WASHINGTON (JTA) – The year was 1981 and the director of AIPAC was calling for a “showdown” with the Reagan administration, saying “This country is being held hostage to the whims of the Saudis.” At issue was the sale to Saudi Arabia of AWACS, aircraft with radar-enabled surveillance capabilities that at the time were state of…
Within days of capturing East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war, Israel was examining options about their future ranging from Jewish settlement-building to the creation of a Palestinian state. As the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the war nears on June 5, recently unearthed documents detailing the post-war legal…
One activist has been arrested and two are missing in China after conducting an investigation into a Chinese company making Ivanka Trump-branded shoes, China Labor Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, said. Labour activist Hua Haifeng was arrested in Jiangxi province on suspicion of illegally using eavesdropping equipment, according to Li Qiang, executive director of…
(JTA) — Jared Kushner was once hailed as the key to Donald Trump’s surprise election victory. Now Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser is at the center of the biggest controversy plaguing the administration: its ties to Russia. Kushner is facing heat following reports of two meetings with figures close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Democrats…
In a meeting with leaders of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the secretary general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, affirmed the historical role of Jews in Jerusalem. “Denial of Israel’s right to exist is anti-Semitism,” Guterres said, according to a statement from the Wiesenthal Center. “History must be respected. Jerusalem is a holy city for…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Among the Jewish men and women with a front-row seat to America’s executive branch, there are Jews who would be president, Jews who are indispensable to presidents and, less happily, Jews who help mire presidents in scandal. Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is a definite category 2, with rumored ambitions of…
The New York Observer, the newspaper owned by White House senior advisor Jared Kushner, laid off a quarter of its editorial staff on Tuesday. Among those let go was entertainment writer Dana Schwartz, a top web traffic driver who wrote an open letter to Kushner on the Observer website last year criticizing him for defending…
(JTA) — Vice President Mike Pence will address the annual summit of Christians United for Israel, the largest pro-Israel group in the country. Pence will speak at CUFI’s conference in Washington, D.C., which is taking place on July 17-18, the group announced Tuesday. Pastor John Hagee, who founded CUFI in 2006, praised the Trump administration in a…
Forward Soundtrack of Our Spirit finalist Cantor Aryeh Leib Hurwitz has released a new music video celebrating the Exodus, commemorating 50 years since the Six Day War and Israeli Independence Day. Watch: Cantor Aryeh Leib Hurwitz was a 2016 Soundtrack of Our Spirit finalist and is a soloist and performer from Brooklyn, New York.
White nationalist Richard Spencer’s “alt-right” podcast was booted from SoundCloud for violating the site’s terms of service last week. The move came in response to a Twitter query from the freelance journalist Alex Kotch, who wrote about the incident in a post for Alternet.org. “I got the notorious white nationalist Richard Spencer kicked off of…
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s senior advisor/son-in-law, has been the subject of ever-more-intense media attention after NBC reported that the FBI was looking closely at his meetings in December with the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. and the head of a Russian bank as part of its inquiry into the country’s role influencing the 2016 presidential…
