Tagged FRONT

NEW YORK (JTA) — Just last week, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was playing the anti-Semitism card against Donald Trump. But in a startling turnaround, on the eve of her own party’s convention, it’s the South Florida congresswoman who is out as chair of the Democratic National Committee — over a… Read more »

CLEVELAND (JTA) — An issue of historical concern to American Jews drew waves of applause when Donald Trump Jr. preached about it Tuesday night from the stage of the Republican National Convention. It wasn’t Israel, Iran or the fight against anti-Semitism. It was a call for the government to… Read more »

(JTA) — When the late Austro-Hungarian aristocrat Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi attended church on Good Friday, his father would famously cause a scene, storming out when the liturgy came to the anti-Semitic exhortation “Let us also pray for the faithless Jews.” Such protest was unusual in 19th-century Austria-Hungary, where anti-Semitism… Read more »

CLEVELAND (JTA) — On the day Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican primaries, Marc Zell was ready to resign his position as vice president of Republicans Overseas, the party’s expatriate group. Zell, who lives in Israel, was put off by Trump’s inconsistent statements regarding the country. In particular, he… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Israel’s government, sometimes called its most right-wing ever, is on a roll. The Knesset was expected to pass a law Tuesday evening allowing lawmakers to oust their colleagues from office for supporting terrorism or inciting racism — the third new government-backed law targeting… Read more »

Daniel Gurevich holds a bottle of wine he won for catching a Pokemon at the Grand Choral Synagogue of St. Petersburg, July 2016. (Courtesy of Jewish News Petersburg)

(JTA) — As the Pokemon Go phenomenon grows, some institutions connected to European Jewry’s darkest hour have taken precautions against it. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum in Poland has banned the addictive smartphone game, in which players viewing their environments through their device’s camera run in search of… Read more »

CLEVELAND (JTA) – Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency rolled out its Israel Advisory Committee last week — no one noticed. Blame the unrelenting news cycle, if you will: July 14 was the day of the hideous mass killing in Nice, France. But also, his Israel Advisory Committee consists… Read more »

HEBRON, West Bank (JTA) – Dozens of American Jews spent Friday in the West Bank practicing nonviolent resistance against Israel’s presence here. On hand to help were some bold-faced names in the American Jewish community’s Israel debate, including Peter Beinart, a leading liberal U.S. Jewish thinker, and Amna Farooqi,… Read more »

CLEVELAND (JTA) – On the Lake Erie boardwalk, a few Republican delegates huddle next to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for a quick selfie before scooting away. Walker was the anti-Donald Trump for 15 minutes last year, until he quit and asked other lagging Republicans to rally around Texas Sen.… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — Voters who have their hearts set on supporting a left-wing secular Jew running an insurgent campaign still have a candidate. Jill Stein, the 2012 Green Party candidate, is making another run. And this year, with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both earning historically low popularity… Read more »

Editor’s note: This piece was written before the failed military coup in Turkey this weekend. WASHINGTON (JTA) – The conventional wisdom has it that earning the sobriquet “the most right-wing government in Israeli history” does not lead to diplomatic successes. In recent weeks, on the Turkish, Egyptian and African… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — What was RBG thinking? U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg launched a broadside against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump over the the last week, calling him unfit for office. She subsequently apologized, but not before voices on the right and left criticized her for seeming… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — Being an American Jew, more than anything else, means remembering the Holocaust. That’s what nearly three quarters of Jewish Americans said, according to the Pew Research Center’s landmark 2013 study on American Jewry. Asked to pick attributes “essential” to being Jewish, more Jews said Holocaust… Read more »

BERKELEY, Calif. (JTA) – When Shoshana Dembitz and Abigail Grafton first met, they spent several long moments gazing into each others’ eyes. But this wasn’t a love-at-first-sight occurrence. Rather, the two were attending a Shabbat service in which participants were split into pairs to look into each… Read more »

PHILADELPHIA (JTA) – Growing up in Namibia, Dan Craven would bicycle long distances upon the only two paved roads in his hometown of Omaruru — 80 miles heading north to Otjiwarongo and 45 miles south to Karibib. Cycling on what he calls the “tar roads” is how he fell… Read more »

Author and publisher Arthur Naiman has no time for those without humor or creativity. The Chicago-born Tucson transplant by way of New York, Paris and the Bay Area has published more than 30 nonfiction books and started two publishing companies. A philosophy major at Brandeis University, he had no… Read more »

At 90 years young, Mort Kranitz still has a song in his heart and a spring to his step. The pacemaker he got in June inspired him to take life easier and he now gets into his office at Mort’s Auto Brokerage a little later in the day. Yes,… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) – “I am proud to be a Vlach,” says Yiannis Boutaris, the mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city. Ostensibly, we’re here at the Washington Hilton to discuss Boutaris’ bid to put the Jewish back in Thessaloniki, a city — perhaps best known as Salonika —once… Read more »

LONDON (JTA) — For two years, in her travels around the English capital, Natalie Pitimson has toted a library bag emblazoned with a word in Yiddish. “The word ‘schlep’ written on the side perfectly describes my regular hour-long trek through central London,” Pitimson, a senior sociology lecturer at the… Read more »

EDINBURGH, Scotland (JTA) — The last time that Scotland voted on whether to become independent from the United Kingdom, most of its 7,000 Jews thought doing so was a bad idea. Worried that Scottish independence would encourage nationalism and embolden an already aggressive anti-Israel movement with deep roots in… Read more »