The Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley announced Tuesday it has received a $10 million gift from the S.F.-based Helen Diller Foundation to coincide with the institute’s 10-year anniversary. The largesse will be accompanied by a name change, as the institute will henceforth be known as the Helen Diller Institute…
(JTA) — Karen Lewis, the firebrand former president of Chicago’s teachers union, has died at 67 after a long battle with brain cancer. Lewis, a convert to Judaism who said she was attracted to the religion’s embrace of questions, ran the Chicago Teachers Union from 2010 to 2018. Under her leadership, the union became a…
(JTA) — George Shultz, the Reagan administration secretary of state who made it his mission to bring about freedom for Soviet Jewry, has died at 100. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Shultz has been a distinguished fellow for decades, announced his passing on Saturday. It did not give a cause. Shultz was a…
Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial is set to begin on Tuesday and his lawyer – David Schoen, a modern Orthodox Jew – has withdrawn a request to pause the trial for Shabbat. The decision by Schoen is a quick reversal from his request last week that the trial be suspended from sunset on Friday to…
(JTA) — The Jewish sister rock band Haim have gone from being paid in matzah ball soup to scoring a feature film. The trio will soundtrack the Netflix animated feature “The Witch Boy,” based on a three-book graphic novel series of the same name by Molly Knox Ostertag. The fantasy musical is set in a…
(JTA) — Non-Jewish faculty members at a haredi Orthodox school in Antwerp, Belgium, have gone on strike, citing the failure of some parents to test their children for the coronavirus to the teachers’ satisfaction. Most of the non-Jewish teachers at the girls’ department of the Jesode Hatora Beth Jacob school stopped working on Wednesday, the…
(JTA) — The impeachment trial for Donald Trump will pause for Shabbat, after the former president’s lawyer requested accommodations for his religious observance. David Schoen, the Orthodox attorney leading Trump’s defense, asked for the trial to be paused for the duration of the Jewish day of rest, which begins this coming Friday in Washington, D.C.,…
(JTA) — Police in California are investigating after a Jewish fraternity at the California Polytechnic State University reported finding swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti painted outside its house. The symbols were scrawled in front of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house in California’s San Luis Obispo County on Friday night, campus authorities said. “We awoke…
Researchers at two Israeli hospitals are reporting positive results in preliminary tests for a potential cure to COVID-19. At the Integrated Cancer Prevention Center at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital, Professor Nadir Arber has been testing a new drug called EXO-CD24, which he claimed is an inexpensive treatment for the novel coronavirus, if it is taken…
We’ve all been frustrated with our internet service providers at one point or another, but one Jewish man took his kvetch game to the next level. Aaron Epstein, a 90-year-old from California bought a quarter page ad in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday to lambaste AT&T CEO John Stankey over his company’s slow internet…
For Eric Dinowitz, a public-school teacher, father of 5-year-old twins and aspiring politician, one of the challenges living through the COVID-19 pandemic has been the disruption of his musical career. Dinowitz is a member of Six13, a Jewish all-male a cappella group formed in 2003. In an interview, he said what he has missed most…
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