An Illinois man has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly vandalizing a synagogue. John White, of Westmont, Ill., was charged Friday with a hate crime for allegedly vandalizing Congregation Etz Chaim, in Lombard, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. White, 40, was arrested Oct. 21 and accused of smashing the synagogue’s windows and writing…
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, who had surgery last week for a serious illness, will not run against Mayor Rahm Emanuel in city elections next year, her exploratory committee said on Monday. “Karen Lewis has decided to not pursue a mayoral bid,” the committee said in a statement. “Yet she charges us to continue…
Norma Spungen, the former archivist at the Chicago Jewish Archives at Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, has died. Spungen died Sunday at the age of 87. As the archivist at Spertus from 1986 to 1996, Spungen curated and assisted with several major exhibits mounted at the institute dealing with many important themes in…
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The University of Illinois rescinded a job offer to an incoming professor who harshly criticized Israel on Twitter.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…
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