KAZAN, Russia — Hundreds of Israeli and European Jews convened in the capital of the predominantly Muslim Russian state of Tatarstan for an annual Jewish music festival as well as a Jewish learning Limmud FSU conference. The two events, which coincide with a third — the Sept. 4 European Day of Jewish Culture — kicked off Friday evening…
The group that created “The Great Schlep,” a Jewish initiative that promoted Barack Obama’s presidential run in 2008, has written an anti-Donald Trump musical to be performed across the country. The musical, called “Chump,” is a satire of Trump’s Republican presidential campaign modeled on “The Great Dictator,” Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 satire of Adolf Hitler. Its…
(JTA) — The Trump and Clinton campaigns issued tough-on-Iran statements in the wake of a report that alleges that negotiators allowed Iran secret loopholes in the nuclear agreement. The Institute for Science and International Affairs, a think tank founded by a former United Nations nuclear weapons inspector, David Albright, said in a report released this…
A former Stanford University swimmer was released from jail on Friday after serving just half of a six-month sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, a sentence widely criticized as too lenient. Brock Turner, 20, left the Santa Clara County Main Jail in San Jose shortly after 6 a.m. PDT (1300 GMT), just three months…
— A Jerusalem rabbi said he would seek royalties from Japan’s delegation to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro for its allegedly unauthorized use of a melody he composed. Rabbi Baruch Hayat, according to the Shirunt website of Israeli songs, composed the melody to the popular song “Kol Ha’Olam Kulo Gesher Tzar Me’od” to…
— Repeated anti-Semitic incidents involving members of the United Kingdom’s Labour party show it must work harder to fix the problem, Israel’s envoy to the fight against anti-Semitism said. Gideon Behar, the director of the Israeli foreign ministry’s Department for Combating Antisemitism, spoke with JTA amid reports of a fresh string of hate speech by…
Wind and rain from Hurricane Hermine toppled trees and power lines along Florida’s northern Gulf Coast, inundating coastal areas with storm surges before it weakened to a tropical storm over land and plowed toward the Atlantic Coast on Friday. Hermine made landfall early on Friday near St. Marks, Florida, 20 miles south of the capital…
— Mel Gibson confirmed that he is making a movie about the resurrection of Jesus, recalling that he had the “tar kicked out of” him for his movie about the last days of the Christian messiah, “The Passion of the Christ.” “That’s a very big subject and it needs to be looked at because we…
The first known television interview with South Africa’s late anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela has emerged — and it was filmed in a former synagogue. The Nelson Mandela Foundation, an NGO dedicated to Mandela’s memory, said that the 24-second footage featuring a bearded activist defiantly vowing to fight racism as probably filmed during the “1956 Treason…
AMSTERDAM — To honor a woman’s dying wish, the Dutch Jewish community arranged for her body to be buried in a cemetery that had not been used in nearly a century. The funeral of Juliana Slaat-Luycx, who was born in 1941, was the first burial since 1920 at the Jewish cemetery of Den Ham 80…
— King Mohammed VI of Morocco thanked a Jewish composer from Casablanca who had written a song in the monarch’s honor. Albert Cohen, a novelist, composer and singer, earlier this week shared on Facebook a copy of the letter he received from the king for a poem entitled “Lay off my King” that Cohen had…
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