This is an adaptation of our weekly Shabbat newsletter, sent by our editor-in-chief on Friday afternoons. Sign up here to get the Forward’s free newsletters delivered to your inbox. And click here to download and print a PDF of Your Weekend Reads. Jodi Rudoren, our editor-in-chief, is off today for her twins’ bnai mitzvah, so…
(JTA) — Deni Avdija, the 19-year-old Israeli basketball phenom, was taken by the Washington Wizards with the ninth overall pick of the NBA Draft on Wednesday night – the earliest an Israeli has been picked in league history. Avdija, a lanky 6-9 forward for Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel’s top professional league, becomes the second…
An organization representing ultra-Orthodox Jews is asking the highest court in the land to block New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 restrictions on worship — and to do it in time for Shabbat on Nov. 20. Agudath Israel of America has been trying to overturn Cuomo’s rules in the courts for more than a month…
NOV. 18, 2020 • 15 DAYS AFTER THE ELECTION Welcome to FAHRENHEIT 411, a special newsletter on disinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election. It is produced in partnership with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank that studies extremism, and written by Molly Boigon, an investigative reporter at the Forward….
With questions over Israel policy continuing to play an outsize role in the runoff election for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, Jon Ossoff came to the defense of his fellow Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock on Wednesday. “Reverend Warnock is a beloved friend and ally of Georgia’s’s Jewish community and a friend of Israel,” Ossoff said…
(JTA) — When Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann and her colleagues gathered in a backyard earlier this month to sing together, they knew it would likely be the last time for the foreseeable future. COVID-19 case counts in Chicago were rising sharply, and the mayor and governor warned that new restrictions would soon be necessary to curb…
In late September, six months into a global pandemic that had devastated his city, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti prayed. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and things were a mess. On his watch, more than 250,000 people in L.A. County had tested positive for the Covid-19 virus. More than 6,000 had…
This article is adapted from The Branch, a monthly podcast exploring individual relationships between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. The Branch is produced by Hadassah and created by Dina Kraft, a journalist based in Tel Aviv. Sign up here to listen to episodes and be notified when new episodes are published. It’s late afternoon…
By last spring Dr. Tal Zaks had a pretty good sense that the COVID-19 vaccine under development at the biotech firm Moderna would work. It now appears he was right. Zaks is Moderna’s chief medical officer, a native Israeli whose career in medicine has been immersed in drug discovery and development. On Nov. 16, the…
(JTA)— Weeks after a federal complaint alleged an anti-Semitic climate at the University of Illinois, the university announced it would work with Jewish groups to improve conditions for Jews and pro-Israel students on campus. The campus in Champaign-Urbana, home to 34,000 undergraduates and some 3,000 Jewish undergraduate students, was recently the subject of a legal…
An FBI report revealing a continued increase in antisemitic hate crimes in 2019 undercounts the problem, groups that track those crimes said on Monday. According to the report, antisemitic hate crimes jumped 14% in 2019, a year that saw a shooting in a synagogue in Poway, Calif., and another in a kosher supermarket in Jersey…
