(JTA) — Beto O’Rourke, the El Paso native and former congressman, hopes to build on the buzz that accompanied his unsuccessful but oh-so-close campaign against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in last year’s Texas Senate race. O’Rourke, a Roman Catholic, has clashed at times with the local Jewish community, particularly his vote in 2014 against funding…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is like a CNN panel — more people fit than you think possible. Up next is the nice one: Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. She’s committed to bipartisanship, close to Republicans like her late Senate colleague John McCain from Arizona and John Hoeven from neighboring North…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s pick for vice president is the daughter of a mother who immigrated from India and a father who immigrated from Jamaica,. Harris, 54, has some Jewish nuggets in her history. That time @KamalaHarris met her Jewish in-laws. “The first time I meet my mother-in-law, she looks at me,…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — In the waning days of 2018, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., formally declared her interest in running for the presidency. Warren was not the first to do so — former Maryland Rep. John Delaney has for months been canvassing for Democratic votes in Iowa, the first caucus state — but Warren is the…
The Jewish community in Chicago is one of the biggest in the country, and until recently, the mayor was Jewish, but leaders in the city’s largest Orthodox neighborhood said that a mayor hadn’t come to meet them there for decades – until June 15, that is. Lori Lightfoot, who took office last month, is the…
Chico had a vision. A wealthy aviation reinsurance magnate and a devoted Jew, Maurice “Chico” Sabbah took great pride in seeing the children of his Jewish community in Greensboro, North Carolina, become leaders of the faith. So he hatched a plan to make Greensboro — Jewish population, 3,000 — an international destination in elite Jewish…
What is a concentration camp? Is describing detention camps for immigrants together with the phrase “Never again” acceptable? Do these references trivialize the mass slaughter that took place in the Nazi-era death camps? The use of these words by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in reference to the “brutalizing” of illegal immigrants in detention centers on the…
NEW YORK (JTA) — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised a ruckus when she said detention centers holding undocumented immigrants on the southern border are “concentration camps.” “The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are,” the freshman New York Democrat said Monday night in an Instagram Live video. “If…
Birthright Israel has sent 650,000 young Jews to Israel over the past two decades, and few have complained about their free trip to the Jewish state. But last summer, something strange started happening. Members of IfNotNow, the Jewish organization that raises awareness about Palestinian suffering and American complicity in it, would go on the trips…
The American Hebrew Academy, a prestigious and ambitious Jewish boarding school in North Carolina, abruptly announced its closure Tuesday morning, surprising its students and leaving its faculty without jobs. The closure was announced in an email signed by both the AHA’s chief executive and the chairwoman of the board. The email was notification to most…
When Rabbi Ted Falcon dies, plant a fig tree over his remains. Sorry, with his remains: Falcon wants his body to be composted. “I’m just trying to apply the principle of returning dust to dust,” he said. “How do you do that in the most productive way?” In May, Washington became the first state to…
