Award-winning musical theater composer and lyricist Michael Friedman died on Saturday at the age of 41. Friedman, best known for his 2010 musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” died from complications with HIV/AIDS, according to the Public Theater in New York, where he worked as artist-in-residence. Friedman first rose to prominence in the early 2000s as…
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s 26-year-old son, continues to court controversy with his social media activity. The young Netanyahu is widely seen in Israel as being groomed by his parents as a future political leader and the Facebook posts have attracted particular public interest. On Saturday, he posted on Facebook a…
Hurricane Irma ripped through the U.S. Virgin Islands this week, badly damaging most of the buildings in the archipelago — including the local Chabad House, whose leaders have stayed there to help the recovery effort. “My brother Asher and his wife Henya are Chabad Shluchim on the Island,” wrote Eli Federman, brother to Chabad staffers…
The United States will return to Iraq next year a trove of Iraqi Jewish artifacts that lawmakers and Jewish groups have lobbied to keep in this country, a State Department official said. A four-year extension to keep the Iraqi Jewish Archive in the U.S. is set to expire in September 2018, as is funding for…
Rabbi Yaakov Zucker, the Chabad rabbi in the Florida resort of Key West, is offering his building as a potential shelter for local residents who might face a direct hit from the ferocious Hurricane Irma. Zucker, who has been working to prepare the building, told the Algemeiner that the Chabad house was a “hurricane 5…
(JTA) — Tufts University’s Hillel is described as “an organization that supports a white supremacist state” in a student-written guide to activist life at the university. The Tufts University Disorientation Guide offers information on social, spiritual, health and academic resources at the Boston-area university, but singles out Hillel for opprobrium, calling it a “Zionist space”…
Jewish groups welcomed $25 million in federal security grants for nonprofits, thanking Congress and the Trump administration for funding in line with previous years’ grants. The Department of Homeland Security disbursed the funding last week, the vast majority of which goes to Jewish institutions. The money is congressionally mandated, but the Trump administration has attempted…
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — A statue honoring Brazil’s first black clown was vandalized with a swastika at a public park. Police have no suspects in the vandalism this week of the statue of Benjamin de Oliveira in the city of Para de Minas. Known as the most famous clown in Brazil in the first…
More than 600 rabbis affiliated with the Conservative movement have signed a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu protesting the country’s lack of recognition and support for non-Orthodox Jewish movements. “We ask you to lead; we ask you to fulfill your promise to us that Israel will be the homeland of the entire Jewish…
President Trump and Senator Chuck Schumer have for a change decided to say positive things about each other – in a possible sign of a warming relationship between Senate Democrats and the White House. “He seemed super upbeat,” one Capitol Hill staffer told Politico, referring to Trump’s response after cutting a debt limit deal with…
A newly fraying relationship between President Trump and top White House economic adviser Gary Cohn has raised questions about how long Cohn will stay in his job, say two people with close ties to the White House. One source said concern had grown among Cohn’s allies over the past 24 hours that he might be…
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