(JTA) — It’s early days for the White House’s latest charm offensive among American Jews, but a new poll suggests that the wooing effort is having little effect. The poll, published Wednesday by J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group that generally backs President Barack Obama’s Middle East policies, shows Obama stuck at the same mid-50s approval…
Maryland officials have limited state child protective services involvement in so-called “free-range” parenting cases under a policy directive released on Friday. The new guidelines come after a Silver Spring, Maryland, couple, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, drew national attention when they were charged with child neglect for letting their children walk home alone from a park…
Tens of thousands of people participated in Tel Aviv’s annual gay pride parade, whose theme this year was the transgender community. Friday’s parade, Tel Aviv’s 17th, featured an appearance by Conchita, the transgender Austrian performer who last year won the Eurovision song festival, Army Radio reported. Some participants in the procession from Meir Garden’s Tel…
The yearly tally, released June 11, shows there were 1,627 reported anti-Semitic incidents in 2014, a 28 percent increase over the year before. The previous record was 1,345 incidents in 2012. Most cases last year – 84 percent or 1,370 incidents – involved harassment; there were 238 reported incidents of vandalism, or 15 percent of…
A Hungarian county’s government fired a former department chief after he was seen making anti-Semitic sentiments in a recording that surfaced online. Imre Sisak, a former lawmaker for Hungary’s Socialist Party, MSZP, was fired Tuesday from his position as the head of a department within the local government of the northern country of Nógrád, ATV…
Israeli military prosecutors closed a probe into the death of four children in Gaza last year and opened three new ones — including an alleged revenge shelling. The Israel Defense Forces’ announcement Thursday on the closure of the probe said the children’s deaths on a Gaza beach in July as a result of an airstrike…
Prosecutors charged two U.S. men on Friday of plotting to help the Islamic State militant group by beheading Americans, including the anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller, after an investigation that led law enforcement officers to shoot a suspect dead last week in Boston. The case follows a handful of so-called “lone wolf” attacks in the United…
A French anti-Semitism watchdog called for a police probe against a former lawmaker who warned Muslim shoppers about locally produced kosher products. “Ramadan soon: Watch out with your shopping,” Jean-Claude Lefort, a former lawmaker for France’s communist party and current president of the France Palestine Solidarity Association, or AFPS, wrote in a social media posting…
Forward journalists have won Ippies Awards for best investigative story and best video. Frimet Goldberger won in the investigative category for her exhaustive probe of corruption and abuse in the Skver Hasidic community of New Square, New York. Read: Hasidic Enclave Keeps Its Secrets Amid Elusive Rebbe’s Tight Control Martyna Starosta was honored for her…
A French court on Friday acquitted former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of charges that he instigated sex parties with prostitutes. The decision fits with a view expressed in February by the state prosecutor, who called for the 66 year-old to be acquitted because of a lack of proof. It comes four years after…
A U.S. federal judge declined to order the return from Spain of a painting that was sold under duress by a Jewish owner to a Nazi art appraiser. The June 4 ruling by Judge John F. Walter of Los Angeles’ Central District Court of California stated that Spanish law applied in the case, and that…
