Earlier this month, Josh Katz noticed a dip in sales at his kosher restaurant, Ben Yehuda Pizza in Silver Spring, Maryland.

He knew the culprit, and it wasn’t antisemitism or an anti-Israel boycott. The federal government’s shutdown had left hundreds of thousands of federal employees across the country furloughed, and his regular customers were tightening their belts.

“People are being a little bit more vocal about their financial insecurities at the moment,” said Katz. “They’re just not sure when they’re going to be getting a paycheck.”

In Silver Spring alone, the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration draws over 10,000 federal employees. In the greater Washington, D.C. area, roughly 280,000 workers are employed by the federal government. With all of those workers going multiple weeks without paychecks, Katz said he’d heard from members of his community who were feeling the financial strain.

So last week, he posted an offer on Facebook: “Order now, and pay us down the road when the paychecks come in.” Soon, the first requests started rolling in.

“We’re not giving anything away for free here, but I realized by just allowing people to defer payments, that could really help with their sense of normalcy,” Katz said.

The post did not take a stance on the shutdown, which has hinged on a stalemate between Democratic and Republican senators over competing spending bills and does not appear to be near resolution. “We try to avoid politics at Ben Yehuda,” it said. “We support the Pizza Party, but that’s about as far as we go.”

Ben Yehuda Pizza is located in Kemp Mill, a neighborhood of Silver Spring with a sizable Orthodox Jewish population and multiple synagogues and Jewish community centers. Katz said that while the deal was open to all federal workers, most of his regular customers are Jewish.

He said the timing of the shutdown, which began on Oct. 1 and coincided with the beginning of Yom Kippur, had further compounded the strain on local Jewish families he serves.

“When it started during the holidays, all of a sudden we have massive food bills, because we have to pay for all these festive meals,” said Katz. “When you’re not sure when the next check is going to come, you tighten the belt, or maybe you’re not as festive as you’d ideally like.”

Jewish leaders and groups across the country have mobilized to support unpaid federal government workers affected by the shutdown, some of whom are working essential roles without being paid.

In San Diego, the local branch of the Jewish Family Service began distributing bags of groceries to affected federal workers just days into the shutdown. It has has since provided over 5,700 meals to about 1,000 families.

And multiple free loan societies have created special programs for federal workers, echoing an initiative offered by the Hebrew Free Loan Association of Greater Washington during the 2018 shutdown that lasted 35 days, setting a record that could soon be eclipsed. The Hebrew Free Loan Society of New York, for example, is providing interest-free loans of up to $7,500 for federal employees affected by the current shutdown.

On Friday, Katz said two families had already signed up for Ben Yehuda’s payment deferment deal. But far more community members, he said, had reached out asking how they could contribute a meal to a federal employee.

“That’s really what inspires me, is seeing people who are willing to do that,” he said. “That’s really been the most beautiful thing that comes out of this.”

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LAS VEGAS — Most of the Republicans denouncing an explosion of antisemitism on the right at this weekend’s Republican Jewish Coalition convention refrained from naming names.

Not so for Randy Fine, one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress.

“Make no mistake. Today, Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous antisemite in America,” he said during an address Saturday morning. “He has chosen to take on the mantle of leader of a modern-day Hitler Youth.”

He continued by listing Carlson’s offenses: “To broadcast and feature those who celebrate the Nazis, those who call for the extermination of Israel, to defend Hamas, to even criticize President Trump for stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Friends, make no mistake: Tucker is not MAGA.”

In front of Fine, dozens of student volunteers held up signs with that message that the RJC had prepared. The group’s convention has taken place under a shadow cast by Carlson, the former Fox News host who last week hosted the white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his popular streaming show.

In their first-ever joint appearance, the duo discussed “these Zionist Jews” at length, with Carlson and Fuentes both expressing opposition to U.S. support for Israel and Fuentes describing his views on Jews and Judaism at length.

The interview spurred distress from some on the right who saw it as evidence of a broad mainstreaming of antisemitism within the Republican Party. It also elicited a striking response from the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that envisioned many of the policies being advanced by the party today.

On Thursday, the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, announced in a video statement that not only was he rejecting calls to cut ties with Carlson, but he saw Carlson’s critics as evidence of a “venomous coalition” threatening the party from within.

