Pamela Geller is the flamboyant and unfiltered representative for the anti-Muslim far-right on the Internet. Her organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, has mounted legal campaigns to force public buses across the country to run her advertisements, including one claiming “Islamic Jew-hatred: It’s in the Quran,” and urging an end to “all aid to Islamic…
I don’t presume to know all the positive attributes that define true leadership in our age, but I can confidently tell you what does not, by itself, constitute a good Jewish leader: money. Financial capacity to donate to an organization or a cause is not the same as leadership — and yet, all too frequently,…
The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology will receive a $50 million gift from Dr. Andrew J. Viterbi, the largest ever from an American donor. The gift to the Haifa-based university was announced on Saturday during the Technion Board of Governor’s meeting in Israel. Viterbi is the creator of the Viterbi Algorithm, a mathematical formula used in…
(JTA) — At a recent event to launch a pro-Israel mentoring program at UCLA, the speaker introducing Michael Leven gushed, “He was willing to take his own plane and come here to speak to us.” When it was Leven’s turn to speak, he started with a clarification: “I didn’t take my plane, I took Sheldon Adelson’s….
As the Jewish Federations of North America holds its annual General Assembly this week, newly emerging evidence from the Pew Research Center’s 2013 “Portrait of American Jewry” points to enormous challenges facing federations, Jewish philanthropy and organized Jewish life, more generally. Virtually every Jewish institution is contending with a sharply diminishing base of people who…
When a storm wreaked havoc on East Coast air travel last winter, among the thousands of travelers stranded were several dozen Israeli-American teens from Washington and Philadelphia. But these youths, who were en route to the annual meeting of the Tzofim, the Israeli scouts, were luckier than the many others forced to mill about air…
Sylvia Hassenfeld, a major Jewish philanthropist and the first female president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, has died. Hassenfeld, of Palm Beach, Fla., died Friday. She was 93. She served as the JDC chair from 1988 to 1992, representing the organization in the then newly disbanded Soviet Union, and overseeing significant Jewish outreach…
Cleveland philanthropists Michael and Anita Siegal have established a $1.25 million endowment to send Jewish children to overnight camp. The endowment in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, as well as the Foundation for Jewish Camp and the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland, establishes the Michael and Anita Siegal One Happy Camper Program. The…
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