Good Monday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we feature op-eds from Shanie Reichman, Mor Yahalom and Abigail Harmon. Also in this newsletter: Alex Soros, Deborah Lipstadt and Olena Zelenska. We’ll start with a conversation with American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutch.
The American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum kicked off in Tel Aviv last night, before a crowd of 1,500 attendees from around the world. On the main stage at Sunday night’s plenary, Israeli President Isaac Herzog sat in conversation with AJC’s CEO. But for the first time in decades, the organization’s head was not David Harris, who stepped down last year, but Ted Deutch, who assumed the global NGO’s top job last fall after more than a decade in Congress. Ahead of the start of Global Forum, Jewish Insider‘s Melissa Weiss sat down with Deutch to discuss the transition, AJC’s efforts in the Gulf and the organization’s priorities under Deutch’s leadership.
Melissa Weiss: Let’s start with this trip. You were just in the UAE.
Ted Deutch: It was my first trip to the AJC Abu Dhabi office, which was exciting as not only the first Jewish organization to open an office in the UAE, but I believe one of the only NGOs in the world to have an office in the UAE, and I got to see up close the work that we do there, so it was a really gratifying trip. In the eight months [since joining AJC] I’ve come to appreciate in a much deeper way the breadth of our work, and so a lot of that was on display and in the few days that we spent in the UAE, it was the interfaith work that we do and visiting the Abrahamic Family House. We had a really meaningful meeting with the foreign minister [Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan].
MW: What were your conversations like with the foreign minister?
TD: He shares the same desire that we at AJC feel, that people who care about Israel feel, which is to really capitalize on what we’ve got and on what the Abraham Accords represents, and that means really trying to go full speed ahead and to make sure that there aren’t hurdles that stand in the way, that some of the political discourse that happens on the outside shouldn’t interfere.
Read the full interview here.
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