National

NEW YORK (JTA) – Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is facing growing accusations that his campaign is countenancing anti-Semitism – if not encouraging it outright. Trump’s foreign policy slogan, “America First,” echoes the World War II-era noninterventionist movement championed by a notorious anti-Semite. During the height of the… Read more »

UNITED NATIONS (JTA) – It was an incongruous sight: The U.N. General Assembly hall filled to capacity with 1,500 cheering people waving miniature Israeli flags and singing “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem. No, hell hadn’t frozen over. The occasion was a one-day conference hosted by Israel’s U.N. mission devoted to… Read more »

(JTA) — Erin Schrode may not be a household name — yet. But if the 25-year-old Jewish activist lures enough of her millennial peers to the polls for California’s Democratic primary on June 7, she just may become the youngest person in the U.S. House of Representatives — and… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Boycott Trump? Mock Trump? Trump, the musical? Jewish liberals are ready to sow a summer of Donald Trump discontent in ways that aim both to bludgeon and entertain. Bend the Arc, an advocacy group, is convening its first national conference here next week aimed in part at… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — In a rare and sharp split with Israeli government policy, a group of Jewish community leaders want to get a proposal for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the next president’s desk. Two complementary U.S. and Israeli working papers to be launched next week propose… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) – When it comes to Israel, Democrats and Republicans simply do not see eye to eye, and for all their love of Zion, evangelicals will turn out for a candidate who is less than 100 percent on the issue. Welcome to the 2016 presidential election, when the… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Democratic Party platform drafting committee is top heavy with veterans of political battles over Israel — some friendly, some critical, and including at least one major backer of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The Democratic National Committee named the committee on Monday, a day… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A bill unanimously approved by the U.S. House of Representatives would extend religious protections to advocates of circumcision and ritual slaughter as well as atheists, addressing what its sponsors describe as an increase in religious persecution in recent years. The bill, passed Monday, would broaden the definition of… Read more »

Washington, D.C. – Today,  people from diverse spiritual backgrounds will call, email, and tweet congressional representatives and senators, urging them to close a dangerous loophole in current gun laws. This call to action was spearheaded by Jewish Women International’s Interfaith Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence — a group of 36 faiths… Read more »

(JTA) — For the second year in a row, the Detroit area’s Walk for Israel has rebuffed the sponsorship of left-wing pro-Israel groups because of their support for boycotting settlements. At the heart of the dispute is a question of definitions: Is support of a boycott targeting Jewish enterprises beyond… Read more »

WALTHAM, Mass. (JTA) – When Jonathan Sarna was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1999 at the age of 44, it changed his life. Already a highly regarded historian at Brandeis University, Sarna was in the midst of writing his seminal study of American Jewish history when he realized with… Read more »

  NEW YORK (JTA) — If there’s one story that sums up the changes afoot on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a once heavily Jewish neighborhood, it’s the saga surrounding the Anshei Meseritz synagogue. The Orthodox shul at 415 E. Sixth St. is a relic of a time… Read more »

  NEW YORK (JTA) – Advocates for sexual abuse victims in the Orthodox Jewish community will be descending on New York’s state capital on May 3 to lobby the legislature to eliminate the statute of limitations for child sex abuse offenses. A bill to change the statute of limitations… Read more »

JACKSON, N.J. (JTA) – Pinchas Cohen spent most of Monday wandering around Six Flags Great Adventure under a blazing sun, wearing a knee-length black coat and carrying a big box of shmura matzah under his arm. An imposing, Russian-born Chabad-Lubavitch Hasid who now lives in Brooklyn, Cohen came to… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) – The combative tone in Bernie Sanders’ campaign statements faded on Tuesday evening to a softer pitch of suasion. “I congratulate Secretary Clinton on her victories tonight, and I look forward to issue-oriented campaigns in the 14 contests to come,” Sanders’ statement began after his rival for… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Paul Ryan wants you to know he’s not running for president, he’s no fan of the Obama doctrine and he’s not a neoconservative. What the Wisconsin congressman wants to be, he suggested at an April 14 breakfast in his Capitol Hill offices with foreign policy reporters, is the leader of… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — In “The Last Laugh,” a new documentary about humor and the Holocaust (you read that right), the comedian Judy Gold tells this joke: If the Nazis forced her to stand naked on a line with other women, would she hold her stomach in? How you,… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Maryland goes to the polls Tuesday – one of five states where the two remaining candidates in the Democratic presidential race and the three in the Republican race are facing off. The headline: It’s the new Super Tuesday, at least for the Democrats. This could be… Read more »

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (JTA) —  Donald Trump’s xenophobic views are neither new nor particularly shocking in Europe, where fears of jihadism and the challenges of illegal immigration are blowing winds into the sails of a rising far right. Although the Republican presidential hopeful’s statements on immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims are often… Read more »

  NEW YORK (JTA) — For a people obsessed with numbers, the Jews have relatively scant concrete data about how, exactly, the Jews voted in Tuesday’s presidential primaries in New York. But we do know enough to make some educated guesses. Here’s what we know: Approximately 12 percent of… Read more »