JERUSALEM (JTA) — A lecturer at an Israeli university expelled an Arab student from class after she refused to take off her hijab. The lecturer in Bar-Ilan University’s Middle Eastern Studies department last week asked the student to take off her head and face covering, and then asked her to leave the classroom when she…
Bar-Ilan University in Israel barred an LGBT student group from holding a gay pride event on campus. The Tel Aviv-area university, which is public but has a religious mission and a disproportionately Orthodox student body, objected on religious grounds, according to a spokesman who cited the school’s “religious character” and the halachic prohibition on homosexual…
The Netanyahu government’s most left-wing member, environmental defense minister Amir Peretz, quit the cabinet on Sunday and declared war on the prime minister, vowing to work for a new government committed to peace and economic justice. Peretz, a onetime Labor Party chairman and defense minister, is a member of Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah party. The move…
Pope Francis received Rabbi Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz, Bar-Ilan University of Israel’s president, at the Vatican. During the audience on Monday, the university bestowed its highest Award of Distinction upon the Pope in recognition of his lifelong efforts promoting peace and fighting for human rights. “We are the sons of Abraham and we have the privilege…
Israeli scholar and law professor Mordechai Kedar, who made headlines recently for his comments about rape as a way to combat Hamas terrorism, says that the backlash to this controversy has done little, if anything, to affect his academic speaking tour through North American university campuses, which is scheduled for this upcoming winter. Last month,…
Hanoch Sheinman, the philosophy professor at Bar-Ilan University’s law school caught in the midst of a fierce controversy involving an email sent to his second-year law students, expressing sympathy for all victims of Israel’s Gaza conflict, phoned me in frustration because he couldn’t manage to shut the roof of his rented convertible. I had emailed…
Israeli public support for West Bank settlements has declined significantly in the past year, according to a new survey released June 12. It’s the second consecutive year of sharp decreases in sympathy for settlers and the settlement enterprise. The findings include an 11-point increase, from 48% to 59%, in those saying settlements damage Israel’s relations…
It’s been a week since Bar-Ilan 2, Benjamin Netanyahu’s jarringly hardline policy address October 6 at the university campus where he first endorsed Palestinian statehood in 2009. And so far there’s been almost no public reaction. What little attention there’s been has gone mostly to his defiantly hardline statements on Iran. The important part has…
100% of profits support our journalism
