Life is good for Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin. The Texas capital is famous for its music scene, SXSW festival, and “Keep Austin Weird” sensibility — Adler revels in all of that. But his job isn’t easy. Increasingly, being the mayor of Austin has come to mean high-noon-style showdowns with the state and federal…
An arrest that would have likely only made for a brief mention in local crime news is now gaining national attention and stirring right-wing conspiracy theories. Imran Awan, who worked in the office of Democratic congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz as a part-time information technology aide, has been charged with bank fraud after being arrested by…
Controversial White House aide Sebastian Gorka appears poised for a more visible role promoting President Trump’s agenda — despite unanswered questions about his ties to far-right anti-Semitic and racist groups in Hungary. Once relegated to right-wing media outlets, Gorka has recently made prominent appearances on such prime-time mainstream cable news shows as “360 With Anderson Cooper,”…
The CEO of one of the American Jewish community’s most iconic charities is returning a $525,000 loan he received from the organization, following an exposé in the Forward. A spokesman for the Jewish National Fund told New York Jewish Life, a small Jewish newspaper, that the group’s CEO would pay back the loan by the…
Phil Mazo, a comedian based in Jersey City, NJ, was reading through the to-do list on his phone when he decided it might be time to check off one item that had been on the list for some time: Buy a take-home genome testing kit from the company 23andMe. After finding a deal on a…
When Nazi forces advanced towards the Ukrainian village of Korolówka in 1943, Etcia Goldberg was 36 years old, a widowed mother of three children. As the armies drew closer, Etcia took matters into her own hands, joining a group of 37 Jews to a small cave known as Priest’s Grotto. There, they hid underground, living…
“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” The people united will never be defeated! Protesters chanted loudly as police led them away from a public hearing this week on rezoning a portion of Brooklyn’s Broadway Triangle to make room for a controversial new development on a rare slice of available land in the booming borough. Seven…
One of the American Jewish community’s most iconic charities appears to have broken New York state law by loaning its CEO over $500,000 to help him buy property. Known for its ubiquitous blue-and-white charity boxes, present in virtually every American synagogue and Hebrew school for generations, Jewish National Fund is a major American Zionist organization…
This Saturday, travel back in time to the innocent days before Facebook and Twitter, when in order to have an argument with a stranger, you actually had to do it in person. The Newberry Library’s annual Bughouse Square Debates revive a glorious era in the park’s history, back in the early 20th century, when socialists,…
She was 22 when she was sold to a high-ranking soldier in the Islamic State group. And she knew she was privileged, getting a high-ranking husband. After all, most Yazidi girls are sold 25 times at minimum. Being owned by a high-ranking official meant she would most likely be kept for longer. Every morning, her…
The New Jersey hamlet of Mahwah has become the latest flashpoint in tensions between locals and a growing Orthodox population in the far northeast corner of the state along the border with New York. A symbolic boundary that allows religious Jews to carry objects outside on the Sabbath, called an eruv, is at the heart…
