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American Terror Victim Was Suburban Boston Teen Studying for Year in Israel
The American killed in a West Bank shooting was a Massachusetts teenager who was studying for a year at an Israeli yeshiva. Ezra Schwartz, 18, of the Boston suburb of Sharon, was reportedly returning from visiting a memorial to the three young people kidnapped and killed in 2014 when he was ambushed near the settlement…
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Ex-Hasidic Transgender Woman Speaks Out on New Identity
Srully Stein grew up in Brooklyn’s Hasidic Vizhnitzer community. He got married at 18, and started a family. Despite the fact that he looked much like any other Hasid, he did not feel comfortable in his male body. No one, of course, in the ultra-Orthodox community had a clue that Stein was born as the…
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What This French Rabbi Wants You to Know About the Paris Attacks
Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur leads a congregation belonging to the Mouvement Juif Liberal de France (Liberal Jewish Movement of France). As France’s third female rabbi, she has long believed in the need for Jews to constantly re-evaluate what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. In a November 17 email exchange with the Forward…
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Richard Joel Scores $1.6M Payout Amid Deep Yeshiva Fiscal Crisis
As his college’s finances continued to crumble last year, Yeshiva University’s president, Richard Joel publicly took a pay cut. Then months later, he privately pocketed a deferred compensation payment of $1.6 million. That payout took Joel’s total compensation for 2014 to $2.8 million, among the highest packages for college presidents nationwide. But unlike most of…
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Israel Says Paris Attacks Prove Its Point About Terror — But Europe Disagrees
In the days after Islamic State terrorists attacked Paris, killing 129, Israeli officials had a message for the people of France: We feel your pain. The Paris attacks came on the heels of a bloody six weeks in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, in which 14 Israelis and more than 70 Palestinians have been killed….
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As Releaase Nears, Jonathan Pollard Shielded From Public Embrace He Once Sought
After spending 30 years in the jailhouse spotlight, Jonathan Pollard’s lawyers, family members and friends are now trying to shield the Israeli spy from public attention. According to a parole decision handed down in July, Pollard is scheduled to be released no later than November 21, and since his release day falls on a Saturday,…
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When Israel Demolishes a Palestinian Home, Does It Deter Terror or Encourage It?
Muawiyah Abu Jamal, a slight 42-year-old construction worker, recalls vividly the night that Israeli security forces came to his East Jerusalem neighborhood to demolish the nearby home of his younger brother, Ghassan Abu Jamal. The October 6 demolition came, he recalled, almost one year after his brother and his cousin, Odai Abu Jamal, attacked a…
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Trial Shows How Far Kingmaker Sheldon Silver Has Fallen
Sheldon Silver stepped into the path of an impatient bicyclist on the way out of the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan at the end of the first week of his criminal trial. In court that day, Silver had heard an email read out calling him “the most powerful man in New York…
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Syria Refugee Crisis Spurs Surge of Giving
With 12 million Syrians forced from their homes in the past four years, the refugee crisis has hit levels not seen since World War II. For Jewish charities in the field, September 3 was a turning point. That was the day multiple media outlets published photographs of a 3-year-old Syrian boy named Aylan Kurdi, showing…
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Hundreds Gather In Tel Aviv to Show Solidarity after Paris Attacks
Hundreds of Israelis came to show solidarity with France this Saturday, after Friday’s tragic terror attacks. Carrying French flags and signs, voicing their solidarity, the crowd gathered at Rabin Square. Many of the attendants were French Jews who made aliyah to Israel. French Ambassador to Israel Patrick Maisonnave presided over the rally, which took place…
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How Norman Sugarman Became $50B Godfather of Charitable Funds
If you asked most people why the year 1969 was important in American life, few would mention that year’s federal Tax Reform Act. But Norman Sugarman’s fingerprints on that document may have had as much of a lasting effect on this country’s history as Neil Armstrong’s feet on the moon. More than $50 billion in…
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