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This Week:

• RJC Leadership Meeting Focuses on Antisemitism

• House Speaker Johnson to Address Israeli Knesset

• The 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' Will Restore the American Dream

• Legislators Denounce Antisemitism at Vigil for Victims of Terrorism

• Short Takes

• Week's Best Tweets

• Upcoming Events

RJC Summer Leadership Meeting in Washington, DC.

RJC Leadership Meeting Focuses on Antisemitism

Today more than 200 top leaders of the Republican Jewish Coalition participated in our annual leadership meeting in Washington, DC. The featured speakers included Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, as well as Trump administration officials: White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf and Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Leo Terrell, who heads the Justice Department Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.

House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain (R-MI) and Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT) were also featured.

The meeting was closed to media, to give speakers and participants freedom to speak their minds and ask questions about their concerns. Antisemitism was the top issue in the day's discussions. Amb. Leiter said, "You cannot fight antisemitism if you don’t fight anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism… 'Free Free Palestine' is Orwellian language. It means 'Death, Death, Israel.' That's eliminationist. 'From the River to the Sea' means genocide." The ambassador was clear that anti-Zionism IS antisemitism.

RJC National Chairman Sen. Norm Coleman and Amb. Yechiel Leiter

Leo Terrell is not Jewish, but he has made fighting antisemitism his 24/7 mission. He said that President Donald Trump "is absolutely committed to eliminating antisemitism in this country." Terrell said that the fight against antisemitism is not just a Jewish issue; it is an American issue.

Will Scharf shared what it's like to work closely with President Trump and talked about the vast amount of work they have already accomplished. He said, "I think the Jewish community in America owes President Trump a tremendous debt of gratitude for everything that he has done, is doing, and will do."

Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Leo Terrell

House GOP Chair Lisa McClain and Sen. Tim Sheehy shared their personal commitment to safety and freedom for Jewish Americans. Rep. McClain works to hold university leaders accountable for what has happened to Jewish students on their campuses. Sen. Sheehy told the group that he traveled to Israel after October 7, 2023, to send a message of support to the people of Israel, and spoke about the unwavering support of Israel among mainstream Americans.

Today's meeting was exclusively for members at the Leadership Council level ($1000) and above. If you would like to upgrade your membership and attend our annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas at the end of October, the biggest and most exciting leadership event of the year, click here.

RJC CEO Matt Brooks and White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf.

House Speaker Johnson to Address Israeli Knesset

House Speaker Mike Johnson will visit Israel later this month. The Speaker will address the Knesset on June 22, making him the third House Speaker to do so. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich was the first, in 1998, and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was the second, in 2023.

Speaker Johnson will meet with top Israeli officials and is expected to tour important sites, including the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

The Speaker said in a statement on Wednesday, "It will be one of the highest honors of my life to address the Israeli Knesset at this fateful moment. Our ties run deeper than military partnerships and trade agreements. We're bound by the same beliefs, the same psalms, and the same sacred pursuit of liberty."

Photo by William Warby CC BY 2.0

The 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' Will Restore the American Dream

In an op-ed in the Washington Examiner, Rep. David Kustoff (R-TN), one of four Jewish Republican members of Congress, itemizes some of the key provisions in the "big, beautiful bill" and what they will mean for the US economy and American families. One very important element is preventing the Trump tax cuts of 2017 from expiring, but the bill includes much more. Rep. Kustoff writes:

This tax bill prioritizes pocketbooks by solidifying and increasing the doubled standard deduction, boosting the doubled child tax credit, expanding the small business deduction, and making the doubled death tax exemption permanent for family-owned farms. It even goes a step further and incorporates Trump's priorities of no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and tax relief for seniors.

… The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is once-in-a-generation, nation-building legislation that will drive economic growth, create jobs, and prioritize American families and businesses. Time is of the essence. I urge my colleagues in the Senate to pass this bill that will safeguard the American dream for all.

Speaker Mike Johnson speaks at the Capitol vigil this week. Photo: X.com

Legislators Denounce Antisemitism at Vigil for Victims of Terrorism

Jewish Insider reports:

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sharply denounced the anti-Israel movement on Tuesday, describing it as making common cause with terrorists and putting "a bounty on the heads of peace-loving Jewish Americans."

Johnson gathered on the steps of the Capitol with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), dozens of members of Congress, Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutch, hostage family members including Ronen Neutra and staff from the Israeli Embassy and AJC for a vigil honoring Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, the Israeli Embassy employees killed by an anti-Israel activist outside an AJC event at the Capital Jewish Museum last month.

"It's a dangerous time to be a Jewish American," Johnson said, noting that the House had taken extra precautions to keep the event under wraps for security reasons. Visible and covert security surrounded the gathering.

… "'Free Palestine' is the chant of a violent movement that has found common cause with Hamas," Johnson said. "It's a movement that has lost hold of the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil, between light and darkness … They proclaim that violence is righteous, that rape is justice and that murder is liberation. They have created a culture of lies that puts a bounty on the heads of peace-loving Jewish Americans."

Read our exclusive report for details about how the RJC moved voters across America to President Trump and the GOP.

