JERUSALEM (JTA) — A rocket fired from Gaza hit a school building in the southern Israeli city of Sderot on Thursday evening. The building, identified as a Jewish religious school, was damaged but no injuries were reported. It was reported to be empty at the time of impact and was fortified against rockets. No one has…
Alex Jones’ InfoWars has paid up for its unauthorized use of a familiar cartoon frog. Cartoonist Matt Furie won a $15,000 settlement against Jones’ website for using his creation Pepe the Frog in merchandise espousing a far-right worldview, The Washington Post reports. Pepe, a teary-eyed anthropomorphic amphibian, dreamed up by Furie as a “peaceful frog-dude”…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn, who is trailing in her bid to win the Democratic presidential nomination, met in Washington D.C. with Jewish Democrats. Amy Rotenberg, a crisis communications consultant, hosted the event for Klobuchar. About 70 people attended, a participant said. Klobuchar discussed immigration, Israel, foreign policy and climate change. Among the 24…
(JTA) — The city of Lodz, once a major Jewish hub in Poland, hosted its first Jewish festival in decades. Hundreds attended the Festival of Tranquility last week in the central city over the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. Drawing on similar events in Krakow, Warsaw, Budapest and other cities throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the…
The wait staff at a Jerusalem cafe lifted their shirts to scare away a group of ultra-Orthodox men after dealing with weeks of protests, The Washington Post reported. Bastet, a vegan and LGBT-friendly cafe, is open on Saturdays during the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest. Each week, a group of ultra-Orthodox men walk by,…
(JTA) — A Jewish death row inmate in Texas has filed an appeal alleging that the judge in the case was anti-Semitic and racist. Randy Halprin, 41, said in the appeal filed last month that Judge Vickers Cunningham referred to him using anti-Semitic language and should have recused himself from his case. Halprin was part…
(JTA) — A Jewish candidate for Seattle City Council has been subjected to anti-Semitic threats on the online message board 8Chan and on social media. Ari Hoffman, a married father of three, is one of nearly 50 candidates for seven of the nine council seats. The primary is scheduled for Aug. 6 and the general…
(JTA) — The Toronto Raptors are one win away from the NBA championship — and a free trip to Israel. The team’s Jewish billionaire co-owner, Larry Tanenbaum, said he will bring the club to visit if it wins the title. The Raptors are up 3 games to 1 in the best-of-7 Finals over the two-time…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — More than half of the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives say a peace plan that does not expressly have as its outcome two states would endanger the prospects of peace. The resolution, a dig at the Trump administration’s peace policies, was backed by J Street, the liberal Middle East policy…
A Muslim-American comedian was awarded $4.1 million in a lawsuit against the founder of a neo-Nazi website after the comedian was falsely accused of committing a terrorist attack, Huffpost reported. SiriusXM Radio show host Dean Obeidallah wrote an article in 2017 criticizing how President Trump was handling white supremacy. After The Daily Stormer website followed…
As interest has been renewed in the “Central Park Five” case thanks to a recent Netflix miniseries, so has scrutiny for the prosecutor on the case, Linda Fairstein. Fairstein claims she did nothing wrong in the case, in which five teenagers — four black and one Hispanic — were wrongfully convicted for the 1989 assault of a…
