MILWAUKEE — As a young girl growing up in Connecticut, Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg, who sits on Wisconsin’s second highest tribunal and is now running for state Supreme Court, made what many would consider an unusual, albeit mature decision: She refused a bat mitzvah. Kloppenburg, 62, recalls that she was active in her Conservative shul –…
Israel’s appointment of a settler leader to replace a well-liked career diplomat as the country’s top official representative in New York is unsettling groups on the left, such as the dovish pro-Israel group J Street. Dani Dayan, the former leader of Israel’s settler movement, will replace career foreign service officer Ido Aharoni as Israel’s consul…
TEL AVIV (JTA) — It began as an all-too-common story: A Palestinian assailant in the contested West Bank city of Hebron stabs and wounds an Israeli soldier. Israeli forces shoot him dead. Hours after the incident Thursday, a political and moral firestorm engulfed Israel. A video showed a soldier executing the already incapacitated attacker. One…
Three quarters of respondents in a survey about divorce in Israel said they supported taking the procedure out of the rabbinate’s hands and subjecting it to the authority of secular family courts. The survey on divorce, which under Israel’s laws is handled for Jewish couples by rabbinical judges with the authority of family court magistrates,…
The historic compromise that would have created an egalitarian prayer section at the holy Western Wall has been compromised. Under intense pressure from his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that “several difficulties arose” with the painstakingly-negotiated deal and that new talks will be held. The difficulties? It comes down to…
Hollis Gauss visited her dentist in the middle of February to get a broken filling replaced. While Gauss and the dentist waited for the Novocain to kick in, they chatted about recent events in their hometown of Durham, North Carolina. It was the dentist who brought up the local Jewish elementary school, of which Gauss…
On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple: Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home. The only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired…
Bernie Sanders didn’t flinch when he was interrupted by a finch — and the crowd went bonkers. It’s been a good few days for the Vermont senator and thorn in Hillary Clinton’s side. On Saturday, he trounced the former secretary of state in Democratic nominating contests in Washington state, Hawaii, and Alaska. “I think, I…
The New York State Senate has voted to slash $485 million in funding to senior colleges in the City University of New York system to “send a message” that they have not done enough to fight campus anti-Semitism. On March 14, a state budget resolution championed by Republicans passed after a sprawling two-hour debate on…
ANTWERP (JTA) – The hundreds of rifle-toting police and soldiers who patrol Isaac Michaeli’s neighborhood have done little to improve his sense of safety. “When the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, the soldiers might as well be cardboard cutouts,” he said. A jeweler in his 40s, Michaeli lives with his…
TEL AVIV — In the immediate aftermath of the Istanbul suicide attack that killed three Israeli tourists March 19, Turkish leaders sent condolences to the victims’ families and otherwise seemed to move to repair diplomatic ties between the two nations. The terrorism even may have inadvertently created momentum for normalization talks. But that doesn’t mean…
