(JTA) — An unknown arsonist attempted twice to set on fire a synagogue building in downtown Chicago, while vandals smashed the windows of cars parked outside of a synagogue on the far north side of the city. Chicago Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told reporters on Sunday that Chicago Police Deputy Superintendent Anthony Ricci ordered that…
(JTA) — Palestinian leaders rejected a plan for an economic workshop announced as the first part of the Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan. The Palestinians say they were not consulted on the plan to hold the conference next month in Bahrain. Finance ministers and global and regional business leaders will meet June 25-26 in Manama…
(JTA) — Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jewish actor and comedian, was sworn in Monday as president of Ukraine and said his nation must defend their land like Israelis. Zelensky took the oath of office reportedly on a copy of the country’s constitution and a 16th-century manuscript of the New Testament. “We must become Icelanders in football,…
(JTA) — Netflix has dropped an Australian comedian who made jokes about the Holocaust and insulted a Jewish audience member who later complained in an email. Last month, Isaac Butterfield asked his audience at the Melbourne Comedy Festival to “imagine the joy of people when they heard the Jews were sent to the gas chambers,”…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Al Sharpton appealed to Reform Jews for a united front in facing down anti-Semitism, racism and other forms of bias and acknowledged his role in stoking division, recounting how the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow reprimanded him for his “cheap” rhetoric. The civil rights activist and CNN host reportedly has expressed regrets privately…
The family of an American-born lone soldier in the Israel Defense Forces who recently died by suicide is using social media to piece together what happened, The Times of Israel reported. Michaela Levit, 19, was found dead on her base in central Israel last week. Her body was flown to South Florida, where her family…
Al-Jazeera’s AJ+ Arabic channel pulled a video it posted to its social media channels Friday night that claimed Jews exploit the Holocaust and that Israel is the genocide’s “greatest beneficiary.” Two journalists who created the video were later suspended. The seven minute-long, Arabic-language video asserted that though the Holocaust did occur, “it’s different from how…
(JTA)– The Jewish Student Union sign at a Boston-area high school was vandalized with a swastika. The swastika was discovered Friday at Brookline High School, a public high school in a near Boston suburb, the CBS affiliate in Boston reported. “Anti-Semitic vandalism like this is a scary reminder that our work on fostering an inclusive,…
Updated 4:00 p.m. A couple that had moved to a heavily-Jewish neighborhood in Chicago were actually Christian missionaries who had been trying to pass as Jewish in order to promote their religion, the Jewish news website COLlive reported. The proselytizers, who went by David and Rivkah Costello, were exposed by a visitor from Brooklyn, New…
(JTA) — The German Bundestag is set to call the movement to boycott Israel anti-Semitic. The legislative body is expected to pass on Friday a non-binding resolution proposed by the four mainstream parties that calls to bar the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and any other group deemed anti-Semitic from receiving federal funds and from…
(JTA) – Most Democratic primary voters don’t follow news about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict all that closely, but have warm feelings about both Israel and the Palestinians. Those are some of the findings in a recent survey commissioned by the liberal pro-Israel group J Street. Four in five respondents agreed with the statement that “someone can be…
