles by the millions.”

Read the full story here.

COURTESY/SHAI KORMAN

As summer heats up, Jewish adults looking for an escape from the fraught state of world Jewry may find themselves reflecting on a seemingly simpler time — getting competitive over color war or gaga ball and singing Debbie Friedman songs around a campfire at Jewish sleepaway camp. That sense of nostalgia for one's Jewish summer camp years is doled out liberally in "The Floaters," a new film that centers on the fictional Camp Daveed and a group of outsider teens called “floaters,” Jewish Insider’s Haley Cohen reports. 

Art imitating life: “We try to push the movie beyond lox and bagels,” co-producer Shai Korman told JI, noting that he and his co-producers — his two sisters — specifically aimed to “put on-screen Jewish women that exemplified the Jewish women that raised us, that were leaders and mentors.” Camp Daveed is run by women, from camp director Mara to the camp’s rabbi, Rabbi Rachel. Several iconic films, such as “Wet Hot American Summer” and “Meatballs,” were also inspired by Jewish camps. But in “The Floaters,” “we talk about the rules of kashrut,” Korman said. “You see Orthodox and secular kids all together, reflecting the world we grew up in.”

Read the full interview here.

R&D Nation: In the Financial Times, Ruchir Sharma observes Israel’s rise as a regional economic superpower despite nearly two years of war. “Perhaps the most telling sign of its dynamism is that Israel now spends more than 6 per cent of GDP on research and development — more than any other nation and over double the global average. An unusually high share — about half — of that R&D funding comes from foreign multinationals, many involved in defence-related industries. … To many observers, the geopolitical situation in the Middle East still seems precarious. But the market’s optimistic take on Israel’s tech-driven economy is now showing up in economists’ forecasts, which are projecting growth at nearly 4 per cent in coming years. That’s relatively strong for a developed nation. It validates the market view that Israel is cementing its status as the region’s dominant economic force.” [FT]

FIDF Scandal Fallout: eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross looks at how recent concerns over alleged mismanagement and financial impropriety at Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces has “provided ample ammunition” to observers critical of legacy Jewish organizations. “Though always present in communal discourse, the tear-it-all-down-and-start-again voices have gained strength since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks and the subsequent rise in global antisemitism, and not without cause. … Legacy institutions, with their galas and boards and committees and well-paid executives, are an easy target. These established organizations have often failed to defend their size and bureaucracy, or even acknowledge that alongside the stability and internal checks that they provide, those things do make them slower to react and pivot in an emergency.” [eJP] 

The World to Come: In his “Jerusalem Journal” Substack, Avi Mayer considers the possibility of a post-Zionist America. “Critiques of Israeli policy, no matter how strident or widespread, do not automatically lead to the wholesale rejection of Israel or the negation of Jewish self-determination. But if current trends continue, and if voting patterns start to reflect the shifting views of the electorate, we may find ourselves in uncharted territory. The ramifications of a changed America could be wide-ranging, deeply impacting both American Jewish life and Israeli national security. An America that is intolerant of a core element of contemporary Jewish identity would be a place in which American Jews would feel — and be made to feel — increasingly uncomfortable. From the Soviet Union to the Middle East to western Europe, hostility to Zionism on the part of national leaders and elites has always precipitated societal antisemitism, forcing Jews to confront painful dilemmas.” [JerusalemJournal]

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