(JTA) — Henry Orenstein, a Holocaust survivor who went on to invent the Transformers toys and became a major donor to Jewish and Israeli causes, died Tuesday at the age of 98. Orenstein became a best-selling toy maker with his Transformers line, which he first created in the early 1980s. He followed up on that…
This article originally appeared in Haaretz and was reprinted here with permission. Sunday, December 12, Abu Dhabi. It’s 23 degrees Celsius, the relative humidity is 60 percent and an 18 kilometer per hour northwesterly wind is blowing. Not ideal weather for running, but nothing stops A. – a senior commander at the VIP security unit…
(JTA) — Fox News removed from social media a cartoon depicting George Soros as a puppet master after the Anti-Defamation League called out the conservative news giant for peddling antisemitic tropes. “As we have told @FoxNews numerous times, casting a Jewish individual as a puppet master who manipulates national events for malign purposes conjures up…
There have been 397 attacks so far in 2021, compared to 272 attacks in 2020.
(JTA) — A Cuban restaurant is no place for a Jewish piglet to be so close to Christmas — unless of course, that pig is being pardoned in Miami’s annual pig pardoning ceremony. Since 2017, Miami has celebrated a pig pardoning event ahead of Christmas in recognition of the large Hispanic population in the South…
The swearing-in ceremony traditionally takes place at 12 p.m. on the first day of the year
(JTA) — The 19th-century German historian who coined the phrase, later popularized by the Nazis, “the Jews are our misfortune” has a street named for him in Berlin. So does a 15th-century official who supported a murderous purge of Jews from his region, and a competitive athlete who was a darling of the Nazi regime….
Most people who study Talmud go with the Babylonian one, and pay scant attention to its older, more difficult cousin — the Jerusalem Talmud. Sefaria, the non-profit library, released a new, online English translation of it this week in hopes that more people will delve into the challenging compendium of Jewish law. It’s free. And…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Anti-Defamation League has joined the District of Columbia attorney-general in a lawsuit against two extremist groups that allegedly help organize the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The civil rights group and antisemitism watchdog said it helped identify plaintiffs in the case. A congressional panel is scrutinizing the insurrection and…
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Dozens of New York City rabbis, including leaders of some of the city’s largest synagogues, signed an open letter calling on the New York City Council to pass legislation ending solitary confinement in the city’s prison system. The letter, published Tuesday by the liberal rabbinic human…
(JTA) — A professor in Gaza whom the New York Times profiled as “calmly teaching Israeli poetry” has in fact derided Israeli poems in class, according to a 266-word editor’s note the newspaper appended to the original story Tuesday. The article, written by the paper’s Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley and published last month, “did…
