Hebrew College, the non-denominational higher education institute in Massachusetts, has announced that President Daniel Lehmann will soon step down, after leading the organization for the past decade. “I have decided it is the right time, both personally and institutionally for a change,” said Lehmann, in a press release from the college. “Teaching current and future…
(JTA) — The Israeli Chief Rabbinate says that its list of foreign rabbis has been misconstrued, and that the list does not imply that those rabbis cannot be trusted to vouch for the Jewish identities of their followers. On Saturday, JTA reported on a list of some 160 rabbis whose efforts to confirm the Jewish identities of immigrants were rejected by Israel’s…
As the State Department struggles to fill a record number of positions, President Trump has selected Lewis Eisenberg, a Republican fundraiser and ex-Goldman Sachs exec, as United States ambassador to Italy. Eisenberg, who lives in Vero Beach, near the president’s Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, has previously worked as a partner at Goldman Sachs. He…
Four months after it canceled Milo Yiannopoulos’s book deal, Simon & Schuster is getting sued by the right-wing provocateur, who charged the publisher with breach of contract. “I’m really pissed at them – which is why I’m suing them,” Yiannopoulos said, according to the Guardian. Simon & Schuster paid the ex-Breitbart editor a $250,000 advance…
GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin suggested he was concerned about Donald Trump Jr.’s emails regarding getting damaging information about Hillary Clinton from Russia, saying there was perhaps “some condiment on this nothing burger.” I voted for @POTUS last Nov. & want him & USA to succeed, but that meeting, given that email chain just released, is…
Dear Israel Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau: We, the following San Diego, California, Rabbis are outraged that we were left off of your blacklist of rabbis whose testimony as to the Jewish identity of their congregants are unacceptable to Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. In the future please include our names among the other blacklisted rabbis. We…
A Jewish professor of sociology is among the seven individuals suing President Trump and his communication teams, alleging that they’re violating the Constitution by blocking people on Twitter. Philip N. Cohen, a 49-year-old professor at the University of Maryland, was blocked by the @realDonaldTrump account after responding to Trump on Twitter last summer and calling…
Rob Goldstone told Donald Trump Jr. in a bombshell email that a Russian prosecutor was offering his father’s 2016 presidential campaign incriminating information about White House rival Hillary Clinton. The music publicist told Trump Jr. the dirt was part of Russian government support, according to an email chain that the president’s son released after The…
Edith Windsor’s lawyer is hanging up a shingle. Roberta Kaplan, the attorney who represented Windsor in the 2013 Supreme Court victory that helped lead the way to the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage, is leaving the mega-firm Paul Weiss to set up her own company. So far, things have been going well at Kaplan’s new…
As recently as this spring, the Kushner family was seeking a badly-needed investment from a Qatari businessman to refinance their tower at 666 Fifth Avenue. After negotiations seemed to break down, Kushner led the behind-the-scenes fight to harden the U.S. position on Qatar, according to The Intercept. 666 Fifth Avenue, often hailed as the defining…
A 40-year-old Queens woman pleaded guilty this week to making unauthorized purchases on the credit cards belonging to three elderly patients at a New York Jewish nursing home. Channel Francis, who was arrested last October and charged this past March by the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, faces up to four…
