Barack Obama’s campaign is taking its Jewish outreach strategy to YouTube with a pair of videos of him talking about Israel. The first video is a recorded message to the people of Sderot, which was shown at the recent “Live for Sderot” fund-raiser in Los Angeles: The second features excerpts of his recent remarks to…
The executive director of America’s leading pro-Palestinian advocacy group was ousted recently, following allegations of financial misconduct. Rafi Dajani, who was the American Task Force on Palestine’s second-ranking official and one of the country’s most visible speakers on Palestinian affairs, was fired in late January due to an “apparent breach of his fiduciary responsibilities,” according…
KATI MARTON AND NOBEL LAUREATE MUHAMMAD YUNUS HONORED AT INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S HEALTH COALITION GALA “In my travels, I have learned that if the world is going to be saved, it will be women who will do the saving,” said Kati Marton, who, with 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, was honored at the February…
Los Angeles – When Beverly Hills’s Iranian Jewish mayor, Jimmy Jamshid Delshad, ran for office in 2007, he faced an uphill battle. But contrary to conventional wisdom, his biggest challenge wasn’t persuading skeptical non-Iranians to rally behind him. Instead, Delshad’s toughest fight was convincing his natural constituency — the city’s roughly 8,000 Iranian American Jews…
Washington – Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam and icon of black antisemitism in America, is emerging once again as a prominent factor in the political arena, causing trouble not only for Democratic presidential frontrunner Barack Obama but also for a number of other political candidates. In a February 24 speech in Chicago…
Tel Aviv – Mutiny is brewing in the Israeli army. The protest isn’t political, like past incidents of disobedience by hard right-wingers who refuse to evacuate settlements, and hard left-wingers who refuse to serve in the Palestinian territories. This rebellion is bubbling up across the political spectrum. The anger is directed toward the Knesset and…
What was supposed to be a bipartisan debate among the three major presidential campaigns turned into a Democratic showdown, as the McCain campaign pulled out at the last minute from a scheduled debate of surrogates before a gathering of Jewish leaders. With the McCain camp absent, Jewish representatives of the Clinton and Obama campaigns vied…
Barack Obama met with Cleveland Jewish leaders in a private meeting Sunday a few hours before his chief Jewish surrogate, Florida Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler, took questions from a crowd of 500 at a local synagogue. Obama suggested in his meeting that a driving force in his Jewish campaign was fighting back against an Internet…
A piece of land in Kishinev, Moldova, that was once home to a synagogue and is the place where a Jewish community center now sits has become the focus of a legal battle between American and Moldovan Jewish organizations. According to officials at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Association of Jewish Organizations and…
Russia’s only graduate program dedicated to Jewish studies is caught in the crossfire between its parent university and St. Petersburg city officials, who closed the university last week over fire code violations. Critics say the closure was a politically motivated response to a university course in election monitoring. The European University at St. Petersburg, which…
Often, the biggest question at the Oscars besides “Who’s going to win?” is “Who is that?” followed by the thought: “Wonder what he’ll be doing next year.” Turns out, one of the men who stood with Al Gore to accept the 2007 Oscar for best documentary had already been the key creative force behind several…
