— A historic wedding in western Turkey triggered a deluge of anti-Semitic hate speech online, a leader of that country’s Jewish community said. Ishak Ibrahimzadeh, president of the Jewish Community of Turkey, said this on Sunday after some social network users responded with hate speech to his invitation to watch a live streaming video of the first Jewish…
A prominent Turkish-Jewish businessman and politician, Cefi Kamhi is chairman of an Istanbul-based consulting agency and television distribution company. He heads three councils for Turkey’s foreign economic relations board, and represents his home country in the European Jewish Parliament. His wife is Muslim. Yet after several assassination attempts, Kamhi is under 24-hour police protection to…
BOSTON — The Ottoman government’s massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in the early 20th century was “unequivocally genocide,” the head of the Anti-Defamation League said in the group’s strongest position on the subject. Jonathan Greenblatt, the civil rights group’s CEO, also said in a blog post Friday that the ADL will support U.S. recognition of the…
Long-running efforts to fully restore Israeli-Turkish relations have made good progress but need a few more rounds of negotiations, though a political shift in Turkey should not affect the process, Israel’s top diplomat in the country said. The impetus behind fixing a relationship badly damaged by a clash over Gaza in 2010 is now security,…
Long-running efforts to fully restore Israeli-Turkish ties strained after an Israeli raid of a Turkish boat in 2010 must now await the formation of a new government in Ankara, Israel’s top diplomat in Turkey said. Turkey downgraded diplomatic relations and ejected Israel’s ambassador in 2011, a year after Israeli commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara, part…
(JTA) — Prominent scholars of Jewish demography dismissed the findings of a newly published genetic study suggesting that today’s Ashkenazi Jews originate from converts to Judaism in what today is Turkey. Titled “Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz,” the by the University of Sheffield geneticist Eran Elhaik and…
When I first saw the short film from Sheffield University featuring Dr. Eran Elhaik claiming that Yiddish has its roots in Turkey, I thought it must be an elaborate ruse, a Sacha Baron Cohen-esque prank to poke fun at the sometimes inane world of academia. But I soon realized that it was, alas, all too…
LONDON — Britain’s Sky News quoted intelligence sources on Monday as saying that Islamic State had “advanced plans” to kill Jewish children in Turkey by attacking kindergartens, schools and youth centers. Sky Foreign Affairs Editor Sam Kiley said the information on the “imminent” threat came from six operatives arrested over the past week in the…
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