Imad and Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh heard the gunshots reverberate at close range as they were sitting on the porch of their Hebron home, drinking coffee. Quickly, Imad Abu Shamsiyeh went to check on the construction workers who were renovating a section of their home. None of them were hurt. Then, rather than duck inside until…
(JTA) — Simone Zimmerman, the Bernie Sanders campaign’s newly hired national , is quite familiar with the American Jewish establishment. She is used to fighting against it. During the 2014 Gaza war, Zimmerman was one of the leaders of a group of young Jews that held regular protest vigils outside the offices of the Conference…
One of the Jewish businessmen at the center of a reported federal corruption investigation rocking New York politics is the scion of a wealthy and politically-connected California Orthodox family, the Forward has learned. Jona Rechnitz, the 32-year-old real estate developer whose face and name have appeared daily in every New York City tabloid, is the…
Volodymr Groysman is on the verge of making history as the first Jewish Prime Minister of Ukraine, a country firmly planted in the American psyche as a place of anti-Semitism and pogroms. Groysman, 38, is proposing the formation of a new coalition government following the resignation of Prime Minister Areniy Yatsenyuk on Sunday. If Groysman’s…
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders decided to open his busy weekend in New York with a speech outside of the old apartment building that he called home during his first 18 years. The street, off Kings Highway in Brooklyn, where the young Sanders played marbles with his friends is now home to ultra-Orthodox families, and…
(JTA) — In January 2015, Rabbi Marcelo Polakoff was stuck in Buenos Aires when his phone rang. He’d been planning a trip to New York but a storm had canceled all flights, and Polakoff, the rabbi of Cordoba, a province in central Argentina, was cooling his heels at his sister’s house. A woman he didn’t know…
(JTA) — How was Helene and Bob Fine’s family seder in 2000 different from every other Passover night? First lady Hillary Clinton and her daughter Chelsea came. (President Bill Clinton would have joined, too, if not for Yasser Arafat, but we’ll get to that.) This was no political or community institution event. It was a…
Hillary Clinton backed Israel’s 2014 war in Gaza in a television interview Sunday amid a controversy over Democratic rival Bernie Sanders’s claim that it acted “disproportionately” in the campaign. The Democratic frontrunner told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the Jewish state bombed and invaded the Hamas-ruled enclave in self-defense, Politico reported When “your soldiers…
Ted Cruz sought to put a controversy over his off-the-cuff New York comments on “money and the media” behind him with a speech at the Republican Jewish Coalition on Saturday in Las Vegas. Cruz opened his comments with a “Good Shabbos” blessing, moved on to a quick mention of the Jewish calendar month of Nisan…
It was the future U.S. senator from New Jersey’s first Purim party, back at Oxford University in the 1990s. The home video shows a young Cory Booker dancing in circles and carrying on his back a bearded man dressed in a clown suit – Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. But today, instead of bringing a smile to…
The City University of New York’s efforts to deal with charges and countercharges about anti-Semitism and free speech on campus regarding Israel will soon face a daunting new challenge: On April 15, the school system’s graduate student council will vote on a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Hamad Sindhi, co-chair for communications at CUNY’s…
