CNN’s Jake Tapper offered a “thought experiment” to try and analyze what went wrong in the political storm surrounding President Trump’s phone call to Myeshia Johnson, who had just lost her husband, Sgt. LaDavid T. Johnson, in an ambush in Niger. “Let’s try to assume for the sake of argument that everyone in this story…
NEW YORK (JTA) — “It doesn’t help.” “I don’t know how it happened or why it happened.” “The most common response I’m seeing is confusion.” That’s what some Conservative rabbis are saying about their movement’s recent major statement on intermarriage, which reasserts the ban on rabbis performing interfaith weddings while urging its member synagogues to…
NEW YORK (JTA) — Marijuana entrepreneur Catherine Goldberg was working on an event with the Orthodox founders of Mitzva Herbal, a company that makes kosher-certified cannabis-infused edibles, when she shared her dream of uniting marijuana-loving Jews over Friday-night dinners. “They were, like, ‘Cat, we can’t smoke on Shabbat,” Goldberg, 28, recalled. “So I figured havdalah,…
(JTA) — Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino said he regrets not speaking out sooner about alleged sexual misconduct by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein. Tarantino, who worked with Weinstein on some of his most successful films, including “Pulp Fiction,” said in an interview published Thursday by the New York Times that he “knew enough to do more”…
VIENNA (JTA) — Austria’s largest urban transport firm for the first time commemorated the Holocaust, in a subway art installation in memory of hundreds of victims who lived as prisoners on a single street. The Wiener Linien installation unveiled Thursday at the Herminengasse station features a graph scheme in which each identified victim that had…
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A Dutch activist for Palestinian rights who is married to a senior member of the PLO was nominated cabinet minister for international aid at her country’s foreign ministry. Sigrid Kaag’s nomination to the position — the second-most powerful cabinet post at the Dutch foreign ministry — will be formalized in the coming…
(JTA) — Security guards at the Western Wall prevented a group of men and women promoting gender-egalitarian prayer for accessing the holy site’s main plaza with a Torah scroll. In the incident Friday, about 300 people were barred from entering the main plaza of the Western Wall while holding a Torah scroll, according to Women…
(JTA) — A Manhattan psychiatrist was indicted for attempted murder in 2012 of the father of her son. The indictment alleges that Pamela Buchbinder enlisted her young cousin to bludgeon and stab Michael Weiss, whop is also a psychiatrist, in the alleged victim’s West 57th Street home office, the New York Post reportedThursday. The report…
(JTA) — A rabbi at a suburban Atlanta synagogue apologized for a Rosh Hashanah sermon after congregants complained that he appeared to cast the American left as inimical to the Jews. “The great threat that we face as Americans and as Jews comes not from the ‘alt-right’ but from the alt-left,” Rabbi Shalom Lewis said…
Protesters shouted “Go home Nazis” as a white nationalist gave a speech on Thursday at the University of Florida, where hundreds of police set up barricades and separated supporters and demonstrators to guard against violence. Several hundred protesters shouting “We don’t want your Nazi hate” marched outside a campus performing arts center where Spencer spoke….
A Houston suburb will not approve grants to repair homes or businesses damaged in Hurricane Harvey if the applicant supports boycotting Israel. The city of Dickinson’s application form for storm damage repair funding includes a clause stating that “By executing this Agreement below, the Applicant verifies that the Applicant: (1) does not boycott Israel; and…
