(JTA) — Jewish basketball star Sue Bird will be one of Team USA’s two flag bearers at the Tokyo Olympics’ opening ceremony on Friday. Bird, one of many Jewish athletes going for gold this summer, will be competing in her fifth Olympic games this summer. The 12-time WNBA All-Star has won gold at the last…
(JTA) — Recho Omondi, a fashion podcaster who was accused of antisemitism for comments in a recent interview she conducted with a Jewish writer, has posted a lengthy apology to her listeners. “I owe the Jewish community and anyone else who’s offended by my words an apology,” Omondi said in a six-minute segment uploaded Tuesday…
(JTA) — Will it be a historic Olympics for Israel? The Associated Press thinks so. On its list of predicted medalists for each event in Tokyo published Monday, the news agency includes seven Israeli athletes. The Jewish state has won nine medals in its entire Olympics history. This year, Israel is sending its largest delegation…
Rep. Nicole Malliotalkis of New York described a trip she took earlier this month to Israel with her colleagues on the House Foreign Affairs Committee as a refreshing moment of bipartisanship in sharp contrast to Washington politics. One of the members of the committee who was not on the mission was Rep. Ilhan Omar of…
Ben & Jerry’s announced Monday that it would end sales of ice cream in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, following “concerns shared with us by our fans and trusted partners.” “Although Ben & Jerry’s will no longer be sold in the OPT [Occupied Palestinian territories], we will stay in Israel through a different…
(JTA) — A crowd of Orthodox men disrupted a Conservative prayer service on Tisha B’Av, a Jewish day of mourning, at the Western Wall — shouting down worshippers, attempting to block the entrance and setting up a makeshift divider meant to separate between men and women. The disturbance happened on Saturday night at the non-Orthodox…
Nikki Haley, the former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. during the first two years of the Trump administration, cautioned the Biden administration against returning to the nuclear deal with Iran, in a speech to supporters of Israel on Sunday. Iran’s prime goal, by funding its proxies in the Middle East region, is to target the…
(JTA) — Pope Francis has restricted the use of the Latin Mass, a form of the liturgy favored by traditionalist Catholics that calls for the conversion of the Jews and, until 2008, included a reference to Jewish “blindness.” Francis’ declaration, made Friday, is a repudiation of an earlier decree by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI,…
(JTA) — Not even the CEO of Facebook’s dog is immune to online antisemitism. Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo to his platform of his family pet — a Hungarian sheepdog named Beast — wearing a yarmulke and a canine-sized tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl, on Tuesday. The post was quickly inundated with comments, most of…
(JTA) — Three Jewish filmmakers working on a documentary about far-flung Jewish communities in Africa have been detained for days by Nigerian authorities and accused of aiding a separatist rebellion led by a Nigerian Jewish activist. Their families say they were doing nothing of the sort. They say the men were giving a Torah scroll…
David Harris, the longtime chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, announced on Thursday that next year he will be stepping down as head of one of the oldest Jewish advocacy groups in the country. Harris, 71, joined the organization in 1979 and became its executive director and CEO in 1990. “Now, after more than…
