Shlomo Sulayman, not just Israel’s oldest man, but also one of the oldest people in the world, passed away in Netanya yesterday at the age of 117. Born in Yemen, Sulayman witnessed the deterioration of that country’s once-vibrant Jewish community. With his passing, the circle of those who had firsthand experience of Jewish life in…
The organizers of five Jewish religious gatherings in the Hasidic hub of Borough Park, Brooklyn, received maximum-allowable $15,000 fines for violating state rules limiting such gatherings to 10 people in areas where coronavirus infection rates are highest, sources told the New York Post. The city said that it handed out $150,000 total in fines in…
(JTA) — The son of a Jewish same-sex couple should be granted U.S. citizenship, a federal appeals court ruled. The ruling on Friday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds an earlier district court decision recognizing the citizenship from birth of Ethan Dvash-Banks, who was born by surrogacy in Canada to Andrew and Elad…
(JTA) — Jewish American economist Paul Milgrom will share the Nobel Prize in economics with American economist Robert Wilson for their work in auction theory, the the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday. The laureates’ theoretical discoveries in their studies of how auctions work have improved auctions in practice, according to the prize committee….
Facebook updated its hate speech policy to ban content that “denies or distorts” the Holocaust, the platform announced Monday. “I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement on Facebook. “My own thinking has…
(JTA) — A dispute that has roiled Borough Park, an Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn, took a dark new turn Sunday night after Heshy Tischler, the man who led protests against COVID-19 restrictions there last week was arrested and charged with inciting a riot. The New York Police Department announced Sunday night that it had taken…
A Florida principal who told a parent he “can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event” will be rehired after a vote Wednesday night by the school board that fired him. William Latson made the comments to a parent in 2018 and was later removed from the Boca Raton high school where he had…
Born in the wake of an avalanche, he bought his first fishing boat at 14, has sailed through arctic gales, and killed a grizzly bear in self-defense, oh, and he’s a doctor too. It’s not a dating profile, it’s how Dr. Al Gross, a Jewish candidate for senator of Alaska presents himself in one of…
Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who pointed loaded guns, fingers on the trigger, at Black Lives Matter protesters who marched through their neighborhood, have been indicted by a grand jury for exhibiting firearms and tampering with evidence, The Associated Press reported. The McCloskeys have in the past also come into conflict with…
Heshy Tischler, an aspiring politician and the de facto leader of the protest movement which has spread through Orthodox Brooklyn the past two nights in response to New York’s new COVID-19 restrictions, told reporters that he has a “moser” list. “Moser” is a Hebrew term for one who informs on the Jewish community to outside…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — There was a hard deadline to meet and the job involved delicate international negotiations, but the Trump administration’s top Middle East envoy got on the job. Thanks to Avi Berkowitz, Sukkot was was saved for tens of thousands of New York area Jews. Fox News reported Wednesday that Berkowitz led a successful…
