WASHINGTON — A county sheriff in Maryland accused of making racist and anti-Semitic comments is refusing to resign. James Fitzgerald, a Democrat who is the elected sheriff in Howard County, a mixed rural-suburban county straddling Baltimore and the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C., said at a news conference on Sept. 29 that he would not…
WASHINGTON — Michael Chertoff, a homeland security secretary under President George W. Bush, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. The endorsement of the Democratic nominee, appearing in an interview Monday with Bloomberg News, is notable because while other Republicans, including many who have not been in government for decades, have endorsed Clinton, Chertoff was a senior…
WASHINGTON — J Street is launching a half million-dollar campaign against two vulnerable Republicans for their opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami on Wednesday will release TV spots to screen in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where incumbents Sens. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., are in tight competitive races. A…
World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder was questioned by Israeli police last week in connection to the fraud probe into Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The police’s anti-fraud unit summoned Lauder while he was in Israel for Shimon Peres’ funeral and questioned him about various aspects of the fraud case. The development was first reported by…
A Jewish questioner was arrested after asking Middle East expert Dennis Ross a pointed question about what he called Israeli and U.S. “state-sponsored terrorism” at a lecture at a Kansas City library. Jeremy Rothe-Kushel was charged with trespassing and resisting arrest after he challenged Ross to explain why the U.S. continues to support Israel at…
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s joke at a rally, in which he singled out people who were not Christian conservatives, was “unacceptable,” said a top Reform rabbi. “Raise your hand if you’re not a Christian conservative,” Trump said at a Sept. 28 rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, after assessing that the crowd was overwhelmingly Christian conservative….
(JTA) — Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte apologized to members of the country’s Jewish community for suggesting that he would kill as many drug dealers as Adolf Hitler did Jews. “Please accept my apology. It will never happen again,” Duterte said Tuesday at the Beit Yaacov Synagogue in Makati, a city in the Manila metropolitan area where the…
British-born scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for their studies of unusual states of matter, which may open up new applications in electronics. Their discoveries, using advanced mathematics, had boosted research in condensed matter physics and raised hopes for uses in new generations…
An expose by The New York Review of Books claims to have found the identity behind the massively popular pseudonymous author, Elena Ferrante. Claudio Gatti, better known for his investigations of the money behind Oil for Food and other political financial stories, claims that the evidence points to Anita Raja, “a Rome-based translator whose German-born…
This brief is, sadly, not suitable for work or small children. Google’s Jigsaw project — that uses AI to remove hostile bigoted language from Google searches and YouTube pages among others — has met with a depressingly predictable reaction from the trolls that inhabit some specific depths of 4chan. Digression 4chan’s recently exposed financial difficulties…
Lena Dunham posted on Facebook a heartfelt tribute to the cast and crew of her successful HBO series “Girls” hours after filming the series finale. “When we shot our pilot six years ago, I never dreamed that I could be so fulfilled by the process of art-making, of collaboration, of honest expression. And so through…