“If those who support Tucker Carlson want to see a venomous coalition, all they need to do is go look in the mirror,” Fine said, announcing that he was canceling a planned appearance at a Heritage Foundation event next week.

Fine declared that he would no longer allow Heritage staffers entry to his Capitol Hill office.

“I will be calling on all of my colleagues on the Republican side to do the same,” he said.

Fine, who represents a district in central Florida, has the backing of President Donald Trump and has sought to carry the mantle of Trump’s MAGA movement. Calling himself the “Hebrew Hammer,” he has drawn attention for his pugnacious style and unwavering support for the Israeli government.

Fine began his speech by boasting of being the first member of Congress to wear a kippah on the House floor — a move he said was motivated by defiance, not religious piety. He also railed against multiple liberal and pro-Palestinian politicians who are a frequent target of his ire: Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as well as New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, whom he has called to have deported.

But Fine quickly shifted gears to direct his attention to his own party — and explain why he was one of the few speakers to criticize Carlson explicitly.

“It’s easy to talk about antisemitism on the left. I want to talk about the dark force rising on our side,” he said. “Multiple speakers have talked about the rise of antisemitism on the right. But it is not enough to speak in platitudes or generalities about the fight. We must call evil by its name.”

In addition to Carlson, he also condemned two far-right Republicans in Congress by name: Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, each of whom has criticized U.S. support for Israel and drawn censure for advancing antisemitic conspiracy theories.

As the crowd booed at their names, Fine said, “Some days I marvel at their stupidity. Other days, at their evil. It makes my stomach crawl that I have to sit in the same room as them.”

Fine likened their presence in the party to what he said was a once-fringe presence of antisemitism on the left that had metastasized over time.

The Democrats “said, ‘It’s no big deal. They’re the fringe, no one listens to them, no one will believe them.’ And they didn’t do anything about it, and look where we are now,” he said.

Echoing a message broadcast at the start of the RJC confab by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, he then said: “So now we have to choose: Will we ignore these embarrassments to our party? Will we pretend that they don’t matter or don’t exist? Will we make the same mistakes the Democrats made so many years ago? I know what I’m going to choose. I’m going to choose to fight.”

Fine did not mention another prominent Republican who has recently ignited antisemitism concerns of his own: Vice President JD Vance, who earlier this month downplayed a Young Republicans’ group chat in which some participants praised Hitler and this week sidestepped an antisemitic question posed to him by a student at the University of Mississippi.

In an interview, Fine said thought Vance was right to forgive the Young Republicans’ chat, saying, “Kids do stupid things.” (Most of the people on the chat were young professionals, some in their 30s.)

But he said he could not comment on Vance’s Ole Miss encounter. “I haven’t seen it, so I couldn’t comment about it,” he said. “I think that was a pretty long event so I haven’t watched it.”

He said he was proud of his own advocacy around college campuses, citing both his activism against pro-Palestinian student protesters at universities and the engagement of the young Jewish Republicans who joined his speech.

“It was very cool for me to have all those kids down there,” Fine said. “It’s part of why I do what I do — to make sure kids feel safe on college campuses.”

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i24 News – Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met with Hamas chief Khalil al-Khayya and other senior members of the jihadist group’s political bureau in Istanbul on Saturday.

Al-Hayya, a senior Hamas negotiator, was among the terror chiefs surviving an Israeli strike on their Doha residence last month. Topics of discussion, according to the Turkish foreign ministry, included the state of the ceasefire and the flow of humanitarian aid.

The meeting comes ahead of Monday’s Istanbul gathering of the foreign ministers of the so-called “guarantor countries” as stipulated in the ceasefire plan put forth by the U.S. administration of President Donald Trump. The countries include Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile Israel determined that partial remains of three deceased individuals handed over to Israel by Hamas in Gaza overnight were not those of any of the hostages held in the war-ravaged enclave.

The bodies of 11 hostages are thought to still be in Gaza. Hamas has released 20 living hostages and handed over the remains of 17 others since a U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect on October 10, bringing to a halt the two-year war sparked by the October 7, 2023 massacre.

The U.S.-brokered truce, which left thorny issues like the disarmament of Hamas unresolved, has seen the jihadist group reassert its control over parts of Gaza by brutal reprisals against Palestinians perceived to be hostile to its rule. The outbreaks of violence by Hamas against both Gazans and Israeli forces have tested the fragile truce.