It was spring in northern Greece, 1943. Efthymios Kontopoulos, 13, had come to Thessaloniki for the day when he saw Nazis rounding up the city’s Jews. “My father brought me into town,” Kontopoulos, who is not Jewish, said. “We saw them being taken away. They were with their [yellow] badges.” On March 15, 1943, the…
J Street, a liberal Jewish-American lobbying group barely five years old and once shunned by top Israeli officials, is claiming as a victory the fact that Chuck Hagel was confirmed as defense secretary despite opposition from more conservative Jewish groups. In the week when the most influential Jewish-American group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,…
Venezuela has fired the starting gun in a highly charged election race likely to pit Hugo Chavez’s preferred successor, acting President Nicolas Maduro, against centrist opposition leader Henrique Capriles. The pair have until Monday to register their candidacy for the April 14 vote, which will determine whether Chavez’s self-styled nationalist-socialist revolution will live on in…
Marina Plistiev, a Kyrgyzstan-born Jew, has lived in Vienna for 34 years but still doesn’t like to take public transport. She recalls the day in 1986 as a teenager when she and her four-year-old brother, whom she’d collected from school with a fever, were told to get off a tram for having the wrong tickets,…
At a Jewish summer camp in upstate New York, they’re giving kids digital filmmaking classes and telling them to leave their Nintendo Game Boys at home. In Georgia, a camp is encouraging face time with video pen pals rather than time on iPods. In Wisconsin, a camp has traded snail mail for scanned mail. As…
Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg is taking a drubbing for prescribing from a privileged perch the keys to female success in her upcoming book “Lean In,” but she’s struck a chord among many in her backyard. In her own technology sector, women remain woefully underrepresented in leadership roles, even more so than in fields generally considered…
Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday met with the family of a former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007, and urged anyone who may have information about his whereabouts to come forward. Robert Levinson, who retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1998, disappeared from Kish Island in Iran on a…
Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, has pledged to oppose boycotts of Israel and to protect Jewish customs, including circumcision and ritual slaughter. Speaking Thursday before a crowd of 300 at an event organized by Britain’s main Jewish umbrella group, the leader of the British opposition, who is Jewish, warned of the need…
A U.S. court of appeals will again hear arguments on whether Americans born in Jerusalem can have “Israel” listed as their birthplace in their passports. Nathan Lewin, the lawyer who last year won a Supreme Court decision requiring lower courts to resolve the issue, this week said that new hearings will begin on March 19…
The FBI has opened an investigation into possible civil rights violations after reports of hate speech at Oberlin College in Ohio, one of the first U.S. schools to integrate black and white students, a school spokesman said on Friday. The investigation by the FBI’s Cleveland office follows Oberlin’s decision to suspend classes and activities for…
After claiming her Twitter account was hacked, an Egyptian human rights activist appeared to acknowledge at least some of the anti-Jewish tweets that led the Obama administration to delay honoring her with an award. “I refused to apologize to the Zionist lobby in America on the previous statements hostile to Zionism under pressure from the…
