Members of a Jewish fraternity at UC Davis awoke to find swastikas painted on their building two days after the student senate passed a divestment resolution targeting Israel. The non-binding advisory resolution, which was passed Jan. 29 by the Associated Students of UC Davis by a vote of 8 to 2 with two abstentions, calls…
Brandeis University President Frederick Lawrence will step down from his position effective at the end of the current academic year. Lawrence, who made the announcement on Friday, is one of the country’s leading experts in civil rights and the eighth president of Brandeis University. He currently is serving his fifth academic year as president. Brandeis,…
Israeli soldiers shot dead a Palestinian on Saturday in the occupied West Bank, the military and a Palestinian security official said. An Israeli military spokeswoman said soldiers saw two Palestinians throwing a fire bomb towards a road near the Palestinian city of Nablus and “identifying an immediate threat shot toward the suspects’ lower extremities.” The…
Carl Djerassi, an Austrian-born chemist who helped to develop the birth control pill before becoming a playwright and novelist, died in San Francisco on Friday at the age of 91, his family said. Djerassi, professor emeritus at Stanford University, was the leader of a team of researchers in Mexico City who synthesized a derivative of…
Former president Richard von Weizsaecker, who challenged German attitudes about the Holocaust by arguing that the country had been liberated by the Nazi defeat in 1945, died on Saturday at the age of 94, the current president’s office said. A member of one of Germany’s most distinguished aristocratic families, von Weizsaecker also presided over the…
An Egyptian court on Saturday banned the armed wing of the Palestinian group Hamas and listed it as a terrorist organization. The ruling came days after the country faced some of the bloodiest attacks on security forces in years. Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood which the authorities have also declared a terrorist…
Conservative Judaism’s embattled congregational arm has laid off a handful of senior staffers amid its ongoing financial crisis, the Forward has learned. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism handed out at least four pink slips, just a week after announcing it would sell its Manhattan headquarters. The USCJ confirmed the layoffs. “We recently had a…
The Anti-Defamation League condemned a Texas lawmaker who instructed her staff to greet Muslim visitors with an Israeli flag and a request to pledge allegiance to the United States. Molly White, a Republican state representative, was absent on Thursday, Muslim Capitol Day, organized by the local Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter. But she said in…
The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah said on Friday his group did not want war with Israel but was ready for one and reserved the right to respond to Israeli attacks at any time and place. “We do not want a war but we are not afraid of it and we must distinguish between the two…
A rabbi born in pre-state Israel fighting extradition from Holland over alleged sex crimes told a Dutch daily that he is a Holocaust survivor. Eliezer Berland, a charismatic rabbi from Jerusalem who fled Israel after several women and one minor complained he had sexually assaulted them, made the claim in an interview with the Dutch…
Israeli conductor Israel Yinon collapsed and died as he was conducting a concert in the Swiss city of Lucerne. The 59-year-old was in the middle of leading “An Alpine Symphony” by German composer Richard Strauss Thursday night when he slumped, falling headlong to the ground, the AFP news agency reported. The cause of death was…
