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This Week:

• RJC Hanukkah Parties Light Up NY, NV, AZ, CA, and GA
• Ben Shapiro Defends the Conservative Movement at TPUSA Event
• Yehuda Kaploun Confirmed by Senate
• My Family Survived Bondi Beach

• Short Takes

• Week's Best Tweets

RJC Hanukkah Parties Light Up NY, NV, AZ, CA, and GA

The RJC was proud to host events around the country to celebrate Hanukkah. See below for photos from our events in New York, Nevada, Arizona, California, and Georgia. Thank you to everyone who joined us to honor the holiday, Jewish pride, and our connection to Israel.

RJC NY Regional Director Darren Fields, Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Andrew Garbarino, Nassau County Rep. Mazi Pilip, Nassau County Executive and GOP candidate for NY Governor Bruce Blakeman, Dorette Forman, Mayor Peter Forman, Assemblyman Daniel Norber, Nassau County Comptroller Elaine Phillips, and Congressman Randy Fine.

On Sunday night, the final night of Hanukkah, RJC leader and event host Steve Tann, his mother Mimi Tann (Sun City Anthem Conservative Club board member), Nevada/Arizona State Director Alan Hedrick, and Ethan Cohen lit the 8th candle at Southern Highlands Golf Club in Las Vegas, Nevada. Ethan Cohen, a local Las Vegas high school student, was a key advocate for Nevada Senate Bill 179, which went into effect in October 2025 and adopts the IHRA definition of antisemitism to strengthen protections for Nevada’s Jewish community. Photo credit: Schayden Gorai.

Celebrating Hanukkah in Arizona: Angela Sinagoga; host David Widerhorn, owner of Modern Masterpieces and President of the Darash Ahava Foundation; and Rabbi Pinchas Allouche of Congregation Beth Tefillah, alongside Efraim Allouche and Yeshiva students from Los Angeles, lighting the sixth night of Hanukkah at the Elysium property in Scottsdale, Arizona. Photo credit: Modern Masterpieces.

Steven Alevy leading a discussion at the California Hanukkah party on Friday. Photo credit: Young Jewish Conservatives LA Chapter.

On Thursday, the fifth night of Hanukkah, the Atlanta Chapter held a party hosted at Congregation Beth Jacob in Atlanta. We were honored to have Governor Brian Kemp and First Lady Marty Kemp join us. RJC Atlanta Chairman Chuck Berk moderated a discussion with the Governor about antisemitism and the Jewish community.

Ben Shapiro Defends the Conservative Movement at TPUSA Event

Ben Shapiro spoke at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest last week and took on the frauds and grifters who are trying to destroy the conservative movement from within. He said:

[T]oday, the conservative movement is in serious danger. It is in danger not just from a left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder. The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism by championing enervation and grievance. These people are frauds, and they are grifters. And they are something worse: a danger to the only movement capable of stopping the left from wrecking the country wholesale.

So today, I want to go through five obligations that people who speak to you on matters of importance have to you. I want to speak to you of our duties…

Watch Ben Shapiro's full remarks at TPUSA here.

Yehuda Kaploun Confirmed by Senate

The RJC congratulates Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun on his confirmation to be Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.

As JNS reports:

The Republican Jewish Coalition said that it is "confident that Rabbi Kaploun, a proud American Jew, will unflinchingly confront the world’s oldest hatred wherever it appears, and make clear that the United States will not compromise with antisemitism."

My Family Survived Bondi Beach

Arsen Ostrovsky writes at the Wall Street Journal:

When my wife and I told our daughters we were relocating from Israel to Australia, our 8-year-old looked up at me and asked: "Abba, does that mean no more boomies?" She was referring to the sirens and explosions that had become part of everyday life since Oct. 7, 2023. "Yes," I said. Our new home would be safe; our move would mean calm, distance from war, a fresh start for a child who had seen and experienced horrors that no child should.

Less than three weeks later, we were in the crossfire on Bondi Beach.

… And yet, even in the darkness, I witnessed something hopeful. Ordinary Australians, people with no obligation and no protection, ran toward danger to help the wounded. They applied pressure to wounds, offered comfort, shielded strangers with their own bodies and risked their lives to stop the shooters. This is the real Australia. Not the ravenous hatred of the murderers and their enablers, but the quiet courage of decent people.

As I light the Hanukkah candles this year from my hospital bed, I do so as a survivor. But more important, as a father who still believes in the promise I made to my daughters—that this is a place where they can live in peace without the boomies. Hanukkah teaches us that light isn’t inevitable. We must defend it. If Australia wishes to remain a country where Jewish life can flourish openly and safely, this moment must change us all.

See also: Greenblatt: The Bondi Beach Terror Attack Must Strengthen, Not Shatter, Our Bridges

Jason D. Greenblatt, who served as the White House Middle East envoy in the first Trump administration and helped create the Abraham Accords, writes at Newsweek that the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach must not deter us from building connections to Muslim countries and communities who share our interest in fighting extremism and establishing peace and opportunity.

Join the Celebration! RJC at 40

From our start in 1985 to today, the RJC has been a unique, outspoken, and trusted voice for Jewish Republicans, bringing our message to Republican decision makers and the broader Jewish community.

- BEFORE 2025 ENDS -

Please consider making a gift to the RJC today in honor of our 40 years of growth and success.

We need your support to keep moving forward!

Thank you!

Short Takes

Troy: Norman Podhoretz, an intellectual powerhouse of the postwar era

[Norman] Podhoretz, who died [last week] at age 95, went on to become one of America’s leading public intellectuals, a writer and editor of enormous influence in the latter half of the 20th century. Not least among his accomplishments was serving as an inspiration to many disaffected 1960s liberals in their movement from left to right.

Jewish Insider: Rabbi Levi Shemtov brings Hanukkah to the halls of power

Even as power changes hands in Washington, one person is a fixture at Republican and Democratic White House Hanukkah parties, as well as Hanukkah gatherings all across the Beltway, from the Pentagon to the Justice Department to the Capitol. That’s Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), the Washington arm of the global Chabad movement, and Washington’s unofficial menorah-lighter-in-chief.

Hakakian: The Maccabees of the American Revolution

Every Hanukkah, Jews retell the story of the Maccabees, the ancient heroes of the second century BCE, who wrested Jerusalem from the tyranny of the Greek empire.

This year was no different. But as Hanukkah draws to an end, we near ever closer to the 250th birthday of the United States—which gives us reason to tell the story of another set of Jewish heroes as well: those who helped wrest the other Promised Land, America, from the tyranny of the British Empire.

… The Jews of the newborn nation were not a monolith. They were rich and poor, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, men and women. But they shared a common heritage of exile and displacement—experiences that deepened their appreciation for the radical virtue of liberty from tyranny.

Lowry: No, the USS Liberty Attack Wasn’t Israeli Treachery

So, a half-century-old theory that the Jewish state deliberately attacked the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War has renewed currency.

Conspiratorial-minded influencers hostile to Israel, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, have promoted the notion, and it was a topic of discussion at the recent TPUSA conference.

…The fact is that the devastating Israeli attack on the Liberty, killing 34 and wounding 171, was a woeful case of mistaken identification. The series of faulty judgments that led to the incident is so grievous that, taken altogether, it is, indeed, nearly incomprehensible. Yet, when operating with incomplete information in a shooting war, such accidents happen all the time. The Israelis apologized immediately upon realizing their ghastly mistake and offered restitution.

Tweets