Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed pushed back on demands from local Black Lives Matter supporters for the city to boycott Israel by standing behind a police training program between his city and Israel. “I happen to believe that (Israel) has some of the best counterterrorism techniques in the world,” Reed said at a July 18 press…
Influential Los Angeles rabbi David Wolpe called Rabbi Haskel Lookstein’s decision against giving the invocation at the Republican National Convention “a shame” in a Time Magazine opinion piece. Wolpe, who gave the invocation at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, said that a prayer is a blessing that does not — and should not — constitute…
Carlos Santana is moving ahead with a performance, just days away now, in Tel Aviv — shunning public calls from the movement for the boycott, divest and sanction against Israel for him to cancel. The Grammy-award winning rock superstar is scheduled to play in Tel Aviv on July 30. And while Palestinian, Israeli and American…
Ten days after the murder of promising Democratic staffer Seth Rich, the Washington D.C. slaying remains unsolved and police say they have no suspects in the crime. Rich, a Jewish data analyst for the Democratic National Committee who worked on polling station expansion, was shot and killed as he walked home on Sunday, July 10….
A feud between Hasidic and Modern Orthodox Jews over eruvs, the ritual boundaries that allow more mobility on the Sabbath, has apparently spread from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights to nearby Park Slope. The Greater Crown Heights eruv has been cut down twice in the two last weeks. Now the adjacent Park Slope Eruv…
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Today’s convention theme, according to the Republican National Convention, is Make America Work Again. According to the convention website, “The Obama years have delivered anemic economic growth, the lowest labor-force participation rate in 38 years, and job-killing regulations and legislation like Obamacare. These policies are crushing middle-class families, and a…
Sure, there was a rabbi delivering the opening invocation, an activists selling a variety of Trump kippas outside the arena, and a handful of activists roaming the hallways, but Jewish Republicans are somewhat hard to find at the RNC convention in Cleveland. Still, there some big names no one wants to miss. Here are 7…
Sarah Hurwitz, a Jewish speechwriter for Michelle Obama, wrote the 2008 speech that Melania Trump apparently cribbed for her own debut speech on the opening night of the Republican National Convention. Hurwitz now works at the White House as a senior adviser, and once worked for Hillary Clinton. She helped pen the message delivered by…
(JTA) — After 32 years at Middlebury College, Ron Liebowitz is calling Brandeis University his new academic home. On July 1, the 59-year-old New York native took the reins as the ninth president of Brandeis, a Jewish-sponsored, nonsectarian research university in suburban Boston with an enrollment of 3,600 undergraduates and more than 2,000 graduate students….
In recent weeks, America’s racial wounds have been torn open, an uneasy rhythm of violence playing out in the streets and on social media: African-Americans shot dead on camera by police, protests rolling through cities and police killed in apparent retaliatory shootings. Like many African American congregations, members of the century-old black Hebrew Israelite movement…
The Republican National Convention turned to a little-known Ohio police rabbi to deliver an invocation after Rabbi Haskel Lookstein pulled out over the weekend amid protests. Rabbi Ari Wolf took to the stage at the Quicken Loans arena to give an invocation that combined Jewish prayers and phrases in Hebrew. Wolf used the term “avinu…
