A construction worker has reportedly confessed to the January murder of Brooklyn Hasidic businessman Menachem Stark, which he has told investigators was a botched robbery. Kendal Felix, 26, who worked for a contractor who worked with Stark, intended to rob the landlord when he and two buddies snatched him off the street outside his office…
(Reuters) — To both critics and supporters, it was “classic” John Kerry. A day before the formal end of Kerry’s quixotic, nine-month effort to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, the Secretary of State was surreptitiously taped making a comment that provoked a political firestorm in Washington. In a closed meeting with foreign policy experts, Kerry…
(JTA) — On Twitter, pro-Palestinian activists dubbed it “DivestApalooza.” Student governments at three Southern California public universities all voted on divestment resolutions targeting Israel in a single day. The April 23 votes were part of a surge in student governments at American universities voting on divestment resolutions. In the past two years, at least 16…
Several hours before Yom HaShoah solemnly commenced, the website deadspin.com released the fullest version yet of the secretly recorded conversations between Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and V. Stiviano, his ex-mistress. Their subject matter, Sterling’s antipathy toward black Americans, at one point veered in a remarkably timely direction. “Isn’t it wrong?” Stiviano…
The Seesaw is a new kind of advice column in which a a broad range of columnists will address the real life issues faced by interfaith couples and families. Join the discussion by commenting on this post, sharing it on Facebook or following the Forward on Twitter. And keep the questions coming. You can email…
The owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team may be well on the way to making his name, “Donald Sterling,” virtually synonymous in the public’s mind with bigotry. But that is not the name he was actually born with. Donald Tokowitz was born to Jewish immigrants in Chicago who had, in fact, fled Eastern…
(JTA) — Standing in front of a giant flag, a tall blond politician asks his excited followers whether their country should have greater or fewer Moroccans. When they are done chanting “fewer,” the speaker, Geert Wilders of the far-right Dutch Party for Freedom, promises his listeners that he will “take care of it.” Wilders was…
New York City has denied a second attempt by the Jewish Daily Forward to obtain information about consent forms gathered under a regulation that warns parents about metzitzah b’peh, a controversial circumcision rite. The city also refuses to say whether such forms even exist. A regulation that came into force at the beginning of 2013…
The Jewish mayor of Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv in the restive eastern section of the country was shot in a suspected assassination attempt that left him in critical condition. “Today at around noon an attempt was made on the life of Kharkiv Mayor Gennady Kernes,” officials from the city – Ukraine’s second largest –…
Several large, mainstream Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, have to decided to vote in favor of admitting the dovish Israel lobby J Street into organized Jewry’s primary umbrella group on Israel. Others, like the Jewish Federations of North America, are leaning towards voting that way, according to informed…
Near the front steps of the ghetto museum, a man approaches us. I’m fumbling with a map that I’ve just bought there. When I look up, I notice his posture first. It seems typical of people who often have to ask others for something: The shoulders are hunched, the head bent downwards. He has a…
