Yearly Archives 2020

(JTA) — Israel’s culture minister was apparently so worried that she would forget the name of the president of Argentina that she wrote his name in ink on the back of her hand. Miri Regev greeted Alberto Fernandez on Wednesday after his plane touched down at Ben Gurion Airport… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Donald Trump will meet at the White House on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition leader Benny Gantz to talk in part about Middle East peace. Vice President Mike Pence extended the invitation at a meeting Thursday in Jerusalem with Netanyahu. The… Read more »

(JTA) — American actor Jesse Eisenberg said he was attracted to the World War II movie “Resistance,” in which he portrays Marcel Marceau, because he lost family during World War II from the same area as the late Jewish mime’s family. The film, scheduled for release in late March,… Read more »

(JTA) — A senior Muslim leader from Saudi Arabia visited Auschwitz with a delegation from the American Jewish Committee. Mohammed al-Issa, the secretary-general of the Mecca-based Muslim World League and a former Saudi justice minister, joined a delegation of Muslim religious leaders from several countries at the site of… Read more »

(JTA) — This is the second op-ed in a series of pieces about anti-Semitism and Jewish issues written by 2020 presidential candidates. This one is by Pete Buttigieg, 38, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has sent five questions on the topic to all… Read more »

(JTA) — British Jews protested what they perceived to be a BBC reporter’s claim that the Holocaust has distorted Israelis’ perception of reality and the occupation of Palestinian land. The rebuke Thursday by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the editor in chief… Read more »

JERUSALEM (JTA) — An Israeli seventh-grader who was foraging for mushrooms near his home unearthed a marble slab with a Greek inscription from the Byzantine period. Stav Meir, 13, of Caesarea, found the artifact last week, according to a statement issued Wednesday by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Stav saw… Read more »

(JTA) — Bradley Cooper will direct, produce and star in a Netflix film about the late Jewish composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. The untitled film is expected to begin production early next year and will be released in theaters before the film premieres on Netflix, Deadline first reported. The… Read more »

(JTA) — Jason Greenblatt said he left his position as special representative for international negotiations in the Trump administration because of political turbulence in Israel — and the financial cost of raising an Orthodox family in America. In an interview with Mishpacha Magazine, one of the most widely read… Read more »

(JTA) — Belgian police will open an online hotline for reporting anti-Semitic and racist incidents, and some Jews hope it will replace the country’s discredited anti-discrimination agency. Michael Freilich, a Jewish member of Belgian parliament, announced the hotline’s opening Wednesday. Going in person to a police station is intimidating… Read more »

WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — A London-based Jewish newspaper did not have to use the term “German Nazis” an appeals court in Warsaw ruled, upholding a lower court decision. The former head of the Polish League Against Defamation, Mira Wszelaka, had sued the Jewish News under Poland’s controversial Holocaust law… Read more »

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the mother of Naama Issachar, the American-Israeli woman jailed in Russia for drug smuggling, and told her “everything will be all right.” Putin met with Yaffa Issachar during his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. He arrived in… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Trump White House has again credentialed TruNews, the outlet that called the impeachment of President Donald Trump a “Jew coup,” this time to cover Trump’s visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The White House Correspondents Association confirmed to CNN’s Jake Tapper on… Read more »

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his delegation to the World Holocaust Forum gave up their seats at the main ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem so that Holocaust survivors can have them. A limited number of the 800 seats at the Forum ceremony on Thursday afternoon… Read more »

(JTA) — Neo-Nazi podcaster Christopher Cantwell quoted Adolf Hitler in a motion filed in federal court in Virginia. The quote, with which he opens the motion, comes from the Nazi leader’s “Mein Kampf,” though it is only identified in the motion as being from a “Famous 20th Century Statesman.” Cantwell… Read more »

(JTA) — Jeff Goldblum learned a lot from Hebrew school: how to fight back against bullies, and that he enjoyed performing in front of a crowd. As he revealed in Tuesday’s episode of “Finding Your Roots,” the PBS celebrity genealogy show, Goldblum had a rough time at Hebrew school… Read more »

(JTA) — In a survey of 1,100 French adults, 57 percent of respondents indicated that they did not know roughly how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. In the survey, which the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany commissioned in November and published Wednesday, 30 percent of… Read more »

(JTA) — Cancer may have weakened Edward Mosberg’s body, but it has done nothing to dissuade the 94-year-old Holocaust survivor from New Jersey from traveling to his native Poland at least once a year to commemorate the Nazi genocide. “I wouldn’t wish my medical situation on Hitler,” Mosberg told… Read more »

(JTA) — The latest episode of PBS’ celebrity genealogy show “Finding Your Roots” was a lesson in Jewish history. Titled “Beyond the Pale” — a reference to the Pale of Settlement, the region of what was then Imperial Russia where many Ashkenazi Jews have roots — the episode that… Read more »

JERUSALEM – For a growing number of Jews in the Diaspora, turning retirement dreams into reality also means realizing a lifelong dream of living in Israel. Over the past decade, more than 6,000 Jews from North America and Britain have retired to Israel. In 2019, some 500 of 3,500… Read more »