(JTA) — A federal judge in Houston has thrown out a lawsuit by health workers objecting to a city hospital system’s coronavirus vaccine mandate on the merits — but she couldn’t help singling out one of the arguments for special derision. In her five-page opinion on June 12, District Judge Lynn Hughes writes that the…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden nominated Tom Nides, a deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration, to be his ambassador to Israel. Nides, a banker, was the deputy secretary of state for management and resources from 2011 to 2013 and had good relations with Israeli diplomats, although he was less involved in substantive…
(JTA) — Citing the recent spike in antisemitic attacks, the Jewish caucus in the California State Legislature has secured $50 million to help protect nonprofits and $10 million for an exhibit on antisemitism at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The total allocated for Jewish or Jewish-related causes in the 2021-22 state budget is…
(JTA) — (Jewish Journal-Massachusetts via JTA) — A suburban Boston high school football team that had come under fire earlier this year for using Holocaust and Jewish phrases to call plays – “Auschwitz,” “rabbi” and “yarmulke” among them – had been employing similar antisemitic language for at least the last decade. That was the conclusion…
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — Jewish leaders in Europe say the European Union is not only banning some methods of kosher and halal slaughter, but telling Jews and Muslims how to practice their religions. That’s according to many who have read a recent ruling by the EU’s highest court. It upholds bans in Belgium on producing kosher and…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial Georgia Republican congresswoman, toured the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and apologized for likening coronavirus protections to the Holocaust. “I have made a mistake and it’s really bothered me for a couple of weeks now, and so I definitely want to own it. The horrors of the Holocaust…
(JTA) — (J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Leaders from some of Silicon Valley’s most recognized tech companies, including Google, Twitter and YouTube, are among about 200 technology and business leaders who have signed on to a letter calling out antisemitism. The signatories include former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, media mogul…
(JTA) — The World Confederation of United Zionists, one of several groupings within the World Zionist Organization, let go of its secretary-general, American-born Rabbi Dov Lipman, citing his dispute with two women who say he sexually harassed them. Haaretz, which first broke the story of the harassment allegations, reported Monday that the confederation’s chairman, David…
There are tremendous gaps in American and Israeli Jews’ knowledge of each other, according to a new set of surveys from the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Released Monday, they show that 16% of Americans were able to correctly answer all four basic questions asked about Israelis, and that 13% of Israelis were able to correctly…
(JTA) — After 12 years, seven elections and three corruption charges, Benjamin Netanyahu is no longer the prime minister of Israel. Netanyahu, who served as Israel’s leader continuously beginning in 2009 and holds the distinction of being the country’s longest-serving prime minister, was removed from the job in a razor-thin vote in the Knesset, Israel’s…
On Friday, a man found himself inside the mouth of a whale. No, it wasn’t an ancient Hebrew prophet fleeing a God-given quest to the Assyrian city of Nineveh. This time it was a Cape Cod fisherman, Michael Packard, 56, diving for lobster off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts. To secure their catch, lobster divers…
