JERUSALEM (JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s diplomatic envoy, attorney Yitzhak Molcho, has resigned. Molcho served as Netanyahu’s diplomatic envoy during his first term as prime minister in 1996-99 and again since Netanyahu returned to office in 2009. He served as an Israeli negotiator during the 2013-14 Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. He will leave his position…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is stopping in Israel during a Middle East tour focused on combating terrorism. News of Mnuchin’s Israel stop came from Yad Vashem, which said Mnuchin would tour Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum on Thursday. It’s not clear yet which Israeli officials he will meet. Mnuchin, who is Jewish, is…
A Maryland town is enmeshed in controversy over a developer’s effort to build a retirement community for Muslims, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. The controversy, which echoes fights in New York over the construction of Hasidic Jewish communities, pits some locals against a project that aimed to sell homes in a retirement community to members…
New York City’s billionaire ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg plans to live to 125, he told Business Insider this week. That would put him five years past 120, the age to which Jews by tradition aspire to live — and make him the oldest person ever. “I look forward to another, I dunno, 50 years may be…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Graffiti referring to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin as a Nazi was spray painted on an elementary school in the largely haredi Orthodox city of Bnei Brak. The graffiti discovered on Tuesday night read: “Rivlin is a Nazi apostate.” It is the second incident in recent days. Late last week, graffiti at a…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — A municipal planning committee approved building permits for 176 housing units for a Jewish neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem. The expansion announced on Wednesday will create the largest Jewish settlement enclave in a Palestinian neighborhood in the city, according to reports. The plans were approved by the Jerusalem Planning Committee. There are currently…
(JTA) — The Russian company Kaspersky Lab confirmed that it had taken source code for a secret American hacking tool via its antivirus software. The company’s internal investigation came after Israeli intelligence discovered that Russian hackers were using the antivirus software to steal classified information from the United States. Kaspersky’s anti-virus program is used by 400 million…
London’s Holocaust memorial will be designed by David Adjaye, who designed the recently inaugurated National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the Guardian reported. Adjaye’s firm was picked from a shortlist of ten renowned international firms, including Zaha Hadid Architects and Norman Foster. “[W]e wanted to create a living place, not…
A scribbled note by Albert Einstein containing the beloved physicist’s theory on happiness sold for a record $1.6 million dollars at an auction this week in Jerusalem, the Guardian reported. Original estimates for the value of the document — a scribbled note given to a courier in Tokyo — were between $5,000 and $8,000. Einstein’s…
Anthony Weiner will reportedly be spending his prison time for sexting minors at a federal medical center in Massachusetts. The disgraced ex-congressman has been assigned to the Federal Medical Center, Devens, a federal medical center with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp and located in Ayer, Massachusetts, according to the New York Daily News. He…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Accepting the American Enterprise Institute’s annual Irving Kristol award, Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi emeritus, inveighed against a “politics of anger” he said was corroding the fabric of U.S. society. “The politics of anger that’s emerged in our time is full of danger,” Sacks said, speaking Tuesday night at the conservative institute’s…
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