(JTA) — Police in France raided a well-known Orthodox Jewish school, arresting 16 teachers for alleged child abuse and placing dozens of underage students provisionally under the state’s custody. The raid Monday on Beth Yossef, a prestigious boarding school-style yeshiva near Paris attended by many students from Israel and the United States, was the largest-scale…
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — The Shefa School, a Jewish school for students with learning disabilities whose Hebrew name means “abundance,” is living up to its moniker. On a chilly Tuesday morning on the Upper West Side, Shefa staff and families celebrated the beginning of construction on a new campus at…
(JTA) — Whoopi Goldberg apologized for upsetting people by starting a debate on Monday over whether the Holocaust was “about race,” writing that she is “sorry for the hurt I have caused.” But later that night, appearing on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” she elaborated on some of her views on Jewish people that…
This story was updated on Feb. 1 to reflect new developments. More than six months after President Joe Biden nominated Deborah E. Lipstadt to be his global ambassador on antisemitism, the Senate Foreign Relations committee scheduled her confirmation hearing for Feb. 8. “I am grateful and pleased,” Lipstadt, a renowned Holocaust historian and professor at…
(JTA) — In an awkward exchange with her co-hosts on “The View,” actress and producer Whoopi Goldberg claimed that “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” but rather about “man’s inhumanity to man.” The panel was discussing a Tennessee school board’s removal of the Holocaust book “Maus” from its curriculum earlier this month. All five co-hosts opposed…
(JTA) — Ambo Anthos, the Amsterdam-based publishing house that printed the Dutch-language translation of a controversial book alleging that a Jew had betrayed Anne Frank, has apologized for not reviewing the material more critically and ceased printing new copies of it on Monday. The book “The Betrayal of Anne Frank,” published earlier this month by…
(JTA) – In early December, Judaism’s Conservative movement sent a disquieting message to dozens of synagogues looking for a new rabbi: Many of you won’t make a hire this year. At least 80 Conservative synagogues anticipated rabbi vacancies — approximately one of every seven affiliated with the movement, the email said. At most, 50 to 60…
(JTA) — In Orlando, neo-Nazis yelled antisemitic slurs from a highway overpass. In Chicago, a Jewish school and a synagogue were vandalized. In Washington, D.C., a man was arrested and charged with spray painting swastikas on a train station. The turbulent weekend — which also included a rally in Ottawa against COVID-19 vaccine mandates that…
(JTA) — A full page advertisement in The New York Times Saturday urged athletes and corporate sponsors to “walk away” from the Olympic Games, set to begin next month in Beijing, to protest China’s persecution of the Uyghurs. “We urge the athletes and the sponsoring corporations to walk away from these games unless Beijing takes…
(JTA) — Tiffany Haddish has been open about how she connected with her Jewish roots later in life, especially in interviews leading up to her 2019 standup special “Black Mitzvah.” But the comedian-turned-movie-star hadn’t yet said publicly how she incorporates Jewish practice into her daily life — if at all — until an interview she…
(JTA) — A new Jewish coming-of-age movie begins with the hero, at age 12, getting rejected by an older girl at a bar mitzvah. Then the movie jumps to a decade later, as the main character embarks on a career as a bar mitzvah “party starter.” It’s an unlikely vocation for a character who isn’t…
