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In today’s Daily Kickoff, we report on the aftermath of yesterday’s deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia, and look at U.S. lawmakers’ responses to the shooting, in which 15 people were killed. We cover the House Education Committee’s new investigation into antisemitism at the American Psychological Association, and spotlight the Jewish military chaplains serving at U.S. bases across Europe. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Rep. Brian Mast, Gov. JB Pritzker and Narges Mohammadi.

Today’s Daily Kickoff was curated by Jewish Insider Executive Editor Melissa Weiss and Israel editor Tamara Zieve with an assist from Marc Rod. Have a tip? Email us here.

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For the Jews of Sydney, Australia, the horror that unfolded on the popular Bondi Beach during a Hanukkah celebration was a shock, but not a surprise.

Nor was it a surprise for much of the global Jewish community, which, while always on alert and monitoring threats, scales up its efforts around holidays — a task even more critical in the wake of antisemitic terror attacks earlier this year on Passover and Yom Kippur. 

But the deadly attack in Sydney seemed — somehow — to have caught Australian officials by surprise, despite a warning from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu four months ago over the potential for attacks against the Australian Jewish community, as well as a spate of attacks targeting Jewish institutions, some of which were orchestrated by Iran.

An Israeli tourist who was at Bondi during the attack who spoke to JI on Sunday said that he sensed “that [Australian authorities] don’t know how to deal with mass casualty events. … I didn’t see anything on the news for almost an hour, and when I asked locals why they weren’t calling news hotlines or reporting on news apps, they said Australia doesn’t have that. In Israel, it would be in the news three minutes later.” 

Indeed, within an hour of the onset of the attack, Israeli news networks were covering the carnage. International news outlets and networks, as well as Australian media, were slow to note that the attack had taken place at a Hanukkah celebration. Three hours after the attack, the Sydney Morning Herald’s top story was headlined “Ten Dead in Bondi Beach Shooting.” The subhead, too — “Multiple dead, two police officers among injured after shots fired at Bondi Beach” — gave no indication that the attack had taken place at a Hanukkah celebration, and that rabbis and Jewish community members had been shot.

It was a year ago this week that JI reported on concerns from Australian Jewish leaders over Canberra’s response to the antisemitism that dramatically increased following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks and ensuing war between Israel and Hamas.

A travel advisory issued by the Simon Wiesenthal Center more than a year ago specifically cited the Australian government’s response, saying that “in failing to act against the demonization of Jews, Israel and Zionism on the streets of Australian cities, the Australian government has allowed violence against Jews and Israelis to be normalized.” 

“Moreover,” the advisory continued in an ominous and prescient warning, “authorities have failed to take necessary measures to protect Jewish communities from increasingly belligerent and violent targeting by Islamists and other extremists.”

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

Daily Overtime brings you what we’re tracking at the end of the day — and what’s coming next.

At least 15 people were killed on Sunday in an attack at a Hanukkah event in Sydney, Australia, in what authorities described as a targeted terror attack on the Jewish community. The event was hosted by Chabad of Bondi, a neighborhood with a major Jewish community in Sydney. Two gunmen opened fire with long rifles from outside the gated-off event, killing at least 15, and injuring 40. Among the victims were Rabbi Eli Schlanger, the Chabad emissary to Bondi, Holocaust survivor and immigrant from the Former Soviet Union Alex Kleytman, 87, and a 10-year-old girl identified by the Australian press only as Matilda. Eyewitnesses spoke with Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov.

At the scene: Lissy Abrahams was walking with her adult daughter to a bar mitzvah party being held nearby and parked by where the Chabad party was being held. As they were walking, she and her daughter heard gunshots. “We looked at each other and said ‘run,’” Abrahams recounted to JI. Abrahams and her daughter saw a storage area, where lifeguards keep their equipment, and ran down to the beach to take shelter with beachgoers, including parents holding babies. “People were standing in the doorway and didn’t know what to do, but as Jews, we understood what was going on.”  

Read the full story here.

‘Horrified but not surprised’: U.S. officials and lawmakers across the political spectrum are condemning the terrorist attack, tying the murder of 15 attendees to the rise of antisemitism across the world, Jewish Insider’s Danielle Cohen-Kanik reports.

Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) said on Friday that there is a concerted network, on both the right and left, pushing antisemitic and anti-Israel ideology to the point that it has become “pervasive,” particularly among younger people, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

What he said: Speaking at a Hudson Institute conference on antisemitism, Mast, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he does not have a “silver bullet” to address the problem because of how widespread it has become. He recounted a speech in a class at a military academy where he saw “probably a 50/50 divide about why we have this relationship [between the U.S. and Israel], what is the benefit of this relationship?” He said that he sees a “very specific network that is in place that works together to sow antisemitism that is now, in many cases, working on the left and right across the media, to go out there and put this wedge in this relationship.” Mast described the effort as “pervasive, systematic, planned out, orchestrated” and a “very, very serious global threat across multinational organizations, media across the globe and adversaries and terrorist organizations.”

Read the full story here.

