President Trump’s top counter-terrorism advisor, Sebastian Gorka, may soon be out. That’s the latest leak from the White House about the controversial deputy assistant to the president whose alleged lack of professional qualifications and past ties to anti-Semitic and racist groups in Hungary have made him a lightning rod. According to a story posted late…
Gallaudet University is like many other colleges and universities around the world, with students gathering in common areas to chat with their friends and set up study sessions. But there’s one thing that’s less common about the chitchats at Gallaudet: They’re all in American Sign Language. The Washington, D.C., university, sometimes known as “Gally,” was…
Paul Traynor’s documentary “New Trier: The Tip of the Spear” explains in deep detail all the elements of a seemingly local controversy that flared up last February at New Trier High School, a nationally distinguished public school in suburban Chicago’s heavily Jewish North Shore. If the film is to be believed, the angry dispute that…
Jewish students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are up in arms after the student government passed a resolution on Wednesday blaming Israel for police violence against African-Americans and calling for divestment from companies aiding Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, a move that was allegedly reached through under- handed tactic0 s0. “They have trampled on…
Writers, artists, and scholars will spend three days this weekend enlightening Chicagoans on various aspects of what the late comic George Carlin immortalized as “Stuff”: collecting it, organizing it, and having too much of it. The symposium, sponsored by the the Chicago Humanities Spring Fest, does not directly involve Jews. But Jews are probably involved…
(JTA) — On Wednesday, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif, attended a classified briefing with Vice President Mike Pence on the North Korea nuclear threat. By the next day, he’d become a target of Twitter snark, for a hypothetical challenge that sounded like something out of a Seth Rogen-James Franco movie. Sherman, who comes from what he…
Students at New Trier High School were pleased and excited when Andrew Aydin, a close associate of civil rights icon and Democratic Congress member John Lewis, agreed to speak at their school on civil rights; even more so when Colson Whitehead, the widely lauded author of the best-selling novel, “The Underground Railroad,” agreed to join…
Two years ago, Thomas Lopez-Pierre promised uptown Manhattan’s political insiders that he was going to quit being so outrageously offensive. The longtime gadfly, who once called a New York State Assemblywoman a “$20 political slut,” was convincing enough in his vow to reform that he drew a donation from a prominent uptown Democrat who had…
Despite lengthy exposes about his past associations with right-wing extremists in Hungary, Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s increasingly embattled counter-terrorism advisor, is no Nazi, an in-depth new profile of the White House aide concludes. He is, instead, according to Buzzfeed, an émigré opportunist whose efforts to parlay a skimpy resume and limited expertise into political success…
White nationalists and the “alt-right” were dismayed by President Trump’s remarks at a Holocaust remembrance speech on Tuesday, seeing in the speech further evidence of a betrayal to their cause. “You can never appease the Jews,” wrote Benjamin Garland at the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. “Give them an inch and they want a mile….
To one side loom towers manned by Israeli soldiers who keep watch from behind bulletproof glass. To the other stand concrete walls charred by fire bombs, pitted with bullet holes and scrawled with Palestinian graffiti. In between, barriers and steel fences block traffic or corral vehicles and pedestrians. In much the same way Checkpoint Charlie…
