WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden nominated Los Angeles’ Jewish mayor, Eric Garcetti, to be his ambassador to India. The White House in announcing the nomination on Friday emphasized Garcetti’s bona fides in leading an international city. “As mayor, Garcetti oversees the busiest container port in the Western Hemisphere, the largest municipal utility in the…
(JTA) — The suspect in the stabbing of a Boston Chabad rabbi has been charged with committing a hate crime and civil rights offense. Khaled Awad, 24, was arrested Thursday after allegedly stabbing Rabbi Shlomo Noginsky outside of his school and synagogue in the Brighton neighborhood. Noginsky survived the stabbing and has been released from…
Six years ago, the township of Toms River in Ocean County, N.J. planned to acquire a former egg farm owned by the Guttman family to preserve as open space. But ongoing legal disputes, including allegations that the township’s land-use will infringe on the religious rights of Orthodox Jews, have blocked the sale. Now, the township’s…
(JTA) — The Orthodox Union blasted Pennsylvania Republican-led Pennsylvania legislature for cutting security funding for nonprofits to zero. The General Assembly budget passed last month effectively ended a five-year fund the state established in 2019, just after the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh, to secure nonprofits. The fund has so far distributed $10 million…
(JTA) — Rep. Lauren Boebert compared federal COVID-19 vaccination efforts to Nazism, tweeting that Joe Biden “has deployed his Needle Nazis” to her Colorado district. Boebert, a first-term Republican, posted the tweet above a video of White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki discussing the administration’s efforts to raise vaccination rates through targeted outreach around the…
A new route to explore in the Western Wall tunnels will be opening to the public, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation and the Israeli Antiquities Authority revealed on Thursday. The newly opened tunnels, to the west of the Temple Mount, include two massive chambers flanked with columns and fountains that were once part of a…
(JTA) — The median age of American Jews has dropped from 52 to 48 since 2013, according to a massive survey of Americans and religion, making Jews one of only two religious groups to grow younger on average. Every other religious grouping except for mainline Protestants tended to age during the same period, although a…
(JTA) — Facebook is expanding its efforts to combat Holocaust denial by directing users to Holocaust education materials in 12 languages, including Arabic, Russian and German. Beginning in January, people who searched in English for information about the Holocaust or Holocaust denial were given a prompt to visit AboutHolocaust.org, a website that provides basic facts…
Officials called off the rescue operation at the site of the Champlain Towers South collapse Wednesday, 14 days into a grueling but futile search for survivors of the disaster that drew volunteers from all over the country and the world to Surfside, Florida. Until the transition from search-and-rescue operations to search-and-recovery, many people in a…
Former President Donald Trump resented that Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister he had forged a close relationship with, congratulated Joe Biden upon his electoral victory, according to a new book by journalist Michael Wolff. “It was startling to aides, however much they were anticipating an eruption, that Trump’s wrath fell on Bibi Netanyahu,”…
“Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” former President Donald Trump reportedly insisted to his chief of staff, John Kelly, while the two were in Europe at a 2018 event to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. The revelation comes from a new book, “Frankly, We Did Win This…