The House Education and Workforce Committee announced on Friday that it’s opening an investigation into antisemitism in the American Psychological Association, a move that follows mounting reports of antisemitism and unaddressed discrimination inside the organization, which represents more than 170,000 individuals in the psychology field and is responsible for the accreditation of psychology professionals, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

On notice: “The Committee is gravely concerned about antisemitism at the APA,” Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) wrote in a letter to APA President Debra Kawahara on Friday informing the organization of the investigation. “Jewish APA members have reported being harassed and ostracized by their colleagues within the APA and at APA events because of their Jewish identity, their efforts to speak out against antisemitism, and their Zionist beliefs. Members have also stated that their complaints to the association have gone unanswered, raising significant concerns about the APA’s commitment to addressing harassment.”

Read the full story here.

Sebastian Gorka, the National Security Council’s senior director for counterterrorism, defended the Trump administration’s executive order mandating the assessment of certain branches of the Muslim Brotherhood for designation as foreign terrorist organizations, which some critics have argued does not go far enough, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Pushback: “It’s a statement of designation to occur, not a de facto designation, because we follow the law in the Trump administration. We believe in the Constitution and the statutes agreed upon by Congress and signed by the president. We don't just do stuff because we want to,” Gorka said. Gorka said that the three branches named in the executive order are “slam dunk cases,” and that the administration plans to go after additional branches. “For the record, this is not the end, it is just the beginning, and we are assiduously working on the next tranche of designations right now,” Gorka continued.

Read the full story here.

The primary matchup between outgoing New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) was widely expected to be a bellwether race that would test the strength of pro-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party. The race pits Lander, an outspoken critic of Israel and its war in Gaza, against Goldman, a more moderate incumbent viewed as a strong defender of the Jewish state. But nearly a week after announcing his challenge, Lander, the progressive New York City comptroller, is so far tiptoeing around such differences, even as they are arguably the driving contrast in the primary, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.

Trump talk: Instead, Lander has more actively emphasized a message that is casting Goldman as ineffective in countering President Donald Trump — declaring it is “time for fighters” and “not folders” in Congress. Such comments, however, have failed to note that Goldman, who was elected to Congress in 2022, is recognized as a leading Trump antagonist, having served as the top prosecutor in the president’s first impeachment case. 

Read the full story here.

From Germany to Poland, Jewish military chaplains are counseling soldiers, leading religious services and connecting Jewish troops to their heritage — often alongside non-Jewish service members. Rabbis Aaron Gaber, Aaron Melman and Laurence Bazer spoke to Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch about their drive to be ohr l’goyim, a light unto the nations.

New Year’s in the old country: Last year, Gaber volunteered to spend the High Holidays in Poland and Lithuania. He drove between several different bases to make sure Jewish soldiers had access to religious services, food and learning opportunities tied to the holidays. “I take the idea of ohr l’goyim, or bringing light to the world, I was able to bring light to the world,” Gaber told JI. “If I met 10 Jewish soldiers through the entire two weeks, that was a lot. So it was individual work.”

Read the full story here.

Blood on the Beach: In The Wall Street Journal, law professor Peter Kurti, the director of the Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society program at the Australia’s Center for Independent Studies, looks at how Canberra’s response to antisemitism in recent years affected the Australian government’s ability to prevent terror attacks on the country’s Jewish community. “Australia faces a choice familiar to other liberal democracies: whether to confront antisemitism clearly and decisively or to continue managing it as an embarrassment to be explained away. Too often, political leaders have preferred ritual condemnation over moral clarity and bureaucratic language over responsibility. In the U.S., that choice has already forced a reckoning — from congressional hearings on campus antisemitism to the adoption of a national strategy to counter it. Australia’s hesitation stands in contrast, not because the threat is smaller, but because our political class has been slower to accept that antisemitism is a stress test for democratic institutions.” [WSJ]

From Rhetoric to Violence: The Atlantic’s David Frum considers how anti-Israel rhetoric can morph into antisemitic violence. “Yet there has remained, until now, terrible reluctance by Western governments to accept the appearance on their soil of deadly threats to their Jewish citizens from people motivated by anti-Israel ideology. Those movements have progressively tested what used to be red lines: blocking access to synagogues, for example, as happened in recent weeks in Los Angeles and New York City. … People who dress up like Hamas terrorists and brandish their insignia and chant their slogans are not merely opining. They are propagating, recruiting, and inciting the actions they believe in. Among Western liberals is a strong impulse to show respect to people from other cultures — or who hold other beliefs — by interpreting their words and actions in the most benign way. But sometimes the way to show the deepest respect is by taking people seriously, believing their words as they are spoken, heeding their own accounts of their intentions.” [TheAtlantic]

Flicker of Light: In The Free Press, Rachel Goldberg-Polin reflects on the recently released video of her son, Hersh, and five other Israeli hostages commemorating Hanukkah while captive in Gaza nine months before they were killed by Hamas terrorists. “Seeing these young, vibrant, and luminous Jews keeping alive their over-2,000-year-old tradition of lighting Hanukkah candles, even when in the bowels of hell on earth, you cannot help but feel something. I won’t suggest what you should feel. … In these dark times, it is a flicker of light. The flame is whispering something. If you are quiet and you lean forward, you will hear it. Did you grasp it? The Beautiful Six did. It is hope. Hope! It’s not a suggestion, or advice. It is a command. Hanukkah teaches us there is light. Even in the darkest of times and the most upside-down of places. The camera sweeps by Hersh and he says, ‘Wishing you a Hanukkah of peace.’ From hell, without a hand, he wished us peace.” [FreePress]

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TASOS KATOPODIS/GETTY IMAGES FOR DC CENTRAL KITCHEN

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