Rahm Emanuel won election as mayor of Chicago three years ago in part because of his strength in the African-American community, but enough black voters have since soured on him that a black labor leader is emerging as a potential rival in the city’s February election. Emanuel easily won the majority of voters in every…
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked Illinois lawmakers on Tuesday to reform sentencing for low-level drug offenses, which would include ticketing rather than arresting people caught with small amounts of marijuana. Emanuel had backed a 2012 change in Chicago law that decriminalized marijuana in the nation’s third-largest city. Emanuel said on Tuesday that the change statewide…
On paper, Chicago seems like the ideal venue for a relationship to flourish between American Jews and Polish Americans. The city has the second-largest Polish population in the world (after Warsaw) and a sizable Jewish community of more than 300,000. But relations over the years between the two communities have been “like two ships passing…
An Orthodox Jewish man is suing a Chicago-area hospital for cremating his amputated leg instead of preserving it for burial as he requested. Moshe Lefkowitz, 43, had surgery to remove his left leg below the knee in March 2011. He said in a lawsuit filed in court in Cook County that he made his wishes…
The University of Illinois rescinded a job offer to an incoming professor who harshly criticized Israel on Twitter. Steven Salaita, who was offered a job at the Champaign-Urbana campus in the American Indian studies program, will not be hired, according to a report by the website Inside Higher Education. The move reportedly was made in…
A Jewish Chicago police officer was awarded a $540,000 judgment against a former superior who allegedly taunted him for years with anti-Semitic and racist remarks. On Monday, a federal jury found in favor of Detlef Sommerfield, a German-Jewish immigrant who had accused retired Chicago Police Sgt. Lawrence Knasiak of calling him a “f*cking Jew boy,”…
A Chicago public school principal has asked to be reassigned over anti-Semitic bullying at his school. Principal Joshua VanderJagt of the Ogden International School on Chicago’s North Side will be reassigned, Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said in a statement released Friday. “I agree with Mr. VanderJagt that the students, parents and the school…
Leaflets threatening the Jewish community because of Israel’s Gaza operation were found on parked cars in a Chicago neighborhood. The leaflets found Saturday on six cars in the Pulaski Park neighborhood, in the northwestern part of the city, threatened violence if Israel did not pull out of Gaza and end its operation in the coastal…
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