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…
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…
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….
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Anti-Defamation League saw its legendary leader, Abraham Foxman, step down after 28 years at the helm and replaced by 44-year-old outsider Jonathan Greenblatt. UJA-Federation of New York’s longtime CEO, John Ruskay, left last June. His successor, Eric Goldstein, came from the private sector. Within the past few years, a new top leader also took…
The leader of America’s largest rabbinical organization vowed to improve his group’s disciplinary process following a Forward investigation that highlighted failures to alert a Jewish community of alleged sexual misconduct by a Reform rabbi. In a series of private emails and Facebook posts to rabbis, obtained by the Forward, Rabbi Steve Fox said that the…
