NEW YORK (JTA) – For years, Melissa Duchan had found the dress code for girls at her Orthodox school in Brooklyn, the Yeshivah of Flatbush, onerous. But it wasn’t until recently that Duchan, 16, felt that scrutiny of female students had crossed the line from irritating to what she calledContinue Reading
By Alina Dain Sharon, JNS.org When Harvard Hillel refused to host a planned 2012 event titled “Jewish Voices Against the Israeli Occupation,” organized by the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance and the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, frustrated students wrote an open letter to the Hillel community criticizing the decision.Continue Reading
NEW YORK (JTA) — A new partnership has launched to enable the purchase of kosher “fair trade” coffee, tea and chocolate while supporting Jewish communal efforts on human trafficking and worker justice.The Jewish Fair Trade Partnership allows individuals and Jewish institutions like synagogues to purchase fair trade products atContinue Reading
(JTA) — The serial killer Jack the Ripper was identified through DNA as a Jewish barber who immigrated to London from Poland.Businessman Russell Edwards, an amateur Jack the Ripper sleuth, and molecular biologist Dr. Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University made the discovery through DNA traces found onContinue Reading
JERUSALEM (JTA) — All women of Ashkenazi descent should be screened from age 30 for the BRCA gene mutation that causes breast cancer, an Israeli study recommends.The study, by a research team headed by Ephrat Levy-Lahad of Shaare Zedek Medical Center, was published last Friday in the journal ProceedingsContinue Reading
By Ben Sales, JTA World News Service BEERSHEBA, Israel (JTA) — Handcuffed to a wooden chair in the middle of the night, Rafat Awaysha still wasn’t sure what crime he had committed. He had announced a demonstration against the war in Gaza in a July 11 Facebook post. Soon afterward,Continue Reading
By Ron Kampeas, JTA World News Service WASHINGTON (JTA) – Don’t bring it up. If it comes up, change the subject. If you can’t change the subject, consider an outright denial. Those are some of the strategies used by Jewish reporters working in the Arab and Muslim Middle East toContinue Reading
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Joan Rivers, who broke barriers for women in comedy and on television, has died. Rivers, 81, died Thursday a week after being rushed to Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital after her heart stopped during throat surgery at a clinic. Doctors at the hospital put her in an inducedContinue Reading
By Dmitriy Shapiro, JNS.org/Washington Jewish Week After months of rampaging through Iraq and stoking international fears that the Islamic State terrorist group could spread, a combination of Iraqi and Kurdish security forces, aided by targeted United States airstrikes, appear to have pushed back the self-proclaimed caliphate’s rampage in the region. Continue Reading
By Alina Dain Sharon, JNS.org This summer’s 50-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which has come to a close if a cease-fire reached last week holds, has spurred a sharp rise in both anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incidents around the world. At the same time, the boundary between anti-ZionismContinue Reading
By Felice Friedson, The Media Line “As the international media is fixated on the struggle between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, few reporters are focusing on Syria. But a spate of kidnappings of foreign journalists in Syria has made the country a mini-Iraq that few want to venture into.Continue Reading
(JTA) — The Islamist ISIS organization has released a video that apparently shows the beheading of the American journalist Steven Sotloff. The nearly three-minute video, titled “A Second Message to America,” was released Tuesday afternoon on Twitter and other online outlets. Sotloff family spokesman Barak Barfi said in a briefContinue Reading
By Abdullah H. Erakat, The Media Line WEST BANK – As support for the Islamist Hamas movement soars in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, members of the rival Fatah movement charge they have been harassed, beaten, and in some cases, even killed by members of the Islamist HamasContinue Reading
By Uriel Heilman, JTA World News Service (JTA) – Between the war in Gaza and gains by Islamic militants in Iraq, Syria and Libya, there’s plenty of cause these days for pessimism about the Middle East. But amid all the fighting, there’s also some good news for Israel. If itContinue Reading
By Abdullah H. Erakat and Linda Gradstein, The Media Line (RAMALLAH) — After the rockets comes the spin machine, and both Israel and Hamas are claming victory in the fighting that has left 2,200 Palestinians, 69 Israelis, and one foreign worker dead, thousands of Palestinians wounded, and widespread devastation inContinue Reading
By Ben Sales, JTA World News Service TEL AVIV (JTA) — Israel’s war is over, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fight may only have just begun. The past month has seen Netanyahu’s approval rating plummet, according to polling by Israel’s Channel 2. On July 23, about a week after IsraelContinue Reading
By Linda Gradstein, The Media Line An old Bedouin proverb says, “Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, and me and my cousin against the world.” In the Gaza conflict, while Egypt and Israel may not be brothers, they are certainly cousins with a joint interestContinue Reading
By Ben Sales, JTA World News Service TEL AVIV (JTA) — A rocket barrage fell on Israel, a boom sounded over Tel Aviv and then it was over — at least for now. After 50 days of missiles, airstrikes, ground operations, tunnel incursions, truce talks, cease-fire proposals, death and destruction,Continue Reading
By Anthony Weiss, JTA World News Service (JTA) — On the evening of Aug. 12, after two consecutive nights of clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson, Mo., Mikal Smith rose to address a community meeting in the neighboring city of Florissant. In front of Gov. Jay Nixon, Obama administrationContinue Reading
By Ben Sales, JTA World News Service OR YEHUDA, Israel (JTA) — Something that looks like a can of soda could be Israel’s high-tech answer to the network of tunnels that Hamas has created under the Gaza border. A sensor known as a geophone can detect underground movement based onContinue Reading
