(JTA) — After successful lobbying by Orthodox Jewish groups and others, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tucked $2.75 billion in aid for private schools into the $1.9 trillion pandemic rescue package. The move came over the objections of some Democratic leaders, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and public school advocates who have fought efforts to…
(JTA) — Jewlia Eisenberg, who became an unlikely musical star by creating lively tunes inspired in part by arcane poetic and intellectual traditions, has died after struggling with the effects of a rare autoimmune disease. She was 50. The frontwoman for the band Charming Hostess, Eisenberg was a fixture of the avant-garde and experimental music…
(JTA) — Even among Jews in Poland, few are shocked at this point by the popular figurines of haredi Orthodox Jews counting money that are sold there as good luck charms. Yet even locals are pausing to take stock of the latest development on that controversial theme: scented candles that one retailer advertised as “giving…
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was stripped of her House committee assignments last month for antisemitic and other incendiary comments, toured Orthodox areas of Brooklyn and Long Island on Monday, according to a community leader who hosted her. Nachman Mostofsky, executive director of Chovevei Zion, an Orthodox conservative group based in Brooklyn, told the Forward…
BOSTON (JTA) – Carl J. Shapiro, one of Boston’s most significant philanthropists and Brandeis University’s most generous donor, died March 7 at his home in Boston. He was 108. Shapiro built his initial wealth in the middle of the 20th century by transforming his father’s small coat factory into Kay Windsor, a national manufacturer of…
(JTA) — Donald Trump showed off photos of naked women posing with him on a yacht to mourners at the shiva for an associate’s mother, The New Yorker reported. Jennifer Weisselberg, the former daughter-in-law of the Trump organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, recalled the incident in a profile of Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan…
Meyers Leonard, the Miami Heat player who made headlines Tuesday for shouting an antisemitic slur while livestreaming a video-game, has been suspended from team activities a week by the NBA and fined $50,000. The punishment is comparable with racial and homophobic slurs said by other NBA players in recent years. Leonard presumably did not receive…
(J. the Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Jon Minadeo Jr., a 38-year-old man infamous within the Bay Area Jewish community, has launched an online merchandise store selling virulently anti-Semitic and homophobic T-shirts and apparel in an effort to fund propaganda tours across California and beyond — what he calls his “activism.” Dubbed…
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed in a TV interview on Tuesday that she didn’t come up with the term “Jewish space lasers” that triggered backlash from the Jewish community. She blamed the whole hoopla on an activist, leftist journalist. In a recently uncovered Facebook post published by Media Matters, Greene alleged that space lasers were…
Julian Edelman, one of the most prominent Jewish professional athletes in America, spoke out on Wednesday after it was revealed that a player for the Miami Heat had used an antisemitic slur. “Hate is like a virus,” Edelman wrote in an open letter posted to his Twitter account. “Even accidentally, it can rapidly spread.” The…
(JTA) — Steven Spielberg’s newest project is on a subject that he’s quite familiar with: He will direct and co-write a movie loosely based on his childhood in Arizona, Deadline reported Tuesday. Tony Kushner, the Jewish playwright who wrote “Angels in America” and has collaborated with Spielberg on “Munich” and “Lincoln,” is working with the famed…
