Poland’s B’nai Brith has denounced the burning of a Jew in effigy during an anti-refugee rally. The anti-Semitic act followed tirades against Muslim refugees at a rally in Wroclaw, a major city in southwest Poland. “Raped, beaten and murdered by the Islamic savages,” the Polish nationalists shouted in the market square this week. “Do you…
A spy drama that lasted three decades, sowed suspicion between two allies, and that sent a Jewish American behind bars for half his life, ended unceremoniously Friday with the opening of a door in the middle of a dark night in North Carolina. Jonathan Pollard, the Navy intelligence analyst who stole American defense secrets and…
(JTA) — Conservative Judaism is at a crossroads. The movement is committed to Jewish tradition, but it’s seeing a growing number of its young people walk out the door — most often to Reform Judaism. American Jews who self-identify as Conservative increasingly are leading lives at odds with the core values and rules of Conservative…
(JTA) — Once the music started playing — not the “Hava Nagila” tune that made her the Jewish poster child of the London Games, but something equally folksy — Aly Raisman tumbled right out of bounds. On her first bit of gymnastics at her comeback World Championships here last month, she had quickly incurred a…
Ezra Schwartz was just 18 years old when he was killed this Thursday in a shooting attack in the West Bank. Originally from Sharon, Massachusetts, the teen was in Israel for a gap year. He was spending his time studying at at the “Ashreinu” Yeshiva in Beit Shemesh and volunteering. When the terror attack happened,…
At Camp Yavneh in the woods of New Hampshire they were known as the “Ezras” – Ezra Schwartz and Ezra Weener, close friends who shared the same height and name and spent summers together playing benign practical jokes and sharing a laugh. By last summer, the pair who had been bunkmates since they were nine-years-old…
Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard was released on parole in the United States on Friday after 30 years in prison, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, a case that became a serious strain in relations between the close allies. “The people of Israel welcome the release of Jonathan Pollard,” Netanyahu said in a statement. “After three…
The Florida family of a Palestinian-American teen beaten by Israeli police slammed the decision to free an officer without any prison time as “definitely not justice.” “It’s typical,” said Suhad Abukhdeir, the aunt of Tariq Abu Khdeir, whose brutal 2014 beating in Jerusalem was captured on videotape. “There’s nothing else to expect.” Tariq Abu Khdeir…
Samia Hathroubi, a French Muslim human rights activist, has been active in interfaith work between Muslim and Jewish communities as the European programs coordinator for the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. In the days since the November 13 Paris attacks, she has been wrestling with the implications for French Muslims and their relations with…
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…
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…
