President Obama has promoted the first openly transgender person to work in the West Wing to be the White House’s top liaison to the LGBT community. Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, who is Jewish, has been serving as the Outreach and Recruitment Director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel since last year. Mara Keisling, executive director…
(JTA) — For Samir Patel, the term “goy” is no slur. It’s a point of pride. Patel is a manager of Suhag Wine & Liquors, a family-owned business in the heavily Orthodox neighborhood of Kew Gardens Hills, in Queens. He’s a Hindu immigrant from India, but the vast majority of his customers are religious Jews,…
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s premier yeshiva is seeking to assure parents that no sexual or physical abuse is taking place within its walls following a detailed report on allegations of such abuse in the past. “I categorically assure you that there is absolutely no abuse taking place in Oholei Torah that we know of,” Rabbi Sholom…
A senior Jewish federation executive has unusually blunt words for Israeli government officials planning to take up arms in the anti-BDS struggle on American college campuses: Back off, he says. “The Israeli government needs to get out of this business,” says Jay Sanderson, president and chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los…
A complaint from the hawkish Zionist Organization of America about alleged anti-Semitism among pro-Palestinian activists has drawn a quick response from administrators at New York City’s public university system, and a pile-on from elected officials and Jewish groups. In a February 24 letter, ZOA accused local chapters of the group Students for Justice in Palestine…
Bernie Sanders, the Jewish candidate who has gone further than any other member of the tribe in a presidential race, is struggling to connect with Jewish voters. But the rumpled firebrand is dominating rival Hillary Clinton among a surprising slice of the electorate: Arab Americans. Sanders swept Tuesday’s Democratic primary vote in Dearborn, Michigan, the…
Yishay Montogmery wanted to spend Tuesday evening relaxing and strumming his acoustic guitar on the Jaffa waterfront. Instead, his evening turned a real nightmare situation. When a young terrorist with a knife started attacking him, he didn’t waste anytime, he bashed him on the head with the only weapon he had available: his guitar. “After…
(JTA) — Fifty-one years ago this week, hundreds of people marched from Selma toward Montgomery, Alabama, to demand voting rights for African-Americans. The march, one of the most famous civil rights demonstrations in American history, helped spur the passage of the Voting Rights Act. What is less well known is that kippahs were a symbol…
Donald Trump’s ascent in the Republican presidential race has presented one group of Republicans with something more than just concern about the fate of their party. For neoconservatives, a Trump nomination could mean an extension of their sentence in a political Siberia. Some members of this hawkish cohort saw the 2016 election as an opportunity…
Forverts editor Boris Sandler, who introduced Yiddish journalism to a new generation and earned the laurels of the Jewish literary community in the U.S. and in Israel, will retire, Samuel Norich, publisher and president/CEO of the Forward Association, announced today. Sandler, 66, took the reins of the Yiddish Forward 18 years ago, and broadened the…
The bloody murder of an American business student in a tourist area of Jaffa, a seaport city adjacent to Tel Aviv, stunned tourists in Israel’s vacation hub — and shocked a university campus thousands of miles away in Tennessee. Taylor Force, a 29-year-old student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, was stabbed by a Palestinian as…
