⚖️ Survivors of the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh testified Wednesday in the sentencing phase of the trial of Robert Bowers. A police officer who was shot in the head and hospitalized for months said he contemplated suicide. (AP)
?? The king of Morocco has invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a visit, a first in the history of the modern Jewish state. Israel this week became the second country in the world to recognize Morocco’s annexation of oil-rich land in the Western Sahara that it annexed in 1975. The two countries normalized ties as part of the Abraham Accords in 2020. (JTA)
? A growing number of researchers say the work of Chiune Sugihara, often called the “Japanese Schindler” and credited with providing thousands of life-saving visas for Jews fleeing the Nazis, has been exaggerated. (JTA)
? A South Carolina school district is considering banning The Fixer, Bernard Malamud’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about antisemitism. The book was the subject of a landmark 1982 Supreme Court case that limited local school districts’ ability to censor books, but some experts say may be ripe for a challenge. (JTA)
✍️ A letter Albert Einstein wrote to American Jewish students in 1950, rebutting the biblical story of creation, is up for auction. The document is valued at $125,000. (Religion News Service)
? The Escape Artist, the award-winning 2022 book about the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz, is set to be turned into a limited TV series. Watch our interview with the book’s author. (Deadline)
What else we’re reading ➤ A new musical spotlights the Nazi persecution of LGBTQ+ people … A visit to the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum inspires a new picture book … Why Jews are flocking to Loop, a new dating app where users do the matchmaking.
What we’re listening to ➤ Beth Harpaz, who shepherds our Bintel Brief, and Chana Pollack, the Foward’s archivist, gave a behind-the-scenes look at our century-old advice column in this podcast from the Canadian Jewish News.