(JTA) — When Farida Trichine and 11 of her friends burst into a French supermarket in 2009 and began applying stickers with anti-Israel slogans to vegetables imported from the Jewish state, she expected to be escorted from the store by police. What she didn’t expect was to be convicted of inciting racial hatred and slapped…
Aviva Sufian is in “listening mode.” Less than a month after being appointed to serve as the first ever special envoy for U.S. Holocaust survivor services, she is learning the outlines of her new position by speaking to survivors, service providers and not-for-profit organizations, many of them Jewish. “This is the last generation of survivors…
In 1926, a distraught father wrote to the Forverts’s advice column, A Bintel Brief, with a problem: Where are all the Jewish men? With four daughters to marry off, and no Jewish husbands in sight, the man was considering moving to another city. “We live in a country town where we are the only Jewish…
Not many communal leaders are referred to as the “Jewish pope,” but then not many find themselves regularly on the front page of The New York Times, or have the vice president sing “Happy Birthday” to them in front of a huge conference hall. This, in part, explains why the news of Abraham Foxman’s retirement…
On January 30, a federal court judge threw out the $680 million lawsuit brought against Yeshiva University by 34 former students of its high school for boys who claimed they were sexually abused in the 1970s and ’80s. The suit also pinpointed Y.U. officials, trustees, board members and faculty as responsible for a “massive cover-up”…
Intermarriage, for many American Jews, means dark-haired Brooklyn Jewish men wedding corn-fed blond Protestant women. Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, for instance. Alvy Singer and Annie Hall. That stereotype may have once reflected a demographic reality, according to a new analysis of data from the Pew Research Center’s 2013 study of American Jews. But not…
(JTA) — The highlight of AIPAC’s year is the final day of its annual policy conference, when thousands of activists ascend Capitol Hill to lobby for the passage of the organization’s legislative priorities. But just three weeks before the conference, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is facing a dilemma: how to craft a legislative…
The event in New York City in late January looked more like a pitch meeting for venture capitalists than the usual Jewish philanthropic gathering. Several dozen businessmen and women holding booklets with financial balance sheets listened attentively as 17 heads of Jewish not-for-profit organizations took the stage and spoke for 20 minutes each, as if…
The Obama administration is pushing back hard against Israeli critics of its peace efforts, enlisting American Jewish groups to respond to personal attacks on Secretary of State John Kerry. In recent weeks, administration officials have strongly condemned Israeli critics of Kerry’s peace bid. In response to some of the harshest anti-Kerry rhetoric, Jewish groups weighed…
Just three weeks before the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, two dozen Russian reporters, photographers and cameramen squeezed into the spartan first-floor office of the Independent Press Center in Moscow, a five-minute walk from the capital’s main Orthodox church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The journalists were there to see Ilya…
Eliaz Cohen is a second-generation Jewish settler in the occupied West Bank — and that’s where he’s determined to remain. Sitting in his kitchen in Kfar Etzion, between Jerusalem and Hebron, the yarmulke-wearing settler says that he wants to see a two-state solution and to see his home become part of the Palestinian state, with…
