Herbert Friedman, the former chief financial officer of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, pleaded guilty today to grand larceny and conspiracy charges for his role in the $9 million kickback scheme that has rocked the organization since last August. Friedman, 80, admitted to illegally receiving around $250,000 from the scheme between the early 1990s…
Palestinian public sector workers received their salaries on Tuesday, Palestinian officials said, in a sign that Israel had backed down from a threat to impose sanctions as peace talks began to collapse last month. Israel had said on April 10 it would withhold funds after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed a series of international human…
The elderly recluse whose Munich apartment contained a secret art hoard, including masterpieces looted by the Nazis from their Jewish owners in World War Two, has died after a heart operation, his spokesman said on Tuesday. Authorities stumbled upon Cornelius Gurlitt’s trove of paintings and drawings by the likes of Marc Chagall, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso…
An array of Jewish groups decried a U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing prayers at town hall meetings. The 5-4 decision along conservative-liberal lines handed down Monday reversed a lower appeals court decision in favor of a lawsuit brought by Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens, an atheist in Greece, a town in upstate New York. The…
A synagogue in Tunisia was vandalized in what a human rights activist and some Jews described as an anti-Semitic attack. The Beith El synagogue in Sfax, located 150 miles south of the capital Tunis, was ransacked on April 30 by unidentified individuals who littered the floor with prayer books and tallitot, or Jewish prayer shawls,…
Editors of a French television talk show censored a panelist’s comparison between the murder of Jewish children in Toulouse to the actions of the Israeli army. Aymeric Caron, a left-wing French journalist, made the comparison on April 26 as a member of a panel of interviewers of France 2’s show “On n’est Pas Couche” (“We’re…
A Tennessee state senator said he regrets a blog post that compares signups for Obamacare to Nazi “‘train rides’ for Jews in the 40s.” “Democrats bragging about the number of mandatory sign ups for Obamacare is like Germans bragging about the number of mandatory (sic) sign ups for “train rides” for Jews in the 40s,”…
A California school district said it will rewrite an eighth-grade assignment that asked students to argue whether or not the Holocaust happened. The writing assignment for students in the Rialto Unified School District asked students to write an argumentative essay about the Holocaust in which they must explain “whether or not you believe this was…
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Monday making the denial of Nazi crimes and distortion of the Soviet Union’s role in the World War Two a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in jail. The law, described by critics as an attempt to curb freedom of expression to appease conservative Russians,…
Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has died. Becker, who won the Nobel in economic sciences in 1992, died Saturday in Chicago. He was 83. A professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, Becker also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was known for applying economic analysis to human behavior and…
Republican Tennessee State Senator Stacey Campfield is under fire for comparing Obamacare to the Holocaust. Democrats and Republicans alike piled on the lawmaker, who wrote that mandatory health coverage is akin to being sent to a concentration camp. National Jewish Democratic Council Executive Director Rabbi Jack Moline said Campfield’s invoking the Holocaust “ends serious consideration…