Short Takes

Washington Times: Stopping the Jew hunt

Crimes against Jews have long been the dominant religious-based attacks in the United States. In the year before the horrendous attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, crimes against Jews in the United States represented 68% of all religion-based crimes, according to the FBI... However, the rise of anti-Jewish violence has reached a deafening cacophony since the Oct. 7 intifada perpetrated by Hamas. Religious and secular Jews, young and old, Democratic and Republican, have been equal-opportunity victims of hate and violence.

...Sadly, the specter of a masked, racially hate-filled terrorist group that sees nothing wrong with its system of racial superiority, that has captured major segments of American society, including universities, media, local law enforcement, and federal and state elected officials, and that perpetrates and glorifies violence against those they consider to be lesser humans, precisely because of their identity, is not a new phenomenon in America.

As Timothy Egan describes in his book “A Fever in the Heartland,” the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s portrayed itself as pro-American, Christian and law-and-order. The Klan’s infiltration into mainstream American society gave legitimacy and cover to its reprehensible system of racial and religious violence, xenophobia and corruption. Instead of the swastika, today’s terrorists wear the kaffiyeh. Instead of shouting, “Heil Hitler,” today’s terrorists shout, “Free Palestine.”

Spencer: Netanyahu wisely arms Gaza clans to fight Hamas

The chairman of urban warfare studies at West Point, John Spencer, writes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policy of arming local clans inside Gaza to fight Hamas is "a hard-learned, historically grounded strategy, and one of the most effective tools in asymmetric warfare."

He argues that arming rival clans makes strategic sense, because it "fractures Hamas's monopoly on force, empowers Gazans to defend themselves, and denies Hamas safe haven in the communities it once ruled through terror." It moves forward the goal of destroying Hamas.

Spencer writes: "Victory over Hamas won't come from airstrikes alone. It will take local ground knowledge, legitimacy within communities, and the ability to fill power vacuums before Hamas does. Empowering clans that oppose Hamas, regardless of past affiliations, is a tactical necessity. You don't beat a shadowy, embedded enemy like Hamas without taking advantage of the internal fractures in the society it dominates. Israel isn't arming Gaza clans to build a new government. It's arming them to destroy the government Hamas built through terror. That isn't recklessness, it's fighting a war. And it's working."

Peek: Progressives push anti-Israel activism, are surprised by antisemitic violence that follows

Increasingly, it is progressives like [Rep. Ilhan] Omar who are responsible for surging antisemitism. Apologists claim that supporting Palestine and opposing Israel do not constitute antisemitism. Perhaps they would not in in isolation, but the protesters have taken pains to muddy the waters as much as possible. As the New York Times recently noted, "the sprawling protest movement against the war in Gaza has scrambled efforts to distinguish opposition to the actions of the Israeli government, or even to the state of Israel itself, from hostility to Jews. Critics of the protesters have argued that slogans like 'globalize the Intifada' are thinly veiled calls for violence in any Jewish space."

… In City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman writes, “The American radical anti-Israel movement has built the intellectual scaffolding for—and in many cases all but invited—the violence now playing out in places like Boulder. When you call for ‘Intifada,’ you cannot feign surprise when someone takes that call literally. Whatever your legal right to speak, that is the outcome you invoked.”

Rosenberg: America's anti-Jewish assassins are making the case for Zionism

As in [Theodor] Herzl's time, the perpetrators of anti-Jewish acts do more than nearly anyone else to turn Jews who were once indifferent or even hostile to Israel's fate into reluctant appreciators of its necessity.

…Simply put, Israel exists as it does today because of the repeated choices made by societies to reject their Jews. Had these societies made different choices, Jews would still live in them, and Israel likely would not exist—certainly not in its present form. Instead, Israel is a garrison state composed precisely of those Jews with the most reason to distrust the outside world and its appeals to international ideals, knowing that these did precisely nothing to help them when they needed it most. In this manner, decade after decade, anti-Semitism has created more Zionism. Put another way, the unwitting agents of Zionism throughout history have been those unwilling to tolerate Jews in their own countries.

Tweets

Events

PA: "Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites"

Join us in Merion Station to hear constitutional law expert Ilya Shapiro discuss his new book.

NV: Screening and Discussion of "The Social Network"

Join us for a special screening of "The Social Network," the acclaimed film about the founding of Facebook and the rise of Mark Zuckerberg. Featuring expert commentary on the case from Bob Zeidman.

NEW DATE - GA: Event with Rep. Rich McCormick

This event has been rescheduled from an earlier date. Please join us for a conversation and legislative update featuring Rep. Rich McCormick (GA-07)

AZ: Legislative Update in Scottsdale

Save the date for an exclusive event with Warren Petersen (R), President of the AZ Senate.

AZ: Legislative Update in Sun City West

Save the date for an exclusive evening of insights and conversation with key Arizona legislators: AZ State Senate Majority Whip Frank Carroll, and State Reps. Beverly Pingerelli and Alexander Kolodin.

NV: Mahjong Women's Game Night

Join us for a fun and relaxing evening of Mahjong with fellow conservative Jewish women! All skill levels welcome.